Poetry Panic

Yosuke had some bizarre homework tonight. It was for ESL of all things. I think I may have mentioned this, but the ESL program at his high school is a joke. The teacher is almost entirely worthless. He doesn't learn anything. He's never had ESL homework before today.

Well, today's homework assignment reinforced my low opinion of this teacher. Yosuke was given 14 types of poetry and had to write one poem of each type. Fourteen poems! In one day! Can you imagine anything more insane? It was a daunting task, even for a native speaker.

And that's not all. Some types were easy - haiku, free verse, etc - but some were more complex. For example, one was a sonnet. He was supposed to write a sonnet - can you believe that? In case you're not familiar with them, they're fourteen lines long, they have to rhyme, and each line is ten syllables long. They're considered one of the more difficult types of poetry to write, and it's simply insane to ask an ESL II student to write one.

Anyway, Yosuke and I got through the poetry the best we could in two hours. He had a lot of trouble rhyming, so when I left he still had the limerick and sonnet to finish. I hope he managed okay.

His poems were pretty bad (most took complaining about homework in general or the poetry assignment specifically as their topic), but a couple turned out well. One of the poems he had to write was a ballad, which I explained was like a love poem/song. He said, "Like Romeo and Juliet?" and I explained that the whole play wasn't a ballad, but some of the soliloquys are similar to ballads. So we came up with this poem (Yosuke used food as a topic for several of his poems):

Wherefore art thou, food?
Deny thy father, Vending Machine, and refuse thy cost;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my snack,
And I'll no longer be hungry.

You can find the original here for comparison.

So the homework was hard, but we managed to have some fun with it. Darn that ESL teacher, though!

Waiting For Miki

One day last week, Miki had to stay after school to work on a group project. Her mother thought she would be home soon, but Miki ended up not coming home until after I had left. Instead of tutoring Miki, I helped her mother with her ESL work for the hour-and-a-half session. Her mother has a great sense of humor and is really smart, so it was lots of fun to work with her. And of course, teaching someone who wants to learn rather than someone who is being forced to makes all the difference. I wouldn't say I prefer adult learners, but it was nice to have a change of pace.

Mrs. Kikugawa's ESL Struggles

I don't talk about it much, but often (once a week or so) after my usual tutoring sessions I'll talk to Yosuke's mother a bit about English and ESL. (Come to think of it, I mention her enough that she deserves her own nickname. I'll call her Mrs. Kikugawa.)

She's taking a free ESL class for adults at a church, and she usually has a question or two for me. I love how it works out - a bit of free tutoring for her, free (much needed) Japanese practice for me. I enjoy the discussions, too. We complain about the difficulty of learning a second language while simultaneously complimenting each other on her progress.

Mrs. Kikugawa doesn't speak much English - I'm not sure if it's lack of confidence or ability - but she appears to be pretty decent with grammar based on the work she's shown me. I really respect how hard she is working. She's a homemaker, so she doesn't really need to learn English because she can get by without it. In fact, she may be fighting a losing battle. She'll be back in Japan in three years. Is three years enough to learn English for an adult? Most of her time is spent at home, immersed in a Japanese-speaking environment. As far as I can tell, her only English practice comes from the ESL class.

I'll make a point of trying to help her more, and maybe see if I can get her to speak English with me so she can have a chance to practice. The only reason I haven't is that I imagine if I spend too much time helping her, she'll want to pay me for it, and I don't really want to earn a tutor's pay for being a conversation partner. Anybody could do that! I'd just like to continue helping her for free, especially considering that she provides me with the only Japanese practice I've ever gotten in the US.

Posting Frequency Update

I think I've discovered the perfect posting schedule. I will update every week on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. On these days, I will post about what my students are doing and anything interesting that happened.

However, rather than just limiting myself to three posts a week, I will also occasionally make extra posts about ESL learning in general and ideas I have.

The reason I am keeping this blog is, mainly, to track my progress and organize my thoughts. I'd like to use it as a sort of living bookmark, in which I write about ESL-related books or articles that I've read so I can look back on it later, rather than just reading and forgetting. However, I also want to track my students' progress and let others read about my tutoring experiences. I think my new posting schedule will cover all of these points nicely.

So, in short: I will update at least three times a week, on M-W-R. But there may be extra posts.

Thanks for reading! Yoroshiku onegaishimasu~

TV?

One time when I was chatting with Yosuke and Yuki's mother, I mentioned that watching TV was an easy way to pick up English. Yuki is a fan of Spongebob, so I encouraged her to continue watching.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but recently I read an article that watching TV is actually detrimental to learning a language. Who would have thought? I regret encouraging it as a learning tool, but I'm also a bit dubious of the article (which I can't find again, or else I'd post it here). According to the author, we learn either through visual stimuli or audible stimuli, but not by both. So you can learn a foreign language by reading or by listening to music or tapes, but watching TV doesn't work.

I'm not sure I completely believe the article, and I plan to keep looking for other opinions. In any case, when studying a foreign language, watching TV shows or movies in that language beats watching them in your native language, right? I hope so.

New Beginnings!

I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas. I certainly enjoyed my holiday break, and I'm looking forward to beginning tutoring again tomorrow.

Over Christmas break, I had the opportunity to have lunch with the Japanese professor who arranged my tutoring jobs. I was able to thank her for all she's done for me, and we discussed the work I've been doing. I was happy to hear that she is also concerned with the dismal ESL programs at the schools in our area and is actively fighting to get them improved. I told her that I had also been upset about it, but I didn't know what to do, so I asked her to let me know if I can help in any way. I hope she includes me in her efforts, because improving the system would mean a lot to me.

She also mentioned the possibility of another tutoring job. A Japanese family who lives in the same neighborhood as Yosuke and Yuki are looking for an English tutor for their daughter. The daughter is only in second grade, however. I told the teacher that I was interested, but that I don't have any experience teaching young children. If she doesn't find anyone else, I'll get the job. I'm both excited and nervous by the prospect - I'd love to get some experience teaching a child that young, but I just don't think I'm ready yet.

Finding Materials vs Making Materials

Usually when I'm tutoring, I have a specific goal and don't need to make a lesson plan. For example, I usually help with homework, or I help Yosuke prepare for the English EOC test or help Yuki with her book report.

On the rare occasions that I do need to plan and create content, I have used the Internet to find materials. There's so much available (type "ESL lesson plans" or something similar into Google and you'll see for yourself) that I pick and choose things I like and put something together myself. I haven't yet found one source that's provided me with everything I need, so there's always a bit of hunting that needs to be done.

The main problem I have with finding materials is that the English is often unnatural. I hate teaching unnatural English. In school, I could tell when I was being taught unnatural Japanese, and I'm sure kids learning English feel the same. I much preferred being taught a natural phrase or sentence that required an explanation in order to understand it. As a result, I treat my students the same way. When I find a dialog or a lesson plan I like, I go through the English parts and make sure it all sounds okay. I'll often change parts or add on extra stuff.

For example, I was teaching Yosuke's mother an English lesson one day using a dialogue about a trip to the grocery store. It was a decent dialogue, but I had also added some extra phrases that I thought were useful but didn't fit into the normal English education. One of them was "Did you find everything okay?" which, as we all know, several cashiers will say before you check out (at least here in North Carolina). Yosuke's mother had been going through the dialogue without much reaction up until then, but at that point she became excited because she had heard the phrase at the grocery store every time but didn't know what it meant or how to answer. We then discussed it for a while, and I walked away from the lesson happy that I had taken the time to teach her something of value instead of just using a generic lesson plan.

Seemingly Impossibility

What can you do when faced with having to teach something almost impossibly difficult to an ESL student?

I consider myself a decent teacher, and I'd like to think that I could teach any subject material to a student in his or her native language. But when working with ESL, the options suddenly seem limited.

For example, a few months ago I was helping Yuki with her homework. She had to read a short story and answer some questions. It seemed easy enough, until I saw what the story was - Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that a little advanced for 7th grade? I was at a loss at how I could help Yuki understand it at her low English level. (Later I found a Japanese translation and emailed it to her. She mentioned that some of the kanji were difficult for her - clearly advanced stuff even in one's native language.)

This is probably the most daunting challenge I've faced (and continue to face) as an ESL tutor.

Progress Report - Good and Bad News

Yosuke showed me his most recent progress report today. To my surprise, his grade in English I managed to rise from a C to an A in just two months. It was more than I could have hoped for. He started out the semester with a low D on his first progress report, which grudgingly rose to a C on the next one. I was expecting a C+ or, if we were lucky, a B-. An A is just incredible.

Strangely, his grade in ESL II dropped from an A to a C. ESL II is an easy class - it's definitely below his English level, and there isn't much work - so I expressed concerned and asked him why the grade was so low. Yosuke told me that he never did any work in the class, but it was okay because other students in the class got D's and F's. Not accepting that as a valid excuse, I told him that since the class was easy, he should try for an A - it would give him straight A's! He reiterated that he didn't really care.

I wonder how I can make him care about his GPA. I suppose if I wanted to pursue the matter, I could enlist his parents in helping me motivate him, perhaps by asking them to offer him rewards for getting A's. Or maybe he's right and it doesn't matter, and I should just drop it.

I'm not sure what I should do.