First day with ELL student

February 25, 2009 ht1036block

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Last Wednesday, I met the ELL student that I would be working with during the semester. To be perfectly honest, I was really nervious to meet with him for the first time. As I waited in the cafeteria I was going over what I was going to say and how I was going to use my “Me Poster”. When the students came in we were each paired up with a student, and went our seperate ways to talk. Since it was the first day, it was all about building rapport with the student. So i told him a little but about my self using my “Me Poster”, and then I just started to ask him questions. I was pleasently surprized to find that he spoke english very well and was easy to carry on a conversation with. There were very little lulls or pauses in our conversation during the half hour that we were together. He told me about the places he had lived and how long he had been in Texas, and then we got on interests and i found out that he was a motocross racer and i was blown away. So at that ponit I just wanted to know more and more, and he had no problem just talking as much as he could about it. before I knew it, our time was up, and I was still sitting there with so many other questions that I still wanted to ask him. I’m really looking forward to working with him throughout the semester, he seems like a really great kid.

Reflection:

For the short amount of time that I got to spend with my ELL student I feel like I really got a sense of his interests and his personality, but there are still so many other thing that I wanted to know based around school. Before we met, I was coming up with all these questions in my mind that I was going to ask to get a better sense of where he is acedemically. However, I got so into our conversation about personal interests, that I never got a chance to ask any of the other questions that I had in my head. I think that next time we meet, on Monday, I’m going to try to throw out more of those acedemic focus question and try to figure out the areas that he may need help with and how I can help him.

Analysis:

I think what this process really illustrated to me was the importance of time management and in a round about way the idea of  “Time -on- Task”. I had certian goals in mind going into this meeting, and rather than focus on the goals that I wanted to accomplish, I allowed my self to be side tracked with other information. In a way it was a good thing, because I feel like I’ll be able to develope a better relationship with the student throughout the semester based on what I know about him. I definatly believe that I’ve established some repport and have a good base to start from. This experience did help me learn that I can be very easily side tracked and I need to watch out for that in the future.

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One Comment Add your own

• 1. jb50block  |  February 28, 2009 at 3:17 pm

  Very rich posting, Holly. It seems that you learned the importance of building rapport with our students. To me, the best part of teaching is getting to know the students. They are soooo interesting!

  When I taught Russian in high school, I always enjoyed testing days, because it gave me a chance to just watch and look at my students. I always marveled at the unique qualities that they possessed. One was the brain, one was the athlete, one was the cheerleader, one was the Goth kid, one was the cowboy, etc. Each one was unique.

  I sometimes think that we teachers forget to stop and simply enjoy our students. It’s obvious in your posting that you connected with your ELL Buddy and you found interesting aspects of his personality. Good job. Do you think that you can do this with 180 students? I’ll bet you can! NB

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