Teacher Diary: Chronicle Of A First-Time ESL Teacher

By Kristin Bair, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer

The Task

Sometime between the most recent issue of the ELL Outlook and the end of the summer, Alex (editor-in-chief of the ELL Outlook) and I decided that chronicling the first year experiences of a new ELL teacher would make for an interesting article. After all, as the population of ELLs in the United States continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, teachers in every state and nearly every town know, have known, or will soon welcome a new ELL teacher to their school. Teachers everywhere are familiar with the struggles, the frustrations, the challenges, and the joys of the job. So making the decision to write the article was easy.

What wasn't easy was locating a first-time ELL teacher who was willing to spend time with me at the very beginning of the school year when he or she was in the wild throes of preparing for the upcoming year. Understandably so. But I forged ahead, and throughout the month of August, I sent out e-mails and made phone calls to numerous schools. At first, it seemed that my inquiries fell on deaf ears, and I quickly discovered that many teachers and principals were enjoying a final few days of much-deserved R&R. When they did return to school, most either ignored my inquiry completely or sent a polite e-mail telling me that they were too caught up in the responsibilities of starting a new school year. But when I sent an e-mail to Joanne Roy, the principal of the E. J. Harrington Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts, I got a response quite quickly. She had taken the time to review the ELL Outlook and recognized that this series of articles was a good thing for her school, as well as for teachers and principals across the country. Within a few days of first contact, she connected me with Jacqueline Gallo, a young, first-time ELL teacher.

Principal Joanne Roy and the E. J. Harrington Elementary School

Before becoming the principal of the E. J. Harrington Elementary School, Joanne Roy spent thirty years as a classroom teacher and then a few more years as a curriculum specialist, all in Lynn, Massachusetts. When she describes Harrington, she is honest and direct. It's a challenged school in a challenged neighborhood, and though the urge to sugarcoat the reality of things for our readers must be strong, she resists.

"We're definitely an inner-city school," she explains, "and so surrounding us we have a lot of two-, three-, and four-family tenement homes. Right across the street we have a huge office building which houses Lynn Community Mental Health, as well as a few other community-type organizations. Our schoolyard is fenced in with a huge chainlink fence. We have one small grassed-in area on the side, but it's not where children play, so their whole entire schoolyard is made of concrete and tar. There are no swings. There's nothing for the children to play on.

"When you look at it [the school]," she continues, "it's a formidable building … and you walk up about thirty stairs to get to the 'plaza.' I call the bottom level the 'garden' level. It's just a great big concrete area. Our socioeconomic level is extremely low. We probably are about 90% low-income. Our population is starting to change a little. At one time, we were 80% Hispanic. Now we are approximately 85% ELL students; however, that is comprised of not just Hispanic students. We also now have some Russian students, students from Cambodia, from Vietnam, Bosnia, and last year, we also acquired a group of Bantu Somalian children."

As Principal Roy explains, the biggest challenge faced by the Harrington Elementary School is making sure all students receive the best education they can. When she took over three years ago, the school was under-performing on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

"For two years, we've dealt with that status," she explains. "We've been monitored by the Department of Education about once every six weeks. They check to see how things are going with our prescriptive plan. And moving forward, we've gone through a fact-finding review, and we're about to undergo a two-year review that hopefully will release us from our under-performing status. It's very challenging. I try to remain optimistic and positive, but sometimes when we're compared to other communities and other schools where they don't have the ELL population we have, it can become discouraging. We try not to make excuses. We try to give good instruction."

Introducing Jacqueline Gallo

Just a few years ago, Jacqueline Gallo graduated from Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts, with her degree in early childhood education. She spent a few years working in a daycare center in Lynn and, in 2003, began subbing in the Lynn public school system. She is also currently working on her master's degree in early childhood education at Salem State College.

After reading Principal Roy's description of Harrington and its surrounding neighborhood, and after recognizing the challenges faced by a school in which ELLs comprise 85% of the population, some may question why Ms. Gallo would choose to begin her teaching career in Lynn. After all, there are many "good" schools in Massachusetts that are hiring new teachers, schools that offer green grass, lots of swings, more money, and a population of students who speak English as a native language. But for Ms. Gallo, both Lynn and Harrington are natural steps. "I grew up in Lynn," she explains, "and I went to the Lynn public schools. I still live in Lynn, and it may sound corny, but I want to give back to the community."

Ms. Gallo's father, who retired just last year, taught sixth grade in the Lynn public schools for thirty years, and her mother has been teaching first grade in Lynn for the last fifteen years. "I grew up with it," Ms. Gallo explains. "It's part of my culture." And without further explanation, it's clear she means teaching as well as giving back to the community of Lynn.

Last year, Ms. Gallo taught in a mainstream second-grade classroom at the William P. Connery Elementary School in Lynn. Out of twenty students, eight were ELLs. "I had a Haitian student," she explains, "a Khmer [Cambodian] student, a Vietnamese student, in addition to Hispanic students. It was very diverse, and even the students who were not ELL students spoke another language."

At the end of last year, the district closed her position at Connery, and Ms. Gallo was put on the displaced list. When she finally got called to the district office at the end of June, the only classes that were open were SEI (Sheltered English Instruction) classrooms. Anxious to continue teaching in Lynn, Ms. Gallo accepted a position at Harrington. Though she is not trained as an ELL teacher or in the SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol) program, she is currently working on a waiver. In order to get certified and keep her position at the school, she has to take a certain number of relevant courses this year. "I wanted to do this eventually," she says, referring to getting certified as an ELL teacher, "but I hadn't planned on it right now while I'm getting my master's degree."

Ms. Gallo's Classroom

Currently, Ms. Gallo is teaching an SEI class for first graders at the Harrington School. When school began on Wednesday, September 7, Ms. Gallo's roster listed eleven students. Five of the eleven showed up for school. In the middle of the day on Thursday, two students from the Bantu tribe joined her class for a total of seven. When I last spoke with her on Saturday, September 10, she was hoping the final four students would arrive in her classroom on Monday.

"Everyone says not to worry," she explains. "'The students will come in,' they promise. 'Sometimes they just don't know when school starts.'" This seems impossible to many of us, but because most of the parents of Lynn school children do not speak English, they often miss vital information. In addition, there are approximately eleven homeless shelters in Lynn. This complicates the situation further, as families who stay in the shelters miss information as well and often move without notification.

So far, Ms. Gallo's experiences have been mixed. She enjoys the fact that there is such cultural diversity in her classroom, but struggles with the varying levels of English language abilities. "Two of my students, I'm pretty sure within a few months, will be able to go into the regular first grade," she says. "They have a large vocabulary and they love to talk. It's good for the children who are learning English.

"But," she continues, "three of the girls are very shy. It's hard to tell how much they know. I do letter sounds with them, and I have the students repeat after me. But the girls are not repeating what I'm saying. So I have to say things again and again and again."

She also struggles with the fact that no matter how much or how little English the students speak, she has to plow forward with the curriculum. "It's hard because I don't know how much they understand. And it's hard because while I'm teaching, I still have to follow the curriculum. When I'm teaching math, I have to follow the curriculum that all first graders are doing. I don't want to confuse them too much and I don't want to bore them. I find myself just talking and talking and talking."

In the first week, Ms. Gallo's students were expected to learn to count from one to ten forward and then backward. Going forward worked out fine, but when she began to work on counting back from ten to one, things unraveled. "I felt horrible and felt I shouldn't be doing this to them," she says. "The Somali girl was very confused. I didn't pressure her or anything. I just did it with her, but I felt I shouldn't even expose her to it yet. She didn't pick it up at all. She's probably thinking, what is going on? But I just kept smiling, even though I felt horrible."

Ms. Gallo is quickly learning that it is up to her to adapt the curriculum as necessary and that in order to judge when and where she needs to do that, she must be extremely attentive at all moments of the day."While I was doing the math lesson today," she says, "I was really starting to lose the students. I could tell. I had to change things but without straying away from the curriculum. I knew I had to spice things up for them. So, first, we were at the desks. Then I had them move to the rug, and we did a matching game. But I changed the game a little bit, just so we were all playing it together. It was supposed to be played in pairs, but I had us all sit in a circle and take turns."

Ms. Gallo admits that adapting the curriculum makes her nervous. "I'm just afraid I'll stray too far away from it, and I want to do everything right."

In the classroom, Ms. Gallo is required to use Mimosa's Growing with Mathematics program, a language-based math program. The extensive use of language is already a bit frustrating to her, but she recognizes the worth of the many manipulatives that accompany the program. "The kids love them," she says. "They also love the overhead projector. When I used it, all their faces lit up. I let them come up and use it, too. But there's so much language in this program. I know they need to hear me talk, but it must be tiring."

Ms. Gallo will also be using Rigby's On Our Way to English, but she is not scheduled to start using it until week two.

During this first week–Ms. Gallo's first week as an ELL teacher–her main goal was to make the children feel comfortable. And thankfully, it seemed to be working. Even the girl and boy from the Bantu tribe, she says, who just stared at her during the first day of class, smiled and gave her hugs on their second day in the classroom. Ms. Gallo was amazed and hopeful.

We will follow Ms. Gallo's experiences for the next few issues of the ELL Outlook. Comments, support, or advice for Ms. Gallo can be directed to: alex@coursecrafters.com.