By Ámbar de Mejía, ELL Outlook™ Staff Writer
January…
A few weeks ago, somebody said to Nagib, “You’re stupid. You had to repeat fifth grade! You don’t know anything!” When I heard about this, I did a slow burn. My adrenaline went up and down and up again. Touch one of my babies, will you? I fumed. We’ll see about that! Then I began to calm down and realized that part of the problem is that the kids in Nagib’s class think that he gets too much help from me. I’ve heard them complain, “He gets help on his tests.” They don’t understand his difficulties, nor do they realize that although his tests are modified and read aloud, we only read the tests but offer no additional help. I found an Arabic-English workbook with simple exercises. Hmmmm!