Program change?

This week I entertained thoughts of changing my program to Special Education, perhaps even Speech and Language Pathology. But, I know nothing about either, so I'm not considering it all that seriously at the moment.

I saw a little first-grade boy, cute as could be, in a transitional Chinese-English bilingual class in Chinatown, on Thursday morning. Later the teacher told me he has language delay, a little ADD, doesn't even speak much in his first language, Fuzhou hua (a southern language from the Chinese province Fujian). She had him doing tongue exercises so that he can develop the motor skills to produce language. It fascinated me. It made me really want to study speech pathology.

This morning I went back to the dual-language Spanish-English class that I observed last week. I watched the class in Spanish this time. They were doing math. Actually so many of the students are English-dominant; they were speaking in English when talking to each other. I was a little surprised. But they seemed to be having a good time and were for the most part attentive and enjoying the math games.

Overall, it was such a nicer classroom experience than the transitional bilingual class I saw yesterday in Chinatown. It may just be the teachers' different personalities that made the difference, but I think a dual-language class is a much more inviting and safe atmosphere for bilingual children. In dual-language programs, you develop both languages; in transitional ones the first language is only used remedially, when the students don't understand what the teacher said in English. Inevitably, the transitional teacher ends up sounding irritated when speaking the other language, because it's the third or fourth time she's repeated herself.

Because of the early morning observations this week, I'm feeling pretty exhausted. I can't wait to catch up on sleep and relax a little. Of course I'll have to clean the apartment and do other chores, in additon to writing papers and reading redundant articles on literacy and multicultural education, but it'll be so nice not to be filing student materials and following up on paperwork in the office.

Peace out.