How We Think About Language

One of my greatest joys is when I have been trying to explain something to a student and all of a sudden, the student understands. Right now I have two students who just don't understand a word that comes out of my mouth. I have been reprimanded by both of their guardians due to the lack of progress that their charges are making. These two cases are very different from one another, but they are equally as frustrating to me, and perhaps to my students as well.

In the first case, I think that there is something wrong in this family. There is a child who is a very dreamy kind of child. The mother yells at him to get his attention because the attention wanders so readily. I find him infuriating to work with because I'll be in the middle of trying to get his attention- and he'll be gone again. I am so angry at him. I told him, using gestures, where he needs to be looking in order to undestand me. He looks, but it's as if he looks but he doesn't see. I don't know what to do for him. I am not going to yell at him. To me, yelling is for emergencies, for example "Oh my God, your pants are on fire!" Also- yelling has progressively less power the more that you do it, and then when there is a real emergency, there is nothing to resort to doing. Plus- I just hate yelling. Further, this child retains nothing that I say- and proceeds to correct me. This has largely stopped, and has been replaced with the above mentioned complete lack of attention. This was after I told him that I am a native English speaker, and through no fault of his- I know more than he does about English. He has been very impatient with me when he is paying attention, using phrases like, "Okay- okay go on". I think that he is very rude, and that he has learned this from his parents.

The other case is totally different. In this case I might be at fault. There is a child that is in the U.S. for six weeks. Normally in these cases I come up with a plan ahead of time. In this case, I employed two workbooks. My hope was to get half way though the two of them. We are four weeks through his stay in the U.S. and his mother (through his aunt) has told me that my tactics are in appropriate. She didn't want him to be learning grammar. The aunt told me that kids his age aren't supposed to be learning grammar. I said that in the U.S. kids are required to start learning grammar at his age. It occured to me that he will not actually be going to school in the U.S. Maybe what I was teaching his was a) unnecessary, and b) frustrating to him (and to me). He's the nicest kid that I have worked with in a long time. I don't want to make his life harder, yet, I have no idea what to do for him. He didn't know when to capitalize, basic punctuation or basic sentence structure when we started. He knows those things now. These things were learned through learning grammar.

If I had to tie these two situations together, they would have two main similarities. One is that they are both frustrating, but the guardians are unwilling to allow their charges to deal with their frustration. I think that this is a mistake because feeling frustration helps kids to be motivated to learn. Second, both guardians have dictated what the curriculum will be, and have micromanaged me to the point where I have no disgression about how to teach the kids at all. The only disgression that I have had is which workbooks to use. I couldn't find the ones I wanted, so I had to make due with the ones that I could find. The parents own meddling has cost us time, money, and added to our frustration.

I can't escape the fact that it is too late for one kid. I will continue to try my best, but it may have been too late from the start. I have to fight the tides of my own depression in the other situation, if I have any hope of helping him. I can't allow myself to slip under the surface because then he will be left to his own self-defeating devices.