9/7 Third week of school

Yep, this is my next work spot in this crazy world I'm traveling. Gorgeous, I think you will agree. My job is to help get the EAL department up and running. For those out of the loop, as I was, EAL reads 'English as an Additional Language'. We have first language speakers of Finnish, Norwegian, Russian, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Thai, Sotho... Many of these languages are even in another alphabet. And we are introducing them to yet another language/alphabet. So I'm forced to learn a lot about what differentiates English from other languages. For example, Chinese is pictorial and mentally visual. English is phonetic and breaks pictures into parts. It's hard for the Chinese to make out the separate sounds because it's so intellectually and sensorially different. Needless to say the idioms in each of a given child's multiple languages are culturally different. Far more complicated than I might have envisioned, if I'd prepared myself by envisioning anything!

For many years this school has catered mostly to Westerners with a smattering of Chinese. Now it's reversed course and there's a need to beef up EAL. My team, my working partners are pictured above. Three others from the US, and three from the UK. It's a great group of talent and dedication. I really enjoy working with them, although all of us feel that we are somehow inventing this process as we go along. Only 2 of the group have been here for at least a year. The rest are new, and the department has never been bigger.

There is a Chinese department of equal or greater size. Some classrooms are called dual language. The morning and all the big lessons are taught in English. The afternoon follow up is entirely in Chinese. (Can you imagine the coordination between the faculty of the same classroom? It's intense!) Some classrooms have Chinese only for an hour a day and everything else is in English.

PE and Music each have 2 sessions per week. Art, Library and Science have one session each per week per grade level. So to any one of my teacher friends who are reading this and who are complaining about scheduling, take a look at this. EAL has to fit in between. It can't take up a Specials space. It can't take up Chinese time. Of course it can't take up in class time. It has to share spare time with Guided Reading. And some kids even paid extra to have English 5 hours/week.

So we have spent several days working on the schedule!! This is where we started. 15 minute segments for each grade level in each class trying to figure out where there was free time. At the same time evaluating all the children with English as a foreign tongue. Tomorrow morning we begin! I have no idea right now how it will go - but it WILL go! (Looking back 2 months, there are schedule changes every week, which can and do lead to chaos, at least in our minds - and that's enough. But we have devised a sense of dark humor that gets us through.

Photos of the playground. It's quite a gorgeous and expansive campus and I love the Chinese red buildings.

And here is the EAL classroom, although quite often we sit with the kids during class time and support that process. There is an element of OMG to removing a child from an English class in order to teach them English.

The classrooms are very generously sized with lots of light. They are all equipped by English and Chinese teachers for their specialties, so there is less space for materials. All of the curriculum has been refined to the bare bones. Every room has a big time air filter to take care that the pollution problem is as controlled as possible. If the pollution level is >150 there is indoor recess. If there have been several indoor days and a good day happens along, there are 2 outdoor recesses (yet another scheduling problem).

More on the school in a later blog.

 

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