Friday, September 26, 2008

I Love My Little Ones

One of my favorite students, a first grader, asked me this week why I take another boy in her class three times a day but her only once a day. She loves me and coming to ESL class so she was very serious in trying to figure out this huge injustice in her six year old life. I tried to explain to her that her classmate only spoke a little English so he needed extra help so he could learn. She was very understanding, "Yeah, he only speaks a little bit English. Not that much." The she added in a whisper, "He said that you play games with him," hoping to dispel his rumor. "That's true. You can learn by playing games too," I told her. Then she said very sternly, "To learn you have to do a lot of *homework*! Not play games!!"

I don't know what's funnier: that a first grader reprimanded me for playing games in class or imagining two six year olds discussing coming to my class and what they do there.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad "cute things kids say about you" won't go into your Teacher Data Report!

Me, the closest I get to that is getting ssshed (sushed?) by kids, or asked, "can we work now?"

But I don't get objections to games.

Jonathan

Melissa said...

That is awesome. I can just imagine those two talking about the things they do in your class and the one little girl thinking to herself that playing is not learning.

By the way thank you for following my student Diego and his blog. It is very nice for him to have someone he doesn't know follow and comment on his blog.