Today I began some of my work that I'll be doing here. I work with the Science department three times a week, with Friday's having me in a lab of some sort. The other two days are mostly devoted to working on posters to put up on the science bulletin board in the courtyard. I am told to make them super awesome. I will keep you posted.
But back to today: I worked in a Chemistry lab about acids and bases. The teacher doesn't speak one word of English. I ended up working with a group of students that knew some English and that I had made friends with on week one. Mostly today I was another student following along with the experiment. It was one of the more frustrating things I have had to do!
It's SO frustrating to know what the experiment is about and know the content behind it but to be completely helpless. I didn't know how to describe what was happening and couldn't understand any of the directions. In fact, if I didn't have the science background, I would have had no idea as to what we were doing.
It made me think about ESL students in our schools and how frustrating it can be for them. I was trying to do high school science (which I should be good at) but should have been doing 1st grade science if I wanted to be able to complete the assignment in Spanish. But that would be super boring for me. I can appreciate the difficulty in placing non-native speakers in classes. The content is fine, but expressing it very difficult. But if you go down so the expressing is easier, the content is boring. Very hard. It only reminds me of all the extra work I'm going to have to do outside of class on Spanish just so that I can accomplish my real working tasks.
Oh Deary
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