Assessing the situation

It’s been a long, tiring day – today was the first day of registration for the ESL classes I teach and I was at a site for 3 hours this evening, testing all of the registrants to see what levels they should go into.

This year, we are using new assessment tests and they are rather annoying to deal with. We are supposed to ask a student a list of questions and while they are answering give them scores in three different areas: Language Comprehension, language complexity, and . . . what’s the last “c”? . . . well, it’s whether we can clearly understand what they are trying to say. (I’m tired, can you tell?) It kind of ruins the flow of the questioning and also is a bit nerve wracking for the student to sit through. For example, we ask a student “Do you work?” The student answers, “Yes.” This is followed by three minutes of circling scores for their answer. Then we ask the next question – they usually give a one word answer, and then lots of scoring. You can also tell how well a student is doing by how many questions they have to answer. If a student isn’t doing well, the test stops much earlier than for a more fluent person. In those cases, I just ask them random questions that they do understand in order to put them at ease and not freak them out too much. I usually ask how many children they have, how old the children are, how they like living in Northern Virginia – stuff that most folks can easily answer a bit. Then the can leave the testing situation not feeling like a failure . . .

I can’t believe that I start teaching again next week . . . I will have to look at my old lesson plans and revise them to make the class flow a little better and encourage more talking amongst themselves. Also, I can’t forget to bring my usual bag of candy to class with me . . . it helps keep folks coming back each week.

I was rather touched this evening when several separate occasions, people that I tested asked me if I was going to be their teacher. I had to explain that I teach at another site in another part of town. One person said that I seemed like I would be a very good teacher have . . . wasn’t that sweet?

Once in a while I think that I should go back to school to become a real, full time teacher, but then I think that I’m having a lot of fun with it now because I’m just a volunteer and I don’t have any major pressure – we just do the best we can with the time that we have. If I had to teach all day, five days a week, I would get pretty sick of it really fast . . .

I have to do more testing at another site on Thursday night for three hours. I don’t know whether to hope it was as busy as it was tonight, or to hope that hardly anyone comes in – I could kind of use the rest . . .

I started reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking last night because I thought that the themes of the book felt appropriate for this week. It is a fast read, but I probably won’t get to it tonight. I’m still up for suggestions as to what to read next . . .

Hope to write something more interesting tomorrow . . .