I think this should be stated over and over again. We work with kids. Kids are on the journey of finding out who they are and uncovering and shaping and molding their identities. I've had kids in my classroom this year that at the start of the year went by a nick-name, and at this point in the year prefer to use their full name and vice-versa.

Using somebody's name, as they ask it to be used, is a way of seeing someone and acknowledging them. This matters when we are unfamiliar with names from other ethno-linguistic origins than we are familiar with, but it also matters with people with very similar backgrounds to ours.

It is always worth the effort to do our best to say names as well as we can, to help others feel seen and acknowledged without compromise.

In the video, Moises demonstrates that he has knowledge of the math activities that they are working on, but he does not have the English skills yet to do story problems written in English. I first went to the Middle East before studying Arabic, and seeing the words and letters floating off the page mirrored my own experience in an unknown language and culture very well. Moises knows what he is doing, but cannot demonstrate it, because there isn't a test available that he can show it with. The teacher tries to make an accommodation, but doesn't have the resources available to do it. Moises demonstrated determination and did his best on the test, even though he was set up to fail, but as we could see with his friend, this situation was too disheartening and made his friend give up hope to the point where he didn't even try. This shows so well how far small accommodations can go in helping kids feel empowered and capable of showing what they know, and that in the school setting, immersion may not be the best way to go.

My school has similarities and differences to the approach shown in this video. We do have an excellent ESL team that offers some support in the home language of our students. Our ESL population is entirely Spanish speaking, and all of our ESL teachers are bilingual Spanish-English speakers. Kids can take work from their homerooms to the ESL room and can take tests there, but for the most part kids are in their classrooms with their peers receiving instruction in English. Most kids are moved out of ESL within three years, and I learned more about this approach in this module's readings. I am thankful that we do have pretty good supports for our English learners, but I am seeing that there is a lot of area to do more for them.

Educating Emergent Bilinguals offers good ideas about how to offer differentiated assessments for bilingual students as to not accidentally equate language limitations with content knowledge limitations.

I do think the Hopewell and Escamilla article created a false dichotomy between parallel monolingualism and holistic bilingualism, and in reality neither of these two categories even really exist. The contrast however, was illustrative, and made apparent the idea that it is valuable to allow students to dip into all pools of knowledge when demonstrating competency in something, including pulling from all available linguistic repertoire.

I recently started encouraging my younger emergent bilingual students to just answer in Spanish if the English is what is tripping them up when we are having class discussions about a musical piece, because they can then express themselves clearly, and even though I don't know Spanish, there are so many cognates that I can generally grasp what they are telling me and then model back in English what they are saying. If I don't understand what the student is saying, they have classmates who gain from hearing their contributions in Spanish, so I want to continue to allow this option in my room.

I started teaching because I wanted to do something meaningful in my community. I saw what I would describe as a parenting epidemic, and wanted to help respond to that in a productive way. I do not see this particular issue as tied to class or race, but it seems more and more that parents are becoming detached and uninvolved in their children's lives in my community. Based on the volunteer work I do with family education, a lot of our migrant families have the strongest parental engagement with their children, despite both parents often working a lot.

I teach around 300 students. This year, I have made an effort to reach out directly to 2 or 3 parents per week to share on their students' progress, behaviors, interests, and wins. Several of these calls have been met with annoyance and one mother even asked me not to bother her about her kid, because she shouldn't have to concern herself about him while he is at school. In total, I've only had four parents reach out to me this year, three to complain about my inclusion of songs in Spanish in my classroom, and one because she was concerned about her child's well being when our band teacher quit midyear and I was taking over.

All of this seems so wrong to me. I think parents should be the most responsible parties for their children, and that schools should come alongside parents in their endeavors, not the other way around.

I liked that chapter 8 presented things as a partnership between parents, the school and community, because that is certainly how things should work. However, I noticed that even though this chapter was aiming to promote parental engagement in the education of their children, it still held the bias of the school being central to the raising and education of the child. When listing entities responsible for the child, the school was regularly listed first, and the parents second. When saying who could come alongside whom, the school was treated as primary.

I think de facto the school is very central to the upbringing of the child, but I think this is a fault in our society, because the family should be prominently primary, with the school being a partner to the parent, and not the other way around.

This year I have been working on bringing in more guests from the community into my classroom, and I'm hoping to get more parents involved in my class throughout this year and next year.