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Kindergarten Lost

I met my kindergarteners a little off-schedule this week. Right after they had returned from lunch. While they were delighted to see me, I made very little if any progress with teaching them with spelling their three letter words or filling the blank with letters in the alphabet. All kids I am dealing with are immigrant children and English is not their first language. I realized that they fundamentally did not understand the point of the alphabet and how it connected to spelling and most importantly the sound of the letters were unclear to them so they could not understand what fit where. B, C and P all sounded about the same to so they struggled with the concept of B following A and why it was not C before Q. This impacted their ability to sound out the words. W and M looked about same depending on vantage point one could be the other. 

While this group of kids struggled to get on the on-ramp to reading and spelling their peers had moved on to reading things. There was a special ed instructor in class and some who was supposed to work with kids who had reading challenges. I shared my insights with them and no one cared. They had other checkboxes to check no doubt to demonstrate performance. The fact that these kids would fall a few years behind in no time at all was not relevant. It made me really sad to realize that I had no idea how to get any of these kids past this hurdle. I would need to understand the kid way better before I found an answer. There was no way to to that in my once a week volunteer gig - I don't have time to commit to more than that. 

What it would really take is a parent or a relative who knew the kid already. Thinking back to the only experience I ever had with teaching a kid, it was built entirely on the foundation of knowing who J was as a person. I had an instinctive feeling for how to work with her, what she would accept and what would get rejected. The trick was to overcome the barriers of rejection and turn those things into what she would find acceptable. All of that had nothing to do with my skill as a teacher. I just knew this child at a human level and was able to help her in way that was suitable for her. With this set of kids its like a random shots in the dark when just about nothing seems to work. The teachers in the classroom have to deal with twenty times of this several hours every day. It makes me wonder how any progress can be made at all. They would be lucky if most kids got to some minimal level of performance - more than that seems impossible with the resources they have. 

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