Just to start out I wanted to type out a quote that stuck out to me as I was reading this chapter.
"As the Zambian Proverb says, 'Start where you are, but don't stay there.'"
I felt this quote in particular summed up the chapter as Wong discusses the different ways to teach ESOL students and how to grow as a teacher and work with problem posing to help students learn. The discussion that Wong had about teachers learning along side their students was particularly important. It is difficult for any student to learn if they are not challenged or given some kind of motivation. When they are not interacting with the material it can be hard to rely on memorization alone.
For me, the section that hit home the most to me was Branch 3-2 Problem Posing and High-Stakes Testing. When I was younger, in elementary school and junior high, most of my teachers taught to the tests. They gave us the material needed for the state testing and felt that the information given would help us the long run. I appreciated Wong discussing the issues following that kind of strategy and I was surprised to find that, even though I had gone through that kind of teaching myself, I hadn't thought much on changing my own teaching strategy so that I wouldn't make the same mistakes. I have a lot to think on now concerning high-stakes testing and how to effectively teach without really teaching for the test and Only for the test.
I also felt it was extremely important to explore the facet of the way women learn and how that can change the way a teacher runs their classroom. Because of the background, or cultural norms, women face in their daily lives it is a large influence on how they react to learning and how they respond to it. It is important to understand these differences and work with these students to help them learn. It is also useful to understand that different genders see the world differently because of their social background and with this, they may answer things differently but still logically. Just because their answer differs, doesn't mean they are wrong. I particularly like this idea because it also not something I have thought on much. Yet, my thinking was somewhat the opposite. I feel that as a women, if I am teaching, I may understand where another female student is coming from better than a male student. In this case, in my own ESOL teaching I may need to open myself up to the male perspective, giving their answers credit just as I would for any female student.
It is probable, in my case, that because I'm a women, and I understand women, that I work in the opposite way of what Wong was discussing. I need to keep an open mind concerning male students where as I feel that less so when it concerns female students.
Hope that made sense. It was difficult to phrase on paper (or electronic blog).
peace & grace.
One thing the discussion about how women respond vs. men brought up for me was the idea of creating test questions. Teachers need to be aware of this issue because the questions they create, whether they feel the question is flawless or not, can be misunderstood. Students can easily be answering a totally different question that what we're asking. Being aware of this may help us when grading and to accept answers we didn't expect but are potentially correct. (I actually came across this issue in my student teaching. I didn't think of it like this until now. At the time I thought, well that was a clever way of answering the question. I couldn't mark it wrong, because it was a correct answer. It just wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for.)
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