Journal #5
February 23, 2011
8:30-10:30 (2 hours)
I found today’s lesson to be both interesting and fun. When I first saw Oscar today he led me right to the library and immediately pulled out some Algebra homework. He told me it was due in just a few hours and he did not understand how to do it at all. The top of the worksheet read “Adding and Subtracting Polynomials.” I was a little nervous when I first saw this. Math has always been one of my weaker subjects. In fact the last few weeks I have been studying math really hard to prepare for a standardized test and ended up doing really well. So, I was feeling a little more confident than normal in my math skills but was afraid that I would not be able to help Oscar, or that I would be telling him the wrong thing. However, after looking at the worksheet I realized I knew exactly what to do. I started by asking Oscar to read the directions aloud to me. I was still conscious that he needed pronunciation help and thought that I would try to get him talking as much as possible during this math lesson. He read every question and problem aloud to me and whenever he wanted me to look over one of his answers he had to say: “will you please look over this problem for me.” He asked me to look over every problem, which meant he was getting a lot of practice. He was reading numbers and asking the same phrase over and over again. I remember speaking to Oscar’s teacher and her saying that he was afraid to ask for help. She believed that maybe he did not know how to do it. Thus, I was feeling pretty confident; Oscar was practicing a phrase that would help him to ask for help in the future.
The best part of the lesson was when I realized Oscar was adding something to his math problem that was just confusing him and making the problem more difficult than it needed to be. I asked Oscar if I could show him my way of doing it and then he could chose which way he thought was easier. He agreed. It’s a hard concept to explain in this journal entry but basically once I showed Oscar my way of doing the problem he said he found it to be much easier. Then, he breezed through the next five problems before asking me to look at them. They were all correct. He had increased his speed and found an easier way to do these math problems.
Unfortunately, there was one problem that proved to be a challenge. A word problem caused us to stumble a little, but mostly me because I did not quite know how to explain the math concept. The word problem gave a geometrical equation that needed to be solved using polynomials. I suggested Oscar try something, but we ended up getting the wrong answer (based on a check we did). So, I suggested another way to do it. This also failed. After about four attempts, Oscar said “I think I know how to do it.” He did the problem and got the right answer. I was pretty sure that I may have confused him before his was able to solve the problem but I also know he got the opportunity to think critically and figure out how to solve the problem on his own. Several times throughout his math homework Oscar switched to Spanish. He then explained to me in English that it was difficult for him to do math in English. He said he could handle many courses in English, but math was much more difficult. I continued to speak in English, especially while explaining concepts and Oscar did an excellent job. It was obvious he learned something new and this made me happy.
Once we finished working on math, we still had another hour left. So, I pulled out the tongue twisters Oscar mastered last week. He did very well reading them aloud again but had some trouble with the “th” one again. After reading through it a few times though he once again had it down. I plan on including these cards in every lesson from here on out. After this I asked Oscar if he wanted to play again. He agreed and so I pulled out one of my favorite card games: The Mad Libs Card Game. In this game there are nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs (each card is color coated to help players know the difference between these words). The goal is to put together a grammatically correct sentence with the cards you are dealt. So, Oscar and I talked about what is necessary to make a sentence. Oscar decided that we can have a sentence with just one verb and one noun, but he also realized that not all verbs and nouns can be a full sentence. For example, “Oscar slept.” Is a full sentence, but “Oscar is,” is not a full sentence even though it contains a noun and a verb. Oscar was also able to see that once sentence can have many different adverbs but also can seemingly only have one verb and one adverb. Oscar seemed very interested in this game. We put together very bizarre sentences but Oscar found most of them amusing and was much better at putting together a correct sentence by the end of the game. He seemed very confident and willing to make mistakes. This game also proved valuable because Oscar was introduced to vocabulary he had never heard before. He would ask me what they meant. I thought it was exciting because Oscar was able to put together a correct sentence without even knowing the meaning of some of the words in the sentence. This means he was definitely understanding the structure of a sentence, even if he was not understanding the words in it. Unfortunately, this lesson ended. It was sad. However, Oscar said “see you Thursday” at the end of the meeting. I actually told Oscar that I only come in on Tuesday and he seemed disappointed, so I asked “would you like me to come on Thursday.” Oscar said “yes,” so I will plan on going in twice this week.
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