Today I subbed for Mr Maeda, the ESL teacher at BOHS.  There were three notable things about today.  First off, I knew a lot of these kids from Monday and Wednesday tutoring.  It was a lot of fun talking with them, and I'm happy that I get to practice speaking Spanish.  ESL kids are a lot better behaved than other low-level kids.  Second, some of the students are stuck in the ESL room for the first three periods of the day: for a two-period ESL class, and then for "Study Skills", a class for kids who aren't doing well gradewise.  Couldn't they send these kids down to shop, or another skills-based class where you don't need a lot of words to learn?  Or make them office aides?  Or give them a soccer ball and send them down to the field?  They aren't learning much, except that school is boring.

Third, ESL 3 has a Korean TA.  ESL 3 is the third level of ESL classes, for kids whose English is decent but not native.  Most of the day I spent translating between English and Spanish, but this class was about one third kids of Korean descent.  So the school had a Korean student TA to help out.  I thought that was an incredibly sensitive thing to do.  I wonder if Mr Maeda thought of it.

##On Another Note...

--<a href="http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~takoyaki/vault/text/google_pizza.txt">Google gets it</a>.