Answering the question, "Who Am I As a Teacher?"

In Navajo culture, our thoughts are very powerful and so is the energy that we put out into the world. When I make bread with my family, my grandmother and mom have told me that it’s important that I’m thinking positive thoughts while I make my bread. As I shape the dough I should be thinking about happy memories and positive thoughts. I remember one day, when I was in middle school, I was upset for whatever reason teens are upset. I was mad at my mom and did not want to make bread. But, when grandma says to make bread, you make bread. So I grabbed the dough and kneaded it half-heartedly. I was mostly thinking about how mad I was and how much I didn’t want to help make bread. My mom scolded me and told me it’s important that I’m not angry while I cook otherwise the food won’t come out good. Sure enough, my bread that I had angrily kneaded and placed on the grill burned. Because I was focused on my anger rather than cooking, my bread didn’t turn out great. However, my mom’s dough, that she made while laughing at jokes with my uncles and cousins, had turned out much better. Our thoughts have power and we encourage positive thinking through laughter and bonding while we cook.

This is similar with gardening. Mother Earth, nature, is sacred for my people. Back then, prayers were offered to plants before they were picked for both permission to use them as well as thanks for their offering. We had to say their names. As we plant, songs are sung, words of encouragement. My brother grew beautiful crops of corn, squash, and watermelon each year that turned out great because of the care he put into them. He woke up early each morning to water the grass, sang songs as he removed weeds, and took good care of his crops. So they flourished. All of this to say that we give our positive energy towards these plants so that they may grow and flourish. If I’m only negative while I’m planting, angry or sad, the plants won’t do as well. The bread that is cooking will burn.

My students and my classroom, is my garden. I can’t force them to grow. I can only guide them through words of encouragement when they’re feeling discouraged, offering a safe and welcoming classroom community, and being a positive adult figure in their lives. All of this so that when I teach my lessons, they want to learn. A quote I found best describes this: “With guidance, care, and patience flowers will grow.”

I spent this past semester in West Lafayette, Indiana in a second grade classroom. A long distance from Colorado and my home on the Navajo reservation. Although this side of the country was new to me, it paralleled a lot of my experience going through school on the reservation. Some of my students were homeless or living with a family member, alcoholism and drugs were not uncommon, high levels of poverty and students not knowing when their next meal would come, and, what drove me to apply to this school, a substantial population of students who were classified as English Language Learners, or as I prefer to call them, emergent bilingual students. Although I grew up on the Navajo reservation, a place fraught with many of the same barriers, I was still shocked by the circumstances that some of these students, my students, had faced or were facing.

While none of these students were Navajo, or Native American, I saw a lot of myself in these students. They were a cultural minority in the schools, their language was second tier to English as everything we do in school is done using English and western society experiences. Imagine coming to school where you not only had to learn math, reading, and writing, but you are also learning an unfamiliar language, adjusting to an unfamiliar school setting and cultural setting, and classroom routines that probably are different from what you’re used to at home. The pledge, our lessons, holidays, etc. are all in English. Most of my students who were classified as English Language Learners spoke Spanish as their first language with one student who spoke Filipino as her first. The students in my classroom ranged from pretty close to speaking fluently in Spanish to the first time they started learning English was two years ago when they entered Kindergarten.

Although I did make an effort to get to know all of my students, it felt especially important to get to know these students. These students who were often a minority in the school and in the classroom. In my classes here at Fort Lewis College and in the research I conducted for my senior seminar class, one of the things we learned when helping and working with emergent bilingual students is to make sure that they feel welcomed and heard in the class. It is important to get these students talking and feeling comfortable enough that they speak up in class, they raise their hand, and they feel confident enough to do so. This is what I sought to do with my students. I needed to create a bridge from the unfamiliar to the familiar.

First of all, I do not speak a lot of Spanish. In fact, I am far from a fluent speaker. I know basic phrases such as, “Good morning,” “See you tomorrow,” or “How are you?” I can count to 100 in Spanish or say the date. I can’t do much more than that. In Filipino, I could only say, “Good morning.” This was my challenge. How could I, someone who primarily spoke English in her day to day life, build a classroom community where these students would feel welcome? First of all, I started simple. I learned their names. Most of my students had English first names with a last-name from their language. On the first day I met them, I introduced myself and then asked them to introduce themselves. They would say their name and I would repeat it back to them, asking if I said it correctly. I told them that it was important to me that I say their names correctly because names are pretty important. I did this to show that I cared.

The second thing that I did was to try and invite their culture into the classroom. Once I started taking over morning meetings from my teacher, I asked my students to teach us all how to say good morning in their language. First, because I know some of my own language, Navajo, I modeled for the students. I told them how lucky we are to have such a rich variety of languages in our classroom. The next morning, I pulled aside the students who spoke Spanish and asked if they’d like to share with the class how they say Good Morning in Spanish like I had shared the day before. This was done before we started our morning meeting so that they didn’t feel called out. They were excited when I told them they’d be our teacher for the morning. We sat in a circle with the students acting as our language experts that morning. I had all of the students practice saying good morning to each other. Some students were embarrassed, but a lot of the other were really excited.

I repeated this with my student who spoke Filipino. She was a little shy, but I promised to help her if wanted my help. We were able to learn to do this in Spanish, Filipino, and in Navajo. I wanted to help introduce my students to the fact that there were other languages spoken by their classmates besides English and I wanted to do it in a meaningful way. After we did this, I made little signs with the phrases Good morning, Buenos Dias, Ya’a’teeh Abini, and Umaga Gugunda. It’s become something that they enjoy doing together.

I also offered books as a way of connecting with students. Call me corny, but I love reading and I believe that books are a powerful way of connecting readers to self, community, and the world. When I was a little girl, I read many fantastic books such as Junie B. Jones, Molly Lou Melon, Stink, Flat Stanley, Heidi, the Princess Diaries, oh my list could go on and on. However, many of these stories were filled with protagonists that I couldn’t relate to, really. I longed to read stories that had a young, Navajo girl protagonist. Stories that reflected my life on the reservation, my experiences, my feelings. There were some books when I was younger, but they still treated Navajos as though we existed in the past. It was stories that I couldn’t really relate to.

So, I wanted to use books as a way to connect to my students. I used books such as The Name Jar, a story, if you aren’t familiar with it, about a Korean girl who is embarrassed and ashamed about her name. She’s teased for her name and decides she wants to change it. So, her teacher suggests a name jar where each student suggests a new name for her. Before the students submit their vote, however, she first explains the meaning and importance behind the young girls name. After, all of the students chose the girl’s original name and she keeps it, but also feels more proud. I chose this book to share and read with the class because one of my students felt embarrassed about her last name. It felt relevant with what she was going through. She really loved the book and wanted to keep reading it. I don’t know how she feels about her last name, but I hope this book reached her in a meaningful way.

Lastly, I also wanted to work in meaningful language learning experiences for my students. We read some books about gardening and vegetables and then we went to a community garden that was just down the road from us. So, one day, we took a walk down as a field to visit this garden. It was arranged by my teacher who was friends with the garden coordinator. The students really loved it. Some of them had no idea that this garden was so close to their homes and those who did had some really love stories to share and memories. For my students who were learning English, this was a great opportunity to live the experience of learning about vegetables. We walked around in groups with the garden volunteers who shared the names of the vegetables, how they grew them, when to harvest the vegetables, and also passed around the vegetables they talked about. Not only did we get to walk around, but students also were able to pick some vegetables. They came back with little bags filled with kale, green peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant. We watched a Magic School Bus episode about vegetables. While they watched it, my teacher washed and cut the vegetables for us to eat. We talked about how they tasted, what they looked like. I really tried to include lots of opportunities for the students to talk and build their vocabulary.

At the beginning of the semester, my emergent bilingual students were a quiet bunch. They did not often raise their hand to answer questions, they were quiet during our Morning Meetings and not wanting to share a lot. It’s taken a lot of work to make them feel comfortable enough to open up not only to me, but also during lessons. The young Filipino student I mentioned earlier was very quiet at the start of the year. She was born in the Phillippines and moved here with her mother a couple of years ago to live with her dad here in the United States. She speaks Filipino only with her mother, but even that is becoming rarer because her mom wants her to be able to speak English so she can succeed in school. Something that I relate to, as my mom wanted the same for me.

My student really hates making mistakes and gets frustrated easily with herself when she doesn’t understand how to complete an assignment. Every time she takes a quiz on a book, she scrunches into a little ball and puts her hand over her eyes because she’s afraid of what her quiz result will be. At first, she would fail most of the quizzes and it was easy to assume that it was because she wasn’t reading carefully or she didn’t have great reading comprehension. However, once I sat down with her and read the questions for her, it was such a big difference! She was passing a lot more of the quizzes and getting more points. It wasn’t a problem with her comprehension skills, it was she was combining all of these skills that she herself was still learning to read, yes, but also needed help understanding the words. So she would read part of the question, stop to think about what the meaning was, read a little bit more, stop, read, stop, read, stop and by the time she got to the end of the question she understandably was frustrated because she no longer remembered what she had just read. Having someone read to her allowed her to hear the entire question and use context clues to make sense of what was being asked.

Her confidence is starting to grow. When before she wouldn’t raise her hand because she was scared to be wrong, I noticed that she’s starting to raise her hand a lot more. When before her answer was wrong she would grimace and slump in her seat, now when she’s wrong, instead of getting frustrated, she smiles and says, “Oh my god, I was so close!” She’s grown a lot this past semester and I am so proud of her.

My other student, grew up in Mexico. It was a small little town, as he describes it. He lived there and went to kindergarten in Mexico before his family decided to move to the United States because they needed jobs. His family lives with his grandmother, who speaks Spanish with very little English as with his mom. His dad, who could speak both Spanish and English has been in jail the past year which was hard on him because his dad was the one who helped him with his homework. He’s been learning English for about a year and a half now and would be classified as a level 1 speaker. He also started out his year as a quiet student especially in reading because he also is in the process of being classified not only as an English Language Learner, but also as possibly having a learning disability. He’s aware that his reading skills are below what other students are doing and on top of already feeling trepidation from learning English still, he’s had a tougher time adjusting.

He was placed in my remedial reading group where I worked with a small group of three students including him. I made it my mission for the first couple of weeks to focus more on student-buy in. In other words, I had a group of students who hadn’t had great experiences with reading and I needed to make them want to learn to read. I did this by just having conversations for a couple minutes before we began asking questions about them and sharing about myself too. At first, he wouldn’t really answer my questions only shrugging his shoulders or giving one word answers. Still, I’d give him an opportunity to share if he wanted. Outside of the group, I would greet him in the morning in Spanish, and started trying to learn more phrases in Spanish that I could use. Usually, I’d ask him how to say small things such as “Line up.” Or “How was your weekend?” Each time he told me how to say it in Spanish, I would thank him and start using those phrases with him. Finally, one day he started to share more. I still remember the first time he gave me a hug. I was picking the class up from their special and some students ran up to hug me. Recently, I was talking with my teacher about the change we’ve noticed in him over the last couple months. He’s become a very silly student who loves him Elmo stuffed animal (usually chilling out in his backpack), shares about the dog he used to have, and makes sure to give me lots of hugs.

My last day, which was this past Tuesday, I did a little art with my students in order to create my artifact. This artifact is supposed to represent my student-teaching experience, but I also wanted it to serve as a reminder to myself in the future. I wanted to create something that wouldn’t just end up in the trash after I give this presentation. I explained this to the students as best as I could, letting them know that as much as they’ve learned from me, I’ve also learned from them. So, I had all of my students put their fingerprints on the flowers because they’ve all been a part of my journey. There were some mistakes, but that in itself is a learning experience.

This past semester taught me a lot about working with students who have different language experiences than I have. It taught me that sometimes it’s as simple as showing students that you care about them and want them to succeed. The question I am supposed to answer tonight is who am I as a teacher? It’s taken me an entire semester of being with my second graders all day every day, getting to know them, getting to know more about self, for me to even begin answering that question. I’ve been trying to avoid clichés in my answer, but clichés had to come from somewhere, right? So who am I as a teacher? I am a gardener. I provide my garden with the patience, love, care, and guidance that they need so they may grow.