Mendoza-Mini Conference Reflection!

Mendoza

Reflection Journal #3

Review-What did you learn?

I found the ESOL Endorsement Mini Conference to be very interested and useful at the same time.  I really enjoyed learning about others people’s culture such as the interpreter Beatriz Uribe, Eunsook Lee, Lan Schlecht, Yisu Brasel  and Vesna Vujinovic.  I enjoyed learning about the Asians interpreters because we have a lot of students from different countries in Asia.  It was particular interesting to learn about how people from the Asian countries feel when they are refer as Asian people as to if Asia was a country I related a lot to that because I am from Dominican Republic but everyone refer to me as if Hispanic as if it was a country.   After living several in the United States I got used to it, but I must confess that when I first immigrated to the USA I was quite confused with the term.  I also found interesting to learn that Koreans don’t liked it when their name is written in red; because it symbolized blood, and that most of the Korean immigrants come from South Korea I was not aware of that fact. One of the things that enjoyed the most from this conference was learning about the Chinese language how it does not have any tenses, it made me really understand student’s performances in my Spanish class, specially the ones that come from china and how challenging it must be for them to learn about verbs conjugations in Spanish.  What I enjoyed the most was to see how education is valued differently depending on the culture and social economics backgrounds.  Students that come from different countries in Asia are expected to achieve highly in school, because they come from countries where there is a lot of competition because they are overpopulated countries. Last not but not least, when dealing with Hispanic students we should be aware that Spanish is spoken in 22 countries and our Hispanic students come from different Spanish speaking countries and although they speak the language, their Spanish might be different from others Spanish native speakers. 

            For the breakout sessions I attended immigration in picture books taught by Dr. Mandi Burgess and Laurie Rohm in the Enterprise Lab and for breakout session II I attended ELPP taught by Maria Gillentine in the Norcross Lab.    In my opinion, they were both good conference because as a Spanish teacher I could use them in my classroom.  I particularly enjoyed the immigration workshop because there was a lot of useful information on immigration which is very hot topic in the United States and I teach Spanish for native speakers where most of students have immigrated to the USA and I teach about immigration therefore a lot of the resources I can use in my class. 

Reflect-What did it mean to you?   

This conference was very useful to me because it helped me understand more the Asian community as well as others immigrants communities which are represented in the student population at NHS.  I particularly enjoyed learning about Asian community because it helps connect more with those students and it help create lessons that are meaningful them that they can relate to.

Refine-How will you use the information in your classroom?

This conference was a good one because now  I am more aware of the students from different countries in Asia, I feel that I will be planning my lessons targeting those student’s needs, taking into consideration that students from china have not being expose to verbs tenses, and in Spanish we have a lot tenses.  I also will take into consideration grading with red pen because it might be offensive to our students and parents of Korean descent.  I believe this conference was very interested because it made me aware of the needs of students that are from different cultural background.  I also feel that this conference brought up a good topic war, we must be sensitive to this because a lot of our students come to our classroom with traumas from war because they gone through this horrible experience.  Therefore, we should take this into consideration when planning our lessons specially when using picture that might be too much representations of war.