All posts by Naomi Epstein

Hi! I teach English as a foreign language to deaf and hard of hearing students in Israel and am a national counselor in this field. http://visualisingideas.edublogs.org

Saturday’s Book: “The World According to Garp” by John Irving

All week I’ve encountered references to John Irving’s new book and it reminded me of the “The World According to Garp”.

This is one of the rare examples of seeing the movie first (I adore Robin Williams!) yet still really enjoying the book afterwards. All this was many years ago but that’s a tale that certainly made a mark in my memory!

I also read the Hotel New Hampshire which was the author’s next book. I think pretty much the only things I remembered about the book was the phrase ” keep passing the open windows” (again, we’re talking many years ago!) . However, I just caught the movie on cable TV one holiday quite recently and I remembered a lot once I began watching. Certainly worth reading.

It isn’t as powerful a story, or as memorable one as Garp. I think the actor Robin Williams must have also been influenced by this tale because the theme of someone trying to do good, to be good to children despite difficulties, runs through a lot of his movies.

Always nice to remember a good book, even better when both the book and the movie were good!

National Exam Day vs. a Special Ed. English Teacher

Yesterday was national exam day, or matriculation, or “Bagrut”, as it is called here. This year was one of the difficult ones.

Photo by Gil Epshtein

And I’m not talking about the complexity of the exams. I didn’t have time to look at them!

Every national exam day is a busy one for me. As a national counselor of English for deaf and hard of hearing students, on the day of the exam itself (and the days preceding the exam)I respond to a large number of questions from schools who have only one such student. They generally need clarifications regarding the paperwork that needs to be stapled to our students’ exams.

At my school we, of course, know what must be stapled where but we have volume! About 30 of our 62 students took the exams, some took more than one. There is the usual round of minor crises to be solved – students who don’t bring their pens or dictionaries, students who come slightly late or arranged to be picked up an hour before the test ends, the usual.

This year, on top of that, all hell broke loose.

We have two students with issues related to anger management (a trigger will cause them to move from being sweet to “Hulk-like” at an amazing speed).

The exams are given in three sessions. During the second session one of these students (we’ll call him L) was taking an exam. The other students (we’ll call him A), along with a few other kids who had taken the first session of the exam and were waiting for the third session, camped out in an empty classroom. I wasn’t aware of this.

This empty classroom was the one adjoining the exam room. Worse, the wall separating the rooms was a dry wall (made of plaster).

It would have gone unnoticed if they had sat quietly and used sign language. But it seems that someone pulled “A”‘s arm and his watch fell off and the metal strap separated into sections. That did it. “A” started pounding the wall with his fists and screaming.

“L” is hard of hearing and he certainly heard THAT. When I came to see what was going on “L” was already getting worked up and making threats

Now, if you were under any illusion that I’m the kind of special-ed teacher that soothes the outbursts of the angry student, then now is the time to get rid of that thought. I can help them find the ways that will enable them to study English. But when a 6 foot 19 year old is enraged I call for help. Other staff members got him out into the yard, fixed his watch strap and calmed him down.

In fact he calmed down so completely that less than an hour and a half later he took his exam. “L” was supposed to be in the same room for his last exam but I moved him into another room with students taking a totally different level of exam – did not want them in the same room! That caused a bit of technical confusion but nobody disagreed with my decision!

Some exam days have gone by so smoothly that I go to gym class afterwards. Yesterday was not one of them!

But it’s over now. And I must tell you, these kids are NOT usually (except for certain days!) the ones I would call my most difficult students.

But this post is long enough and I have written a post entitled “Will the REAL Difficult Student Please Stand Up” over at the iTDi blog (as part of a focus on working with difficult students) so I’ll be off to bed now! Good night!

It’s Saturday! Remembering Maurice Sendak

I have to admit that until I heard that Maurice Sendak had passed away this week, I had never read anything related to his biography. As  I have “mused on” in a previous post, I’m not a big fan of looking for keys to understanding stories (or poems) in the authors’ biography. A piece should stand on its own merit.

“Where the Wild Things Are” most certainly stands on its own. I’ve met people who aren’t interested in children’s literature in the slightest, who may never have heard of Sendak, immediatly react to the name of the books. I encounter the book EVERYWHERE, in its Hebrew translation that is. By the way, the title in Hebrew is “In the Land of Wild Creatures”.

However, reading about Sendak in the New York Times article DID explain a few things. In particular, the part about how the abduction of the Lindbergh baby influenced him.

In short, Maurice Sendak has left a significant legacy. May his memory be blessed!

Simon’s Cat & HOTS

Photo by Omri Epstein

This is the first of my new batch of exercises as part of my Reading Pictures Strategy for  improving the reading comprehension skills of struggling learners.

What is different about this new batch is that I’ve placed more emphasis on the HOTS (higher order thinking skills) which is now a major issue in high-schools.

I’ve added a category and a tag called “HOTS” to make these exercises easy to locate. In addition, they can also be downloaded from the blog page titled “Downloadable Goodies!”

The Simon’s Cat short videos are perfect for discussing the skill of “identifying patterns of behavior”. This cat most certainly exhibits clear patterns of behavior!

Here is the worksheet. You are welcome to adapt it to suit your needs. I would be delighted to hear what you do with it!

Simon’s Cat

It’s Saturday! Musings on the Genre of Fantasy and Getting Older

I just watched the third movie of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy with my younger son. It wasn’t the first time.

I read “The Hobbit” and the trilogy when I was a teenager. I also read many other fantasy books and some science fiction too, then and in the following years. The “Narnia” series, “A Never Ending Story” and “A Wrinkle in Time” are the examples which pop up first.

I accompanied my boys as they discovered the world of fantasy and learned from them about some books that hadn’t been around when I was their age. Books such as the “Artemis Fowl” series and “Good Omens“.

It didn’t seem to me that age was a problem when it came to enjoying fantasy.

However, tonight I felt less sure. Though it must be noted that I was watching the movie again, not rereading the book.

The third film includes the happy end. You see Aragorn being crowned and everyone is in white and all is splendid, beautiful and shiny.

That bothered me.

Of course they are happy. But they’ve just been through an incredibly horrific war with lots of dead and wounded, and great devastation. They couldn’t possibly be looking like that after what they’ve just been through, even though they are happy.

I’m being ridiculous, right? The tale is full of magic, so what’s my problem?! I didn’t have a “reality check” for the previous parts of the film but the ending bothered me.

I didn’t react this way before. Is this a sign of age? Is it harder to surrender to fantasy when you get older? I hope not…

An Emotional Comment on “Evaluate Me, Please”

The post “Evaluate Me, Please” on Teach from the Heart Blog REALLY struck a chord with me.

By Gil Epshtein

So much so that here I am, writing about it. In particular, I need to expand on this quote:

“Don’t assume you know my kids as well as I do. That little boy with his back to me? Yeah, I know he’s off-task, but six months ago he would’ve thrown a desk when he was angry. Now he just turns his back. If I leave him alone, he’ll calm down and eventually apologize. If I say something to him now he’ll explode.”

In my class it wouldn’t be a little boy. It would be a teenage girl who is engrossed in cutting off threads coming out of her cloth pencil case. She can’t focus on anything else until the offending threads have been dealt with. Once she’s done she’ll work quickly and nicely. However,  if I try to stop her now we may end up in the principal’s office. Or it would be the huge teenage boy who says swear words to himself as he works. That’s significant progress – he used to swear at other students and get into fights which lead to trouble. As long as he does it quietly with his head down I’m thankful my students don’t hear well and ignore the behavior.

The problem lies with “the other” people. As opposed to “Teach from the Heart”, I don’t get officialy evaluated. At all! However, that doesn’t mean I’m not being judged.

First of all, there are the young teacher’s aids which I have for part of the lessons. I’ve had cases where I had to talk to them several times so that they wouldn’t loudly draw attention to a child off-task during the lesson. It is sometimes difficult for them to understand how a teacher could not expect everyone to behave like little angels and ignore some things!

Then there are the students themselves. Particularly 10th graders, which are new to the high-school. As I teach mixed classes (all 3 grades together) there’s always at least one student who takes it upon himself / herself to monitor what everyone else is doing and report it to me, loudly. And since that means that student isn’t working, he or she is so indignant that I’ve ignored a behavior the teacher from last year would never have ignored… now, of course, I can’t pretend not to notice and have to diffuse a situation that could easily escalate when it could have simply  been avoided!

Anyway, when you visit my class, which I hope you do, remember that there is a reason for everything, which I”ll be happy to exlain after the class!

I really recommend reading the full “Evaluate Me, Please” post.

 

 

Saturday’s Book: “Spanish Charity” by Abraham B. Yehoshua

The choice of picture on a book’s cover is never accidental. Yet I belieive it is the first time I’ve read a book that uses the picture on the cover (Roman Charity by Matthias Meyvogel) as a starting point for the story.I found myself going back to the cover several times to look at details I hadn’t noticed.

This author is an expert at quickly drawing the reader into the story. You begin with an aging film director, who was invited to Santiago de compostela (Spain) for a retrospection of his films, studying the painting in his room. Before you know it you realize there is a connection between the old city, the world of cinema, the painting and, of course, the hero’s life.

All that’s left is to find time to read, relax and see how it all unfolds!

Comment on “Are YOU Intentionally Creating a TED in Your Head?”

Photo by Iddo Epstein

References to TED Talks come up over and over again when ELT teachers interact, whether online or at conferences. Without having conducted a proper poll, it seems to me that teachers watch talks on a wide variety of topics and do not limit themselves to those directly related to education.

This brought me back to Bill Ferriter’s post on The Tempered Radical blog: “Are YOU Intentionally Creating a TED in Your Head?”

Am I?

Bill Ferriter writes:

“…when we are building our own learning networks using social tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we need to intentionally reach beyond the thinking of leading educators.”

The way I understood his post is that paying attention to people from outside your field is good for you. Really good for you. Social media makes these people available.

So what about the TED in MY head?

For starters, I follow The Tempered Radical blog. While Ferriter is most certainly an educator, he’s not an English language teacher. He posts about many issues that on the surface aren’t relevant to me as a teacher, such as the problems of the American Education System, which I am not a part of. Yet his blog is fascinating and thought provoking.

Then there are two blogs I follow who actually are written by language teachers but teaching English / Spanish isn’t the focus of their blogs. “Humbly Human” and “Be the Change” are blogs that inspire, blogs that remind me to smile. The only problem is that they haven’t been posting recently – where have you gone, you two lovely ladies?

And that’s it.

All the many blogs I follow are closely related to ELT. While it’s true that sometimes I will find a recipe for a carrot cake or poem spreading its wings for the first time on some of these blogs, they are blogs focused on teaching English as a foreign language.

Theoretically, I could subscribe to the blogs of some of the authors I post about every Saturday. Some of the writers I enjoy so much in the New Yorker magazine have blogs too.

Except that I can’t.

Those of you whose blogs I follow know that I’m a dedicated follower. If I tweet about a post that means I have read it. I’m blessed with a diverse PLN that has a lot to give.

Oh, and I work too.

Listening / watching TED talks is not something I do on a daily basis. The TED in MY head will also have to mainly remain a thing that happens occasionally when the time is right to follow a link and read a different kind of post entirely. That does happen and it’s great when it does.

Are YOU creating a TED in YOUR head?