<Standing ovation>. Brava again. Especially on the school libraries and dual language sections. "SEI is not best practice": You get a gold star. But it is the default practice when the bulk of your teaching corps is English monolingual. And it's the practice endorsed by the state. And it's the practice that our state ESOL organization, MATSOL, pushes (so the profession is complicit in this). Perhaps I missed it, but part of addressing this challenge is developing that multilingual teaching corps (I know that Aislinn talked about the distance to get to an institution that can prepare you as a dual language teacher). We *can* do it. The talent is there: so many of our immigrant WPS parents *were teachers in their home countries*. But there is *so much gatekeeping* in moving from being a paraprofessional, which is where much of this talent ends up (and stuck), to being a licensed teacher (the MTEL). Readers, Aislinn has basically given you all a graduate-level education on this for/the price of a coffee and in less than an hour of your time.
(One little proofreading point: for taxes, it's "levy", not "levee." Gosh darn homophones.)
Excellent Part II on literacy in Worcester and powerful guidance for the future to continue to improve it. Thank you
Thank you so much. Thanks for reading!
<Standing ovation>. Brava again. Especially on the school libraries and dual language sections. "SEI is not best practice": You get a gold star. But it is the default practice when the bulk of your teaching corps is English monolingual. And it's the practice endorsed by the state. And it's the practice that our state ESOL organization, MATSOL, pushes (so the profession is complicit in this). Perhaps I missed it, but part of addressing this challenge is developing that multilingual teaching corps (I know that Aislinn talked about the distance to get to an institution that can prepare you as a dual language teacher). We *can* do it. The talent is there: so many of our immigrant WPS parents *were teachers in their home countries*. But there is *so much gatekeeping* in moving from being a paraprofessional, which is where much of this talent ends up (and stuck), to being a licensed teacher (the MTEL). Readers, Aislinn has basically given you all a graduate-level education on this for/the price of a coffee and in less than an hour of your time.
(One little proofreading point: for taxes, it's "levy", not "levee." Gosh darn homophones.)
Thank you so much. We absolutely can do it. So much opportunity here.
(And thank you for the edit! I spent a semester in college in an ocean and coastal studies program, so I always defer to maritime :)