Introduction
The Freemans introduce a powerful
poem written by a very experienced intermediate school teacher, Rusty DeRuiter,
who had just begun teaching developmental reading to struggling high school
students at the time of writing this poem. He wrote this poem late one night as
he tried to understand both his students and his own frustration with teaching
them. Rusty was asked to teach these students because of his success with
intermediate school students in his rural, agricultural district and because
district officials did not know what to do with the growing numbers of students
who were dropping out of school. Most of Rusty’s students were of Mexican
descent.
The Poem
I
Don’t Know What to Do
Rusty
DeRuiter
I
don’t know what to do.
So
many angry faces
Who
have heard all the teacher
Promises
before.
For
too many years
They
have been put down.
Too
many teachers
Who
have given up.
Who
have not understood.
And
now it is big time.
High
School.
Time
to show and shine,
To
be cool with compañeros,
To
be tough.
It’s
tough to start school,
Especially
when you are
Angry
with life.
Having
to ask for money
From
parents who don’t have it,
Wanting
the right shoes,
And
shirts and pants.
Needing
to make your mark early.
I will complete this poem later,
in comment, to show that he understood his students’ need for being able to
understand, read, and write the academic language of school. It is interesting
and illustrates that teachers, across the country, are faced with classrooms
filled with large numbers of students who struggle with the academic demands of
school. Like Rusty, other teachers want to know how to help these students.
With the current nationwide emphasis on standardized tests, exit exams, and
other high-stakes assessments, attention has been given to students who lack
the language of school. Many of these students are English language learners
(ELLs) and struggling readers. Reports from educational agencies and literacy
educators have begun to focus on the need for helping these students develop
academic language, and academic language has become a kind of buzzword at
conferences and in-service presentations.
The Freemans offer teachers an
effective framework based on research to teach both language and content. They
provide a resource to improve reading and writing skills while supplying the
academic vocabulary necessary in the content area. They explain that the focus
of the book is to take the reader into the world of
the classroom using the information “from researchers, teacher educators,
linguists, and practitioners in order to clarify some of the confusions about
academic language and provide suggestions for how to help ELLs and struggling
readers succeed in school.” (p. xvi). The seven chapters in the book deliver
critical components for teaching academic language, the nuts and bolts about
who needs it, “what it is, when and where it is used, the problems that
textbooks cause, different aspects of academic language, how to write
objectives to teach academic language, and how to engage students in effective
instruction to build academic language proficiency” (p. xvi).
