Title: If you care, student will learn.

This is a story from a friend.
This was few years ago when I was a teacher in a private school in Toronto, teaching Mathematics and English. In my grade 9 Math class, there was one student who came from Korea speaking very little of English. He was however very competent in Math; he could understand a math question and gave the right answer most of the times. One of assignments was to summarize a short story. Although the student had been in my class for only couple of weeks, I felt I had known him well. He was trying hard to do that assignment but still he could not do it; he could barely able to read or write. The parents sent him here to study English.
There was no ESL class in our school and I could not stand to see him wasting time. With mutual agreement, I decided to help him along the way and he, in return would try hard to learn what I was going to teach him. We set our goal that he would be able to read and summarize a short novel by the end of the year. With permission, I started pulling him out of the French classes, one-hour everyday to teach him English. He tried very hard and through out the year, we only missed couple of days. His English was improved tremendously. At the end of the year, I gave him a short novel, about 30 pages or so, and asked him to read, analyze, summarize and answer few questions. I was so excited to see that he did so well on that assignment. I was confident that he could be able to continue in the English class next year. Unfortunately, after that school year, he had to go back Korea since his parents could not afford to send him here any longer. It was sad but I felt very good about it. From that experience, I learned a value insight; I would dedicate my time helping students in my class to achieve the same success, as did that student.


Submitted by: T. Nguyen