When we give students a space to be role model for their peers, they feel the power of their voice. I started an ESOL student meeting for my students 3 years ago. The most powerful piece of this meeting is the student speeches. Each year, we ask two ELL students who exited from the program to speak to their peers. Thanks to technology, one of the students sent me her speech via gmail and we started a collaboration. I wish we worked on googledocs but there was a quick turn around for the speech time and she hadn't used it. (I can't schedule when my kids get sick so I missed school and then there were teacher work days. However, we worked through it.) This student has been in the US for 5 years and is graduating in June. She was so happy to write this and speak before 70 people. We recorded her speech and gave it to her on a CD. This is what writing for an audience is all about-it serves the writer even more! Here is her speech.
I came to Mt. View in 2006, with the goal to graduate faster. However, things were not as easy as I thought. I would like to share with all of you right now something that for a moment I thought was the correct thing to do. Last year I tried to quit school because I felt that nothing was going right in life. I was frustrated about the way I lived. I made the decision to stop coming to school and worked more to pay my bills, my rent and my car. At the time I thought that education wasn’t as important as money. Thank god there was one person, my sister who made me understood that once you quit from school it is very difficult to come back again. This person told me that what I wanted to give up was the most valuable thing that would make my future prosperous. Also she told me to remember that money goes like water but education stay with you forever. All of these words made me see that what I wanted to do was a terrible mistake that probably I would regret for the rest of my life. Now I owe a lot of thanks to my sister because she was the person who made me see how important education is. My advice based on my experience, is never give up. Education is the only door that conduce us to succeed in this country. That is the reason I am here, trying to pass through that door and become a professional person because I don’t want to be flipping or wrapping burgers all of my life. I want to succeed and I am 100% sure that I can do this and that everyone here can do this. We have to appreciate what we have. We all know that this is a great and an independent school that gives us the opportunity to be educated no matter how old we are. However, sometimes we take advantage of some privileges.
Many of us never take the chance to think how important is to attend at all of our classes every day. For each day that we skip from school we fall behind from every subject that we are taking plus it’s not the same borrowing notes from the classmates that been there actually hearing what the teacher said during the class period. We loose a lot of essential information that we will need if we have a project to do. Many times we have a lot of absences for things that are not in our hands but sometimes we just let ourselves to get influenced by others to just skip school. We should not let other persuade us in our decisions the best thing to do is to stop and consider the consequences that will eventually affect us in the future. Not finishing school or just skipping classes mean that you just don’t care about your education it also mean that didn’t have the courage to step up for yourself.
As you noticed members of Mt. View are our second family and for some students there are like the first one. Right here we feel that we are around of people who care about us, people who help us, no matter who you are or where do you came from. They always are there with their arms wide open waiting for us. We don’t have to be afraid to ask any questions or to talk about our lives because we know that we can trust them with our problems. No matter the reasons that you skip classes or think about dropping out of school, you have the teachers that are willing to help you with everything that is possible.
I think this great team is glad to listen to us, to help us to achieve our education, to make us better persons everyday and to obtain a better future. I’m glad that we have them as our teachers and I’m sure they are happy to have us as students. We might not be perfect but we try to be better everyday.
Many of us never take the chance to think how important is to attend at all of our classes every day. For each day that we skip from school we fall behind from every subject that we are taking plus it’s not the same borrowing notes from the classmates that been there actually hearing what the teacher said during the class period. We loose a lot of essential information that we will need if we have a project to do. Many times we have a lot of absences for things that are not in our hands but sometimes we just let ourselves to get influenced by others to just skip school. We should not let other persuade us in our decisions the best thing to do is to stop and consider the consequences that will eventually affect us in the future. Not finishing school or just skipping classes mean that you just don’t care about your education it also mean that didn’t have the courage to step up for yourself.
As you noticed members of Mt. View are our second family and for some students there are like the first one. Right here we feel that we are around of people who care about us, people who help us, no matter who you are or where do you came from. They always are there with their arms wide open waiting for us. We don’t have to be afraid to ask any questions or to talk about our lives because we know that we can trust them with our problems. No matter the reasons that you skip classes or think about dropping out of school, you have the teachers that are willing to help you with everything that is possible.
I think this great team is glad to listen to us, to help us to achieve our education, to make us better persons everyday and to obtain a better future. I’m glad that we have them as our teachers and I’m sure they are happy to have us as students. We might not be perfect but we try to be better everyday.
