Background
I am so blessed to be a public-school teacher. I love teaching my students both math and language arts. Up until last school year I taught middle school math. Presently I am looking forward to teaching Language Arts in both Reading and Writing. Starting new in a specific content area like Language Arts meant that I had to cobble together Reading and Writing units in time for the start of the new school year while considering anchor texts I would be utilizing for the year. These texts included To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Night by Elie Wiesel.
I teach 8th grade Language Arts—Reading and Writing to approximately 75 students. I have three in classes which I see on a daily basis. These consist of one class in which I solely instruct Writing for 55 minutes. In addition to this, I teach two additional classes which are two hours long. Those two hours are broken up into one hour of Reading and one hour of Writing. The majority of my instruction time is in English with some Spanish. I teach speaking English to my monolingual students but I can speak Spanish as well to those students who have a stronger capacity for Spanish. Our Language Arts classes have been dramatically impacted with the loss of instruction due to COVID. Middle school students perform well below their grade level in these areas. It is a challenge for students to open books up and write a standard paragraph with proper grammar skills being used.
My school, Richard Edwards IB Dual Language Elementary, is a part of Chicago School District #299. Edwards has one of the largest elementary student populations in Chicago with an enrollment of approximately 1,300 students. The demographics of the school are: Hispanic 95.8%, White 1.6%, and Black 1.2%, with approximately 90% of the student enrollment low income, 51.6% limited English proficient, and 15% diverse learners. There will be approximately 80 eighth grade students. I will be teaching Reading and Writing for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year.6
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