04/18/10

This week has been fairly uneventful. School has been going quickly, but it always does and especially the last quarter. I gave a test in my 6th grade math class this week. There was a small section that had different geometric shapes. There was a trapezoid, parallelogram, ray, line segment, intersecting lines, and pentagon. The students had to write next to the shape what their name is. As the students finish they raise their hands and I walk around to collect the tests. When I took Dorothy's test, I looked at her answers. Next to the intersecting lines she wrote "x-rays". It seems so silly but to a student who hears English as their second language, it makes sense that she would easily get this mixed up. Of course, she has probably heard of x-rays, but most likely only a few times. Maybe as a vocabulary word, but never again. We also had just learned what a ray is in the geometry section, so as the intersecting lines appear to form an "x" it is quite reasonable for her to think that they are "x-rays". It's funny sometimes how words get mixed up. Last year, I had a student write, "photograph" for the name of a pictograph. I corrected him, but I didn't count off for it. I got to thinking about Creole and how hard it is to learn new words sometimes. I first learned "kanpe" which means "to stand". Later, I learned "koute" which means "to listen". They only start with the same letter and end with the same letter, but I used to get them mixed up. For a Haitian, it would be nearly impossible to mix those up as they have learned them in action rather than in a classroom. So, the same holds true for intersecting lines, rays and.... x-rays.