Delectable Diction

This year, I will be teaching 7th, 8th, and 9th grade for a grand total of... 12 students. Yep, after the earthquake last year, half of the families packed up and went home (back to South Korea and Pakistan and Australia and the U.K.) The school is still transitioning from this loss of students as well as a switchover in management. It's possible that more companies will open up over the course of the year and bring in more foreign students, but for now, here's the breakdown:

7th grade - 2 students
8th grade - 5 students
9th grade - 5 students

We had our first two days of school this week, and I got to meet all of the kids. They're awesome. I first realized just how awesome they are when I explained the "Delectable Diction" wall, where they can post words from their reading, words from everyday conversation, and even random words they find in the dictionary. The words are on index cards so we can move them around like Magnetic Poetry. My 7th graders pored over their dictionaries and came up with words like "mugwump". My 8th grade future doctors added hyper-opia and hydro-phobia. The 9th graders wanted to know the longest word in the English language. They crowded around the computer (as much of a crowd as 5 kids can make) and giggled at all of the Wikipedia entries about long words. It was like a dream.

Of course, there will be challenges. The administration wants all of the students to prepare for an IB program when a lot of them are still struggling to learn English. I have a wide range of skill levels in my class even though there are so few kids. But, I'm also really excited about what this diversity will conjure up in terms of discussions and compositions. The students' first journal was to write about their Name, and many of the students wrote about how their English name was chosen by an elementary school teacher. They talked about how frustrating it is when English-speakers can't pronounce their Korean or Chinese names. Some said their name denotes birth order and means nothing more than "second" or "third". I am going to learn so much from these kids. I can't wait.