ESL teacher enjoys diverse students
Teaching English as a second language gives Dodie McDaniel the chance to concentrate on individual students and small groups. Although new to the Bentonville system, McDaniel has been a teacher for several years and had a brief career in business before that.
McDaniel grew up in Rogers but, after graduating from college in Springfield, Mo., she chose to stay in that area. Last year, she moved back to Northwest Arkansas with her family because her parents needed some help.
She’s teaching ESL at two Bentonville schools and that means developing a complex schedule. Not only does she have to work with the students’ schedules to avoid pulling them out of core classes, she also has to figure in some significant driving time between Cooper and Central Park Elementary. And that means learning about the traffic patterns.
The students who get ESL services have different levels of need, she explained. Some are new to the English language, while others function pretty well and only need monitoring. Some ESL students graduate out of the program when they are deemed “proficient.”
She’s starting at Cooper with only a few students, but more may be added as testing is completed.
Not all ESL students have the same native language, she explained. In Bentonville, there are students who come from China, India and Japan, as well as many Hispanic students. They all learn English the same way, McDaniel said, and it’s not that different from the way any infant learns to communicate. It helps to work in small groups.
When she was teaching in a first-grade classroom, she realized that many of her favorite kids were the ones who were learning English as a second language. Those students were often eager to learn and grateful for her help. Their parents, she said, were the ones who showed up at school events, and the children learned quickly.
A classroom teacher has many responsibilities beyond teaching, she explained. Teachers spend a significant amount of time on classroom management and clerical duties. The teachers who pull out small groups of students don’t have to collect lunch money or permission slips. Once she gets her schedule set up, she can spend her time actually teaching her students.
She has one son in the district, but he chose to go to the school in his zone rather than traveling to Cooper or Central Park.
When she’s not teaching, McDaniel said they spend most of their time just hanging out with friends and swimming.