IFO Students with Exceptionalities

26 September 2022

I was excited to get to this weeks’ prompt because I actually have something to talk about for this. Technically speaking, I don’t have any students in either of my classes who have disabilities that need to be taken into account or even students that are more proficient in certain areas. There is, however, a student from West Africa that does not speak English in one of these classes. Even my mentor teacher, Mrs. Kendall did not know what to do with this poor girl, because no one even told Mrs. Kendall what language she speaks. I offered up the idea of using a translator app that most phones have. However, this app would not work until we knew what language the student spoke. My mentor teacher and I spent nearly an entire class period trying to find out what her native language was, until she thought of one of her coworkers she could ask, so we finally found out that this student spoke French. So, since this happened about a week to a week and a half ago, Mrs. Kendall has been having to use Translator in order to communicate with this student. This has been working, and the student and Mrs. Kendall, to my understanding, have simply been translating documents back and forth between each other in order to communicate. Mrs. Kendall also provides information and answers to questions through this app. Additionally, another helper student occasionally helps direct her between classes and gives her directions on what teachers need her to do. I’m not entirely sure how this works, however, because I don’t think this other student speaks French. It’s very fortunate that this has been working for this student and her grades have not suffered. Unfortunately, however, I learned today that this student has a younger brother who is also in Mrs. Kendall’s freshman advisory period, and simply using a translator has not been working for him. None of us really know what to do to help him at this point, and I’m mostly just frustrated that none of the teachers received any direction or even any information about either of these students in order to try to communicate with them. I did not think such a large language barrier would fall under “exceptionalities” I would have to address this semester.