Student Journals

I am extremely busy this session with 41 students and no assistants in my class, so I have to do everything myself and part of that is reading forty-one student journals. All of the students are required to keep journals of each day and to make summaries of anything they read and to make sure they are doing it, I read them. A benefit of this besides learning of the myriad ways English can be mangled, is that I gain an insight on the lives of my students. Some entries are laugh out loud funny, others are tearfully poignant. I give you now an example from one that I just put down. To get the full effect, I left in the spelling and grammar mistakes.

"Last night. I was sad. Because my wife was crying in my sell phone as my daughter left at 8:00 in the evening with her grandparents. My parents-in-law. My wife was crying and crying she was so alone.What a sad thing she meet! No one to talk to, to play with, to share love with. I could say nothing to her except "I love you. Don't cry." Even this, she did not know what is meaning. Because she can not speak English and I am not allowed to speak Chinese to give the comfort to her. Because she is so alonely. I walked back to Dormroom. My tears falled down. I miss my wife very much. I will work very hard in TIP so this will be worth it."