MNIC - Week 8, April 18
Two things happened today that I want to be sure to mention.
I always have a hard time helping everybody that wants my help. As I'm helping one person, another will say "teacher, come help me!" and I'll have to tell them "one second". But I feel bad if it ends up taking longer than a couple minutes or if the bell rings at the end of class and I haven't even gotten to them. Anyway, today while I was helping one girl, another girl asked me to help her and I told her as soon as I was done with the one, I would help the other. They started bickering back and forth in Somali. I obviously couldn't understand them, but I knew they were probably arguing about who was going to get my help. Hassan, the teacher, all of a sudden said to them "speak in English so Michelle can understand" and he went on to explain to me that they were fighting over me. I thought that was kind of fun to think about. It made me realize how much my help is appreciated among them.
In the second class, I ran into a dilemma. I had been working through a problem with one of the students and then Hassan went through it with the class on the board. However, he did it wrong. He made two big mistakes. First of all, he misplaced the i for a 1 and so his answer turned out completely different than mine. When he asked me if I got the same answer, I had to say no and told him that the 1 was actually an i. But when he redid it, he made a mistake in a different area. So when he asked me a second time if that was what I got, I again had to say no. I wasn't about to lie about that sort of thing. I felt really weird as a volunteer correcting the teacher and felt it wasn't my place to do so. However, I didn't feel it was right to let him continue in the future to teach his class the wrong way of doing a math problem. The problem is too complex to write out and explain here, but it was a basic algebraic formula and I knew that what he did was wrong. After class, I tried to point out the way I did it, but he "corrected" me showing me why he had to do it the way he did. I felt like it just made the whole situation awkward and didn't want to make a huge deal of it so I let it go. I hope I dealt with it okay. Maybe I should have tried to show him the way I did it. But on the other hand, I was just a volunteer and he was the teacher. I did not want to make him feel inferior. It's hard to know what to do in that sort of situation.