Tackling the three R’s in a second or third language

To learn math or any other subject, these kids have to first learn English. If a math teacher tests with word problem, the student might know the math concepts but not some of the words, and fails the test. Please read this whole story, very interesting! DP

Math may be a universal language – but what happens when your word problem includes words you don't know?

By Mary Wiltenburg | Correspondent

Clarkston, Ga.-- Stolen shopping carts collect behind Indian Creek Apartment Homes. In good weather, Nyo Nyo spends hours pushing her 2-year-old around the parking lot in one, her skirt flapping, his head high, like a prince surveying his realm. His mother is less at home in the country that took her family in four years ago, when they arrived in the Atlanta suburbs from Burma (Myanmar) by way of a Thai refugee camp.

“The problem, she says, is language. “No English,” she apologizes, and calls to the oldest of her three kids, on the playground outside their apartment.

Reluctantly, daughter Thayoomoo Ywin untangles herself from a swing and comes running. Thayoomoo is 8 going on 30. After 2-1/2 years at the International Community School (ICS) in nearby Decatur, Ga., her English is close to fluent, she’s on track doing math at a second-grade level, she’s in the top half of her class in reading, and she is her parents’ lifeline to the English-speaking world.

Her dad, Thet Naing Aye, speaks enough English to support the family on a $11.20-an-hour job at a Goodyear tire plant. Her mom often depends on her to make sense of responsibilities from the grocery store to school forms to the state driver’s manual.

“She has a lot of friends. If they want to go to the store, their daughters have to go with them,” says Thayoomoo, translating for her mother as they sit on the woven mat that is the family’s main living room furnishing. “If they know English, they could go.”
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