An incident from early in his teaching career taught Andres Alonso to “keep looking for the key” to each student’s learning style.
Question: How has your experience teaching ESL and special needs students informed your administrative career?
rnAndres Alonso: You know, I’ll just tell you about a moment of frustration. I walked into the classroom without ever having had an education course. Had been a lawyer, sort of fell into this environment where I was running a program and I was teaching. And I had - there were emotionally disturbed adolescents, age 11 through 14, and because it was self-contained settings, you had kids ranging from 11 years old to 14. The kid who was completely in grade level to the kid who didn’t read.
rnAnd there's a kid that I’ll always remember. His name was Ivan. Bright, bright, bright. Right now, I mean, I know that this is a kid who was completely dyslexic. Nobody ever diagnosed what he had and he ended up in a classroom for emotionally disturbed kids. There was nothing emotionally disturbed about this kid. He just couldn’t function in a school and nobody had figured out a way to approach him. So, I remember going to my principal, a woman named Wilma ****, and this must have happened within the first month that I was a teacher. And basically reaching out to her and just saying, “You know what, I just don’t know how to teach this kid. I don’t know how to teach Ivan. I sit with him every single day for 45 minutes. Figure out a way to give him 45 minutes of one on one instruction. I come back the next day, it’s like we’ve done nothing the day before.” And I always remember her telling me sort of, like, there's a key. Just looking for the - just keep looking for the key. Keep looking for the key. She was a great influence.
rnSo, when I think of classrooms and think of kids, I always think of that kid and that name. It’s a very important thing for me. I mean, this idea of, “What do we do with Ivan, right?” And also that idea that you might have tried 35 things, but there's a key that you haven’t found. And of course, it informs the way that I think, because I was so unprepared and the systems were not in place back then. The knowledge might not have been in place. While today, I think that we have - in places that have gotten their act together, they are just different ways of insuring that somebody who walks into a classroom without the necessary knowledge gains the hooks, is able to have the kinds of conversations so that they don’t walk into a room and say, “I just don’t know how to do this.”
rnSo, that’s very much at the core of how I see the work. I think that there is a key and I think that we all benefit from saying sometimes, “I just have no clue how to approach this.” I think adults have a hard time with that.
Recorded on January 29, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen