Colleagues:
 
The following post is cross-posted from the Content Standards Discussion
List.
 
Marie Cora
 
********************************************
 
I know I am a little bit late jumping into this discussion. But--as a
high school drop out in the 9th grade and someone who came from an
immigrant family, meaning I spent more years working the fields with my
family than going to elementary school. I had not been able to keep up
with the other students so by the time I hit junior high school I was
completely lost. 

My father officially signend me out of school at the age of 15, and I
then went to work full time. Well when I had my own children and by this
time I was beginning to understand the value of an education when I
couldn't help my children with their homework and also when two of my
boys decided they didn't want to finish school. Well by this time I knew
I had to do something so I went to the adult education school where I
obtained my GED. From there my oldest daughter talked me into going to
the community college. 

I started going to a community college soon afterwards and had a really
hard time. But with the help of the Learning Resource Center I was able
to catch up to the other students who had finished all the k through 12
years in school. Today I am a secretary at a community college and also
teach an ROP/Office Occupations & GED preparation class part-time. I
teach 16 to 21 year olds. 

My students are at all different levels, some were like me and never
really grasped things at the elementary level others just got side
tracked in the junior or senior years of school. I stress to my students
the importance of learning more than what just the GED teaches. We have
a career development skills section we also teach in our classroom.
Some of my students only want to get their GED to get a job, others need
their GED to go on to higher education. What ever my students want to
pursue that is what we work for. 

If they plan on going on to higher education then we study more indepth
with those ones. With the ones who only want a GED for a job, and thats
all they care about getting then we only study the basics to pass the
GED and job skills. 

One thing I really stress when they first come into my classroom, is if
they want to go on to higher education they are really going to have to
and WANT to work hard for it. Some of them will have to be tutored in
different areas that  they never grasped during their k-12 years.  We do
that with them in our classroom. I have an awesome case technician that
helps me with this. We do go out of our way to work with our students in
what ever they desire. But they know they have to have the desire if
they want to succeed. 

We have some students that are coming back to us now after having gotten
their GED but are struggling with a college course they are taking. We
make the time to help them even if we don't get paid for it. I guess for
our classroom it is once our student, always our student! 

Okay I have rambled on enough this morning and I hope I made some sense
with all of this. 

Gloria Fuentes
Gloria Fuentes [ropteacher at gmail.com]
 
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