I'm the ELL coordinator/teacher at a middle school, and we also
push-in. All of our beginner kids have either an aide or me in
classes with them. I think the question is - what is your goal
for being in the class with them? Is it to teach math? In our
program, we believe the ESL help is there to teach the kids how
to approach math, not to teach it. I'm very upfront with my
students about the fact that I'm not a pro at math. If we want
to lead them toward independence, we need to focus on math
vocabulary and on the process we should go through when we come
to a math problem that is full of English words. There are
strategies like underlining cognates (of which there are tons
in math for Spanish-speakers) and underlining/color-coding
words that are new. Whatever it takes to get the kids to start
thinking that they can approach the problems without feeling
scared. And I do realize that your question is about high
school math, and that's h.s. is more rigorous than middle
school...but our m.s. teachers go so fast and expect a lot
(there is no coddling for our ELL kiddos) that I think we're in
similar situations.

On 9/21/09, ESL teacher wrote:
> I taught ESL at the K level before and this year I am at
> the high school level (talk about a big jump). Anyway I am
> "pushing in" to math classes (Algebra I & II, Geometry to
> offer support for my ESL students. However, math is not
> something I am highly qualified in and I am lost. Does
> anyone out there do a similar job? Could you tell me how
> you help support your students in these classes? I'm not
> being met with a lot of cooperation from the math teacher's
> and they refuse to break the class up into cooperative
> learning groups, which is very frustrating to me.

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