Teaching Siran: Exchanging Words and Worlds in a Sixth-Grade Classroom
By Rachel DeWoskin My eleven-year-old student Siran turned to me recently during a conversation about Shel Silverstein’s poetry and said, in her native Chinese, “English is so wasteful!” I had just been thinking the opposite, that rhyme is a lovely expression of compression and economy. “Why?” I asked. She pointed to a “k” at the…