ABSTRACT
Sunhee arrived from Korea in 1990 as a shy seventh grader who flashed a beautiful, bashful smile whenever she didn’t understand what someone said to her. Two years later, in a Massachusetts suburb, Tom, the second author of this chapter, saw that smile much more often than he heard her voice in his ninth-grade social studies class. As Tom recalls,
By that time, I was striving to be a great history teacher and was enjoying some measure of success. Several classes of students had chosen me to be graduation speaker. Staff had chosen me as teacher of the year. My top students were acing A.P. U.S. history exams, and a course I created integrating special education and regular education students had attracted fifty visitors from other schools. None of this helped Sunhee. My B.A. in history and M.A. in teaching hadn’t ever included mention of English language learners; my preservice and in-service teacher education also never challenged my belief that it was someone else’s job to provide help that addressed Sunhee’s needs as an “emergent bilingual,” someone still mastering English.
