Finally updating (again) part 2

October 28th

Mina was not here today, and Ronoldo did not go to the reading room, so the day was spent in the regular classroom. They had spent the majority of the past week working on an essay on a famous explorer that each was expected to write. I took him and a couple other students who needed extra time typing up their papers to the computer lab.
The assignment was very clear cut, and did an excellent job of explaining what the teacher expected from each paper. It had a list of every aspect, and a brief explanation of these sections. There were also some questions that were used to prompt the students’ responses to these.
Ronoldo’s paper was on Christopher Columbus, and in the fourty-five minutes we were in the lab, he barely finished his title page. Typing out the explorer’s and his names was excruciating, because he typed with one finger, and did not know where the keys were. It kind of made me want to take the keyboard from him and have him dictate his information to me while I typed.
He kept having issues with formatting, which I told him he could deal with at the very end. He did not seem to believe me, and spent a lot of time trying to get the right font and font size for his title page. To be fair, I was the same way at his age, and would drive my dad crazy while I formatted and reformatted each part of the paper.
I think that there may be an issue with ELLs learning how to type AND learn the English language. Writing it down is one thing, but typing is hard enough to learn as it is, especially to a fifth grader. I do not doubt that he was intimidated at all by the scale of this project, and the fact that he was required to type out the whole thing. I know I would have been, and am sometimes put off by this even now.