Sister Aimee and Me

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Most adult school teachers work a split shift, with a morning and an evening course, like I do.  There are a few afternoon classes, but these are only assigned to teachers with a great deal of seniority. The evening classes are the fullest, but the morning is quite jumping. As split shifts go, I have a pretty good deal.  When I return home twice a day, the traffic is light.  While my colleagues are all shapes and sizes, there is one commonality.  Teaching creates an adrenalin rush that makes it hard to get to sleep after facilitating an evening class.  Most of my fellow teachers regularly use a sleep remedy. 

I am warming a little to my tiny morning class at an elementary school.  Most of my students are young moms but there are older women too.  Two men have enrolled but neither returned after a single session.  My classroom is a nice parent center with a fridge, a microwave and even a Delonghi coffee pot.  Children wheel in carts every morning with the leftovers from the kids’ breakfast.  Wee cartons of juice and milk.  Packaged nuked burritos, or pancakes or French toast.  And fruit.  Unripe plums.  Mealy apples.  Bananas forty-five minutes away from being completely brown.  The rule is that food served at school is not to be removed from the campus.  My ladies bring shopping bags and I encourage them to remove whatever they want because food that’s not eaten just goes in the dumpster.  I spirit away a few cartons of milk myself.  I bring a couple of packs of pancakes thinking that Spuds might eat them.  I forget to give them to him.   And it dawns on me that there’s no chance in hell that he’d eat them, and I remind myself of my mother hoarding food at the nursing home. Finally, they are offered to, and declined by, the dogs.

There is enormous attrition with beginning level ESL classes.  I don’t take it personally anymore.  I know that students have job changes or family issues, but I think that a lot of them don’t persist because learning English is really friggin’ difficult. My own efforts to learn Italian resulted in being completely unable to say a word and understanding less than 1% of the language that I heard spoken.  Given how daunting it is to learn English and what the experience of coming to a giant city in a foreign country must be like, it is astonishing really that any student gets past the first level.  At my school there are students who complete six levels of ESL and then transition to a vocational program or gain a high school diploma and then enroll in college.

 Most my fellow teachers are over forty.  Offering either part-time work or split shifts, ESL teaching doesn’t have a lot to recommend it.  My own contract is for 27 hours a week but in addition to this paid classroom time, I spend at least 15 unpaid hours preparing lessons.  I don’t teach on Fridays, but I have mandatory (and usually excruciating) meetings for just about every Friday between now and Thanksgiving. Even at events from all over the district, there are very few young ESL teachers.

This is a particularly heavy meeting week and I am also being evaluated which requires me to create a professional plan and describe some objectives toward improving my teaching skills over the next school year. I spend a lot of time on it and really think through what I want to accomplish and better master.  But as lesson prep is so demanding I get a bit tetchy given yet another big project. Still, while the evaluation requires a lot of energy, it does encourage a teacher to self-evaluate and home in on specific steps towards improving classroom practice. 

There are two special adult education programs in play.  One is to enroll upper level ESL students into introductory vocational classes.  I am the ESL portion of a Saturday Health Information Technology course.  The students have memorized the skeletal system, performed skits with examples of both good and bad HIPAA practices and learned about different medical specialties.  As vocational courses go, there are few that I would find less interesting.  The classroom creeps me out.  There are dummies in hospital gowns, a skeleton who’s called Mr. Hueso and charts with blood coursing through veins and bisected muscles.  My job is to help with vocabulary and conversation and after three weeks of class, I’ve absorbed almost none of what I’m teaching.   

The second program is for ESL branch classes in elementary schools and aimed at coaching parents to support their children in school.  There are four such classes under the aegis of my school and it would be financially advantageous for my school if my morning class became the fifth.  I wouldn’t object to this except that half of my students do not have school age children and participating in this program would require me to attend many more meetings and devote even more time to lesson planning.  I am summoned to a special meeting for this program and fear that my class is designated as a part of it and there will be a massive time suck. 

I take my assistant principal to lunch at a place that she is disappointed to find has no liquor license.  She knows that I don’t have a lot of experience but also that I work hard and am eager to become a more effective teacher.  I try to tactfully address the futility I sense about working with other teachers with whom I differ philosophically and she cuts me off.  She assures me that I can work with whoever I want.  I am also promised that my class will not be converted to parent support.  Finally, there is a new vocational class to combine ESL with computing that is being designed with me in mind, and to be taught in lieu of the medical class.

There isn’t a huge window to converse with Himself during the week.  We come home dragging ass and usually full of complaints about dumb meetings and additional work that is being piled on.  But, if I don’t fall asleep, the conversation also continues to the fun that we both have planning lessons and poking around for resources.  Himself is challenged in the classroom to get some of his students to participate in discussions.  I am challenged by getting some of them to talk at all.  We somehow reel in at least some of them.  Except on particularly bad days, we remind ourselves that the work we do has a nearly spiritual component.  I teach a huge class in a giant room and sometimes feel almost like an evangelist.  When we’re at our best, we inspire our students to better their own lives.  Despite the meetings and a smattering of others with whom I do not play well, it’s a darn good gig.

 Illustration:  Sermon on the Mount, Robin Guthrie 1922