I spend days preparing a presentation for a conference at L.A. City College. The conference attendance is pathetically sparse. There are four attendees, which flusters me and results in a mediocre workshop. I attend two other sessions, also with miniscule attendance and underwhelming content. The highlight of the day is a rousing speech by Jackie Goldberg who reminds us of the ravages that Proposition 13 continues to wreak on public education and suggests concrete activist measures to remedy this. I also have lunch at a restaurant with Himself. Other than when we’re travelling, it’s been decades since we’ve had a mid-day meal out. Maybe there will be a breakfast on the horizon.
Manuela is the most advanced student in my tiny morning class. She works babysitting at a megachurch on the weekends. I’m not sure what her religious persuasion is, but she always wears a midi length black skirt. She helps me out with the less advanced students and breezes through her second level textbook. I’m afraid she’s bored so I find a lesson about Malala Yousafzai, intuiting that this will appeal. Manuela is riveted. I set her to work assembling a bilingual PowerPoint about Malala for the other students. I show her the rudiments of finding images and placing text boxes. Manuela has never used a computer before and when I notice that she hunts and pecks at the keyboard, I set her up with some typing lessons. The tiny class is convivial but sluggish. When I steer things to shopping, cooking and parenting they perk up a bit but, with the exception of Manuela, I often feel that the amount of energy that I put in isn’t reciprocated.
Both morning and evening classes have been consumed this week with the preparation for and administration of an EL Civics test. There is a cooperation between the Division of Adult Education and the Los Angeles Public Library. The EL Civics unit on the library is revised. Last year I worked on preparing some lessons to accompany the library test and found the test to be a giant mess. There was a stress on using the library website but none of the icons on the practice and testing materials matched the actual icons on the library site.
Now, the library has made a presentation for every student, as well as an in-service for the teachers. The student session I attend is poorly and cursorily translated from English to Spanish. There is no Internet available, so the librarian is unable to demonstrate the website. Every adult student is to receive a library card and ride on a bus for a library field trip. I have taken most of my classes to the local library for a tour, made sure each received a library card and was familiar with the trove of library offerings. I am excited about this partnership. Each teacher receives a hard binder with teaching materials and there is a 36-page workbook for each student.
The promised library cards have yet to arrive, so the students won’t have them for the field trip. There is no digital component to the workbook or teaching materials, despite the emphasis on the library’s digital resources. The icons on the test are still different than on the actual website. As desktop publishing is now so accessible, it always astonishes me how crappy the materials the district creates look and feel. The test is difficult to read, labor intensive and very confusing. Only about two pages of the student workbook are worth teaching and even these are filed with typos. The color printing of all these materials must have cost a bundle but to my mind, this is a sad waste. A couple of lessons that students could complete on their phones and based on the actual library website (which is what I do with my own classes anyway) would have been way more beneficial.
Last year my class enters the door decorating contest for Christmas and the glue dots we use don’t adhere so the whole thing falls apart and I am crestfallen. Blanca is a civil rights lawyer in Medellin Columbia. She meets and marries an American and ends up living in Los Angeles with in-laws and stepchildren. While Blanca has a green card, her English isn’t anywhere near good enough for her to be hired at any place that isn’t 100% Spanish speaking. There are too many people living in her house, and she is bored out of her mind. Blanca doesn’t understand how limited my Spanish is and often she speaks so quickly and uses vocabulary that’s way above my nursery school level Spanish. I am usually able to glean the gist of what she’s saying but I miss a lot of the nuance.
Blanca volunteers to decorate the door for Halloween and designs an elaborate arch of balloons. We arrive to find out that the daytime teacher’s students have decorated both outer doors without permission, so we are relegated to an interior door. Blanca modifies her design so that the classroom cupboards are accessible and assembles a crew of students who spend hours assembling the flashy display. I make sure that the judges know how the original plan is unfairly foiled.
Attendance is sparse for both classes on Halloween. I bake 60 cupcakes, prepare a Powerpoint and find some lessons about Halloween and then realize that anyone who actually gives a rat’s ass about Halloween would be unlikely to attend school. It is announced that we do not win the door decorating competition. We all march over to see the winning creation and agree that it’s nowhere near as innovative as our own. As the class is small and it will be depressing to arrive post-Halloween and suffer the presence of our losing creation, I decide that we should take down our decorations. To dispose of the balloons. I give each student a tack. I pop a balloon and shout “I hate traffic.” The students are tentative. “I hate McDonalds,” one ventures. Then, Blanca lets loose. “I hate my mother-in-law!” “I hate my father-in-law.” “I hate my stepdaughter. POP! POP! POP! The class is taken aback. A young Japanese missionary, who is usually reticent about speaking pops a balloon and whispers, “I hate Trump.” The students go wild. They all shout and stomp, “I hate Trump,” and in seconds, Blanca’s balloons are laid to waste.
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