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It’s been nearly a year since
I have both kids at home. Spuds is
installing art and maintaining a disciplined schedule of writing, having given
two readings and published two reviews in art publications. Number One son visits from Portland. He is a customer rep at one of those fancy
tech companies. The campus is in a
forest, offers a gym, and myriad social events, including kegs of local beer on
Friday evening.
After weeks of planning
and negotiation, a pit bull Boston Terrier mix has arrived, via caravan, from
Texas and is retrieved from Washington by my son and his girlfriend. I receive
many pictures of the miniature terrier, chocolate brown with silky foldy ears, head
cocked and sporting a wardrobe of new sweaters to protect her from the Portland
chill. During the Thanksgiving visit
there is much communication with girlfriend and housesitter, pertinent to the pups
walking schedule, bathroom habits and dietary requirements. Having reared countless animal companions
myself, the young couples’ responsible care of puppy bodes well for their
attentive parenting of my grandchildren.
Between meals, Thanksgiving
vacation is spent with the boys on the couch, binging on the Great British
Baking Show. Himself spends most of the
long weekend grading assignments and lesson planning but loiters around
watching the program during nourishment breaks.
When we discuss the season’s outcome and the chosen champion baker,
Himself, despite being much more committed to the consumption, rather than the
creation, of baked goods, has strong opinions, belying his indifference to the
time sucking frivolity.
After his return to Portland,
the tenor of the text messages change.
Instead of the doggy sporting her new outwear or posing with her head
cocked inquisitively, there is a picture of a separation anxiety thrashed
closet door and a wistful text indicating that the new pet is sucking up way
more time and money than they’d anticipated.
This, I suspect will lead them to give serious consideration to their
readiness to cultivate of my grandchildren. I can wait but if they cave and return the
destructive little beast to the rescue folks, it’s probably not a good sign.
There are three jam packed
weeks between the week-long Thanksgiving recess and the three-week Christmas
vacation. There are five tests to
administer, and a visit from my administer to collect evidence of my
effectiveness in the classroom. The
lesson for observation is planned long in advance although I’m not sure where
my students will be after a weeklong break.
The night before my observation, the counseling department makes a
presentation to my class regarding post ESL pathways. It’s great to encourage them and keep them
focused on an end goal, but as most will require at least two more years of ESL
before qualifying for a transition, the forty-five minute presentation seems a
bit excessive and certainly puts me behind in developing the skills necessary
to fully grasp the lesson I’ve planned for my teaching evaluation.
After attending a workshop
with a textbook author and nationally renowned trainer of ESL teachers, I am more
amenable to relying on the textbook, which aligns with standards and objectives
and offers a good selection of enrichment opportunities. My real quibble with the textbook is that is
charmless and boring. The materials however
are consistent and once the students get a sense of how the lessons are
designed, assignments don’t require a huge amount of explanation to complete.
I do believe though that
students benefit from instructional materials that are authentic and relatable. With this in mind, I write a little story
about Rosa, one of the office assistants.
We’re working on discussing daily schedules in the present tense, so I
interview Rosa about her work and meal schedules and her weekend activities. I
write a little story and illustrate it with her photo.
The format is very similar to
a story in the book. It is followed by
true/false statements and requires the incorrect statements to be rewritten using
the correct information. Throughout the
course of the semester I try to impart some test taking strategy. God knows we have enough tests to strategize for. For every reading I’ve made it a point to
encourage students to read the questions before tackling the passage and to be
aware of details and how they serve to support a main idea.
While my Rosa story is
designed similarly to the reading exercises in the textbook, I try to fit the
entire assignment into a single page.
There are fewer examples, and less space to write correct answers, than
in a similar exercise in the textbook.
This throws some of the students off.
Furthermore, despite having parsed many other readings for details,
sometimes even slightly subtle ones, and fitting them together in support of a
main idea, students militantly refuse to iterate the concept of details and
main ideas while my administrator is there evaluating my effectiveness.
The Rosa story is completed
in pairs, which is encouraged by the Teaching/Learning Framework that is our
guiding light. Cooperative learning in
small groups though is at present the gold standard. I’ve stated before that some of the students
find that the teacher is shirking her duty when she thrusts the students into
groups, expecting them to learn from each other. Actually, the cooperative learning portion of
my lesson for observation is the most successful component, but it is completed
after the administrator has left the room.
The students complete a
survey about which daily activities they perform in the morning, afternoon or
evening. When do you take a shower? When do you study? When do you exercise? They share their answers
with their group and then create little bar graphs illustrating who does what
when. “No one studies in afternoon.” “Three people shower in the morning.” “Two people study in the afternoon.”
Each student is given a
rubric with three faces. The first one
is ecstatic. (Fantastic!) The second face has a blah expression. (OK) and the third looks confused (Need more help). They evaluate their group’s participation and
use of English and their personal ability to make statements about their daily
activities. Most of the rubrics indicate
that students are comfortable but there are a few students asking for
additional help.
Before going home, I force my
students to speak with me a bit. After
having read the story about Rosa, I invite her to guest conduct the “ticket out”
and talk to each of my students before dismissal. "Who is this?" I ask when she enters the room. "It's Rosa Mendoza!" is the enthusiastic response. They are to introduce themselves and tell
Rosa where they’re from. The performance
is mind-blowingly flawless. Every
student is understood clearly. There’s
no hesitancy, shoe gazing or sneaking out the other door. So, while the story about Rosa wasn’t a
completely successful reading lesson, apparently the familiarity with a real
person lowered affective filters enough to generate outstanding and
intelligible verbal communication.
I manage to maintain robust
numbers at my night class but the sleepy morning class at a branch dwindles as
the mornings grow colder and the holidays approach. Blanca, the civil rights lawyer from Cali
Colombia, in my night class has bronchitis and is absent for a week. I believe that she is the only Colombian
student that I’ve ever taught. Two new
students, Martin and Magdalena arrive for the dinky morning class. They are an older couple, not only hailing
from Colombia, but also retired attorneys. They have five children in the U.S.
and are currently in Los Angeles for six months, helping a daughter with a new
grandchild. They’ve travelled all over
the world and own a condo in Florida.
Martin’s English is slightly better, but they are both beginners. The morning ladies, most who have only had a
couple of years in elementary school in their countries of origin, are shy and
embarrassed at first but settle in when it become obvious that Martin and Magdalena
also struggle with beginning level English and warmly engage with the rest of
the class.
On Thursday, Martin and
Magdalena have to stay home to wait for a repairman. It is Isabel’s 83rd birthday. I’d asked her what her plans are, and she’s
reported that her daughter, who works as a housekeeper, comes home late so there
is no celebration planned. I throw together
a batch of cupcakes. Thursday is usually
a light attendance day anyway, and with Martin and Magdalena absent, it is just
Isabel and Eliza, my other most stalwart student.
I do some writing exercises
in preparation of the pending promotional test.
Eliza writes down answers and takes dictations and Isabel painstakingly
copies from her. I light a candle and
sing to Isabel when it’s breaktime. I
make a pot of coffee for Eliza and myself and a cup of tea for Isabel.
Eliza sometimes brings her
three-year-old son Edgar to class. He is
round faced, dimpled and very placid, just like his mom. Eliza shows me a picture of her other son who
lives with his grandmother in a village four hours from the city of Oaxaca. He’s ten years old. He is thin faced with flat features. He has a different father than Edgar. The picture is a first communion. The boy doesn’t smile, perhaps overwhelmed by
the pomp of the church and occasion. I
ask about the others in the picture.
Eliza points to a young woman. “That’s
my mother.” “Your mother? She’s so young.” Eliza’s mother is fourteen when Eliza is
born. Eliza is seventeen when she had
her own first child. Eliza’s first child’s
father disappears. Desperate, Eliza
leaves her son with her mother and heads north.
Her application for a tourist visa is rejected twice so she is forced to
enter without documents. The final leg of her journey to the U.S. consists of a
six day walk through the desert. She
struggles to learn English. She doesn’t
want Edgar to be embarrassed by her when he starts school. It would be very difficult and dangerous to
bring her older child to the U.S., so she tries to video-chat a couple of times
a week. She sends money when she's able. Eliza has no idea when she will see her older son again. She tries, from afar, to improve his life as
best she can. Returning to Mexico with
Edgar in tow, would just doom all of them to poverty.
Isabel has lived in Los
Angeles for thirty years. She
understands more English than she lets on but is excruciatingly self-conscious
about speaking. For the tiny birthday
celebration, we chat in Spanish. Isabel
has eleven children. She lives with a
daughter who is pressuring her to attend an adult daycare program. “They’ll pick me up, feed me and drive me
home every day. My daughter is mad that
I won’t do it, but I want my freedom. I
like coming to my class, even though I don’t learn anything. I like walking around the neighborhood. I like watching my novelas.” Isabel, now widowed, was married for forty
years to an alcoholic. She shows me her knuckles, deformed by years of scrubbing
clothes on a washboard.
The night class is so big
that I only get students’ back stories in smatterings. Wilmer loves Guns ‘N Roses. Gabriel’s favorite food is a tuna melt,
either on rye or sour dough bread. Isaac
works at the marina, maintaining yachts. Shy Carmen avoids me for days. I want to take her picture for an award she’s
due for having attended class for 100 hours.
She is out for several days, recovering from a severe oil burn at the
restaurant she works at. Finally, I pin
her in a corner. I have to take a dozen
pictures until finally she doesn’t cover her face with her hands. “Look how pretty!” I show her the printed
picture. She smiles faintly. “Carmen, it’s
really pretty. Isn’t it pretty? Say, ‘it’s pretty.” “Yes,” she whispers. “It’s pretty.” She smiles.
Harold, like me, is a huge
true crime fan. We have to be careful
when Blanca is around because, as a human rights attorney from Cali, she finds
our interest in Pablo Escobar repugnant.
Harold takes advantage of Blanca’s bronchitis related absence and tells
me about a new docu-drama about Escobar that he highly recommends. “Harold, did you know that there’s a new
Forensic Files series? It’s
called Forensic Files II and it’s coming in February.” “Discovery or Netflix?” He grins when I confirm that it’s Discovery
and not paid the subscription service.
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