What Teaching ESL Has Taught Me

In a weird juxtaposition of events yesterday, as I was feeling so devastated by this news, I met my new ESL student. I have taught ESL as a volunteer, first through organizations, then on my own. It always seems that somehow, people are put in my path who very much want to learn to read and write English. Maybe they might see it as I am put in THEIR path. But I don't think so, as I always learn MUCH more than I could ever, even for a moment, hope to teach them. I even learned a very important lesson about writing through teaching ESL.

But first what my students have taught me. . . . My first family, the Tran family (and I cannot do proper accents in Blogger, so . . . ) came here as refugees. There were easily 20 of them, including a grandmother who looked ancient but ruled that family like a warrior. I started with them when I was 18, and I remember looking at their faces and seeing fear and a weariness that I had never seen on people's faces before. Vietnamese "Boat People" experienced murder and rape on the high seas by "pirates." Family members drowned. Babies were born dead. People left with nothing, literally, but the clothes on their backs. From the Trans, I learned that people will risk all--even their lives--for freedom. I learned that refugees are often the most cast-off and desperate people in the world. And too often forgotten as the next crisis looms.

My next family was also Vietnamese, though the stepfather was from China. I worked through a formal relief services agency, though I was not the religion of that agency. They just needed teachers willing to go to the family's house twice a week. When I first started with Huong and his family, there were many volunteers. That dwindled to . . . well . . . me . . . within two months, as the excitement and energy, I guess, of helping wore off and the real intense and difficult work was just beginning. For example, one of the daughter's worked in a factory. One day I arrived, and she was in bed, and the family brought me to her . . . and showed me her leg. She was injured on a piece of machinery, and the cut went to her BONE. Literally. I had never seen anything like it and the family wanted me to "fix it." They had no medical insurance, but I was positive she could lose her leg unless we got her to a doctor. I dressed it as best I could, and tried to get someone to see her. She would lose her job if she missed one day, and her supervisor on the machinery had seen the accident . . . and did nothing. Just get back to work. Yes, in America. There were other problems. Tuberculosis and a black market of TB drugs in Washington, D.C. I learned that as long as there are refugees, there are people who will take advantage of them for a buck or for their usefulness as cheap labor (and this family all had green cards). I learned that Mama, who should have been taking her TB drugs, was buying them on the black market to mail back to Vietnam to an uncle who had it a lot worse. The family, as a whole, was depressed, isolated. They would sometimes just sit and cry. I used to go and spend whole days there, and we would watch videos of Vietnamese soap operas. I always knew the "bad lady" was the one in the red dress with the long, long red-varnished fingernails, but the family always felt they had to interpret for me. "Oh, she very, very bad, Teacher. She want the nice lady's husband." In the time I spent with them, I probably have a thousand stories . . . I loved them most of all, I think.

My next student was Brazilian. She had never had formal schooling beyond 5th grade or 6th grade. One day we were talking about the earth, and I realized she thought it was flat. I dragged out my astronomy books and showed her how it was round. We spent an hour looking at amazing photos of stars and planets. From my beloved friend, I learned the power of knowledge. I also learned that we should look with wonder on the things we often most take for granted, like the sun and the moon.

I am very excited for what I will learn with my new student.

As for the lesson about writing? My first ESL class I was given a set of workbooks. I quickly discovered they were crap. And I devised my OWN program. People do not, as refugees, need to learn to say, "Please, put the book on the table" and other scripts. They need to learn to communicate and function FAST in our world, because the sad fact is, in my opinion, Americans are NOT terribly patient as a society with foreigners. Most of my friends were treated pretty rudely, in fact, every single day, because their English was bad. Or worse, they were treated as if they were DUMB. So my program was that lesson 1 was 911 calls, doctors, fire department, police, and explaining what hurts when you are sick or your baby is sick. Lesson 2 is the grocery store and the food you need. Lesson 3 is the hardest of all . . . the bank. Try explaining to someone who has never had a checking account or more than a few dollars (my second family had never used money at all very much but had bartered) what a paycheck REALLY is--it's LIKE money, but you can't SPEND it until you either CASH it or put it in YOUR checking account where it STAYS in that bank building and you write CHECKS that then comes out of your account. Usually, I have to say, it's a multi-lesson thing. Anyway, from there we go on to job interview skills and so on. But the formal program? Useless. How does this apply to writing? We often say, here on the blog, that so much of learning is just doing it, working at it, honing your craft for years and years. You have to do the real learning yourself, no matter what someone teaches you. You toss out what doesn't work for you. So many people use GMC (Goal, Motivation, and Conflict). I can't. I improvise. I do my own thing as it works in my real world.

So that's what I'm thinking about this Saturday morning in my corner of the world. If you are a praying person, please pray for the people of Tibet. And tell me . . . have you ever taught someone something . . . and realized you learned much more than you could ever imagine? Have you ever mentored a writer or critiqued someone and realized YOU learned something instead?

Peace,
E

Tough But Fair

In remembering the late Joel Siegel, film critic for ABC, Steven Spielberg said that Siegel was tough but fair. I think for a film critic or a book reviewer, there is probably not higher praise.

Thinking back on the teachers who had the most influence on my life--they were all tough but fair. I had two teachers, though, who were incredibly tough on me--but not necessarily fair. When I asked one, a writing teacher, why, he said it was because I was a much better writer than my classmates and thus he could demand more of me. I was writing "A" work--for them. But I could do better. That gnawed at me. Was it FAIR? I don't think so, though I suppose in some existential way, some higher level of philosophy in grading, it was. He certainly made me a better writer. I recall him fondly.

The other teacher, immortalized as evil forever in High School Bites, was tough--and utterly unfair. She was nasty and mean. I suppose, in some sense, since she was uniformly rude, that all students were on her level, hideous playing field. So maybe she WAS fair. But I do NOT recall her fondly.

Now that I write books for a living, I can recall two reviewers who were not "fair." Though I think that sounds like a playground term. One was a developmental editor for a nonfiction book I wrote. She objected to my sense of humor in the way I write and said I clearly wrote by the seat of my pants. Nothing could have been further from the truth. My co-author was and is completely anal-retentive, and thus we had spreadsheets and flowcharts and thousands of pages of research. We could just write "funny." What I object most was her INFERENCE that people who are funny don't take their writing seriously. She cast aspersions on my work ethic. That was unfair. And basically I was, from that point on, the classic "difficult" author because I felt she was impossible to work with. That she was unfair.

Another book reviewer had sort of the same inference. It is not fair, to me, for reviewers to somehow infer whether a writer skated, or was lazy in a book, or any other such personal attribute. The work stands. Review the work.

But fair reviewers? Even if they don't like what you write, they can give you cogent reasons. It is why I TREASURE my writers' group. I don't get lauded each time. They hold my feet to the fire. But they are fair. Last week, BOTH of my critique partners questioned something having to do with a cop and his behavior. They are right. It will be changed in rewrites this week. They said good things, too--and I value that even more because I earned it from two tough critics.

Thoughts?

Teachers That Matter

One of my children has a teacher who doesn't seem to like students or teaching. Burn-out case or simply someone who doesn't have the empathy gene (or a poor match for my child--though I've heard from other students and parents so I don't think that's it in entirety), it doesn't much matter, because the end result is a kid turned off from what could be a truly exciting subject. Been there myself. I've blogged here before about a math teacher, immortalized forever in my book, High School Bites, who terrified her class. Who seemed to delight in humiliation.

But that got me thinking about teachers who did matter to me--not in the nightmares they gave, but in a good way. I actually had more of that experience in college . . . professors who were PART of the university community, who really cared and got involved. But I do remember one high school English teacher. And the book that did it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I came home and told my mother about all the symbolism and foreshadowing (new concepts to me) in the book (to which she said I was likely full of shit because people over-read into books). But I was hooked. While classmates grumbled about how boring it was, I saw the magic in every word, on every page. This was a reason to come to school. Hell, it was a reason for living! It wasn't that I hadn't loved other books--I was a big fan of Dickens. But something about the way the book unfolded made me hold my breath. Who was this Boo Radley?

My teacher made it all come alive for me. And it was my first. A book that changed everything. There was reading before Harper Lee, and reading after it. And English class before my 9th grade teacher and English class after it.

Anyone else? Teachers (and books for that matter) that changed the world?