Volunteer Explorer

Susan has me doing small group work with some of the students in the second half of our class time during this fall session. She picks out four or five students who have the most difficulty producing words and sentences on their own, students who consistently depend on a neighbor to prompt them with the words in English or Nepali before they speak. My job is to go extra slow with these students, to have them repeat simple questions and answers over and over, so they can build some confidence in their own speaking capabilities rather than just repeat the sounds others make. I am also correcting small mistakes in syntax and pronunciation to help them form better foundational habits in their rudimentary English and avoid long-term linguistic problems. Here's what that looks like: Burka is Saraswati's husband. Saraswati is really sharp, and rather proficient in her English skills. When we worked with counting coins, she was the quickest in the class, both with the nam...

New Class, Same as the Old Class The summer ESOL class ended in August, and we took two weeks off. In that interim, I resumed classes and my assistantship at the university, observed Labor Day, and had the first of many nervous break-downs about my thesis project. On September 9th, my eighteenth wedding anniversary, we began the fall session of Basic Life Skills. The traffic outside the International Institute was a little more hectic than it had been over the summer; yellow school zone lights flashed in front of Findley Elementary school, slowing my progress up the hill of Tallmadge Avenue. It was a mild summer, but now humid air lies thick and heavy over Akron, swelling wooden door frames, frizzing hair, and shortening people's fuzes. My walk down the basement stairs of the Institute today is a welcome descent into chilled, curry-scented respite. We have twenty students today from our summer class, and I remember all but one of their names--Ratna did not come ev...