Teacher At Large

I think Karma has a vision problem.

That sounds like an incredibly deep statement, until you realize that Karma is the name I am using for one of the adult students in the Basic Life Skills ESOL class I volunteer in.

He is tall and thin and shy, usually seated next to his wife, who is much more adept at speaking and understanding English, and who always feeds him the answers to questions in class. I include him in my small group work when I can—sometimes he won’t join us or goes to the bathroom for half an hour instead. I once had him copy all the letters of the alphabet on his own; it took him forty-five minutes to get through letter G.

Yesterday, we worked on the days of the week. Susan had distributed a hand-out with calendar grids that had different days of the week marked with an X, topped by the question “what day is it?”; the students were to identify which day of the week was marked, then write the sentence, “it is Monday (etc.)” after it.

I circulated among the forty- to sixty-year-old Bhutanese students, reminding Preba to capitalize the first letter of days of the week, praising Mahasweda for spelling Wednesday correctly. I gave each person as much encouragement and praise as possible.

When I got to Karma, he was manipulating the page as if he were trying to see by dim candlelight, though the overhead fluorescents glared down at us in stark blueishness. He held the page in both hands and peered closely at it with one eye then the other, studying the marks intensely. The days were abbreviated as Mon., Tues., etc. He couldn't seem to make heads or tails of them.

I turned his sheet over, and on the blank back I wrote out the seven days of the week in a column, using the simplest and clearest printing I could. Next to each day I drew a straight, empty line.

“Write these here, Karma,” I instructed, indicating the blank lines. Then we said the days out loud together, me first, Karma echoing. When he hesitated to write anything, I broke it down a little more.

“What letter is this?” I was pointing to the capital M at the beginning of Monday.

After a minute or so of deep study, Karma said, “M.”

“Yes! M, O, N…”

We spelled the word out loud together, then I pointed at the blank line again. “Write it here,” I said.

Susan continued her lesson with the rest of the class, but Karma and I worked on our own lesson at the back table, quietly ignoring everyone else. Karma always seems to respond better when he is my sole focus. He gets lost or intimidated or confused by the larger group. And his obvious struggle to see the marks on this paper make me think his vision is more at fault than his mind.

By the end of class, about 45 minutes after he and I started, Karma had written out all seven days of the week. We spelled each one out loud together, pronouncing them fully as well. I made sure to touch his arm and tell him how well he was doing several times. When Susan dismissed the class with her usual “we are finished for today,” Karma’s wife came over to us.

“Karma did really good work today, Mahasweda,” I gushed. “Make sure he practices these at home!” She nodded at me solemnly, taking Karma’s worksheet and folding it into her bag.

“Thank you,” she said. “Namaste.”

As the class filed out of our basement room, I felt immense relief.

I have been helping with this group for a little over a year now. I know all of their names and some of their families. I have given some of them rides to their homes on wintry days, met some of their children and grandchildren. I know which ones have chronic back problems, headaches, difficult spouses; I can tell who practices English at home and who doesn't.

Increasingly, I feel relief when class is over. I become more and more frustrated with repeating the same exercises and sentences every day, every week. I find myself bored in the middle of a small group session.

I am ready to do something else.

Yesterday afternoon, I met with Marjorie at Project Learn about a new class I will be teaching next month. It is a conversation class for students who have tested out of Project Learn’s highest level, who are technically too fluent for any more classes. They are considered fluent by testing standards, but they are not as confident with their abilities as they would like to be. Marjorie tells me most of these students have jobs, some of them in management or high scientific positions, but feel they need more practice to converse easily. Marjorie has already outlined a syllabus and ordered textbooks for the once-weekly evening class.

“But you can alter or amend the syllabus however you like,” she said. “And feel free to include activities that get them out of the classroom. The art museum is right across the street and is free on Thursdays. Or you could send them on a scavenger hunt in the library, so they’ll have to talk to people to find items on their list.”

I will teach this class solo, not as an assistant, but as the actual teacher. And because this class is beyond the scope of Project Learn’s curriculum, I will not have to adhere to any kind of testing or evaluation for completion. It is only for the benefit of the students, to build their confidence.

That’s why I won’t be getting paid for it. There is no funding in PL’s budget for this type of class, so a volunteer teacher is the only way it can happen.

“I've been looking for a way to get you some compensation, though,” Marjorie said after I accepted the position whole-heartedly. “Would you like to be a Tester-At-Large?”

What the heck is that?

A Tester At Large is trained to evaluate ESOL students for fluency level and goes to satellite classrooms as needed to conduct such evaluations. Marjorie explained how the method I will use is largely subjective, based on how well I can understand a particular student in terms of accent, vocabulary, and syntax. It’s the kind of evaluation my French professor used during the causaries we did in my undergrad French classes.

I enthusiastically accepted this on-call, monetarily compensated position.

So this time around, I am reinventing myself as a conversation teacher and ESOL Tester-At-Large. 

As I read over the syllabus Marjorie had made, I got really excited about this new class. My classroom will be equipped with a projector and computer hook-up, so I can show videos or YouTube clips. I can give homework assignments of short essays, bring in artifacts or newspaper articles to discuss, use the copy machine for handouts, anything I want.

This new opportunity is exciting for a couple of reasons.  First, I’ll be the teacher. No longer just an assistant. Nice.

Second, I will finally be able to move on from “My name is… What is your name?” to actual conversation. I will have the chance to teach grammar points, too, one of my favorite things to do. (I know; I am a bona fide grammar geek. Marjorie and I bonded over this shared obsession.) Prepositions, articles, and verb agreement are always at the top of the priority list for new English learners.

My class won’t begin until July—the 3^rd, so we will begin by discussing Independence Day and a little American history. Perhaps we will expand that to include some history of the countries the students came from, as well.

In the meantime, I will begin assisting a vocational ESOL class at ASIA, Inc., on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The teacher there is Rebecca Jenkins, formerly of the International Institute, who organized last year’s Oath of Allegiance Ceremony. I am looking forward to reconnecting with her and seeing some of the folks I interviewed at ASIA, Inc. while writing my thesis.

Now, my summer looks a little less bleak, a little more promising. Dare I say I am excited? I can hardly wait to meet the newest me, Tester-At-Large and Teacher In Her Own Right.