Volunteer Explorer

"Ying and me went to Akron art museum last Thursday, where our English teacher Sharon suggested us to go." This sentence, from a short essay written by one of my advanced conversation students, dominated most of our class last evening. I was delighted that some of the students had gone to the museum, despite the fact that I had to miss class last week. I was even more delighted that two of them wrote about their experience there and shared what they had written with us. This opening sentence of Yuwei's essay seemed the perfect example to begin correcting grammatical mistakes. Changing me to I in the subject was easy and evident for the students, as was inserting a definite article in front of Akron art museum . Van even picked up on putting commas around the appositive, Sharon . No one seemed to want to do anything with the final clause that begins with the verb suggest . "So, what you're really saying here," I began, "is that Sha...

The last hour of Susan's Monday/Wednesday class is kind of chaotic now. Mark and I each form a small group where we can give several students more focused attention on writing or pronunciation. And when I say 'writing,' I mean writing the letters of the alphabet. And when I say 'pronunciation,' I mean correcting to include in Akron, or on April 12 th , or to the United States. Meanwhile, Susan continues with the remaining students. So we have three groups of people conversing in Nepali while we try to teach them fine points of speaking English. Inevitably, someone gets a little lost. This week, in my group, it was Jordan, one of our oldest students, probably in his seventies. Jordan invariably dresses in traditional Nepali tunics and loose pants, a combo called Daura-Suruwal, with a dark suit coat overtop and a topi on his shaved head. I saw a photo of him without his Nepali hat once, on his state ID card. He looked small and old and scared, almost chil...

I really didn’t need to know anything about Sancha’s vagina. In fact, I could live the rest of my life quite happily without having much information about the vaginas of most of the women I know. But sometimes we learn things we never really wanted to—and then we cannot UN-learn them. I go to Susan’s class only on Wednesdays now, and that works out well for both of us. Another volunteer, Mark, has started coming to her class, as well. Mark used to work in Immigration Services at the Institute, but now that they have hired more lawyers for those services, he “can get back into the classroom,” as he put it. Mark is tall and thin with a square head and black-framed glasses. He seems comfortable explaining sentence structure, but not so much learning all the Nepali names. More new students appear in Susan’s class every week. In addition to the woman from Thailand who started a few weeks ago, and the two sisters-in-law from Bhutan, we have the gentleman from Iraq, another Bhutanese...

We had a few new students in our class at the International Institute this week. It’s the beginning of another six-week session, and it’s summer, so we expect new people to show up and regular students to bring their children. Yadu is back, grinning and grunting next to his grandmother, constantly waving me over to hold his hand, and Indira’s fat son is back, eating his way through the first half of class and playing noisily in the hallway for the second half. Two women in their early forties (if I had to guess) that I didn’t recognize were sitting in the front row Wednesday. I introduced myself and asked their names. Tika and Pabithra first said they were sisters, then modified this to say that the men they were married to were brothers. Tika wears tiny, wire-rimmed glasses and has a network of pale scars in figure eights around her eye sockets. Pabithra is plump and round-faced and speaks English much better than Tika, with full sentences and effusive facial expressions. In ...