Volunteer Explorer

I left in the middle of class last Thursday. We had started using our new textbook, which includes very little writing in English, and which I didn't purchase in hard-copy, settling for the much cheaper online version. Thursday's class was the first to indicate that a lot of content from the hard-copy book is not included in the online version. I felt immediately at sea when Eihab began our lesson on a new verb and some new vocabulary, even though I had spent several hours working on the homework. It seems our classwork has taken an exponential leap forward. My stomach knotted as I tried to write phrases with the new words, gleaning their spelling from my neighbor's textbook. I tried to remain calm, to focus on absorbing Eihab's vague instructions about definite articles that attach to adjectives and not nouns. My neck got hot. Tears welled unbidden in my eyes. To avoid an embarrassing breakdown in class, I went to the ladies' room. There, m...

When a student came for tutoring last week, she took out a folder as she searched for the essay she wanted to work on. I glanced at the red folder on the table and was struck by what she had written on it in thick black marker: Writing & Survival Skills. Huh. There was talk in some of my MFA workshops of writing as a survival skill, writing as a way of coping with trauma or mental health issues. And many of our workshops turned into therapy sessions for some of us. Indeed, the first summer after my dad died unexpectedly, I channeled my grief into every writing prompt my undergrad professor threw at us. A strong response to music? My dad's funeral. Writing about the body? My dad's enormous body in a coma in a tiny hospital bed. A short narrative about myself? My connection with my dad through our shared love of tattoos. All these essays were more therapy than literature, though I still think some of them are quite good. And I still—six years later—have a str...

A new student appeared in our class this week. She is unlike all the other students in our class, for reasons beyond the bizarre fact that she has joined us halfway through the semester. Her name is Anne, she is in her early sixties, and she is also taking a Chinese class at the university. She never specified her reasons for taking Arabic, specifically, but she alluded to the idea that both these languages come from countries high on the US list of terrorist nations. We only had a couple of minutes to chat before class started, so I really don't know if she is planning to visit any Chinese- or Arabic-speaking countries, or if she wants to better understand what people from these countries are saying in news reports. Perhaps she firmly believes there is a real threat of one of these countries invading the US, making these language skills particularly valuable. I'm trying not to assume she's that kind of crazy. I do know she was very impressed with Eihab's s...

I see a lot of Arab men for tutoring at my job. Whenever I see an Arabic name on my schedule, I am careful to comport myself in a culturally sensitive manner: I consciously avoid any kind of physical contact, even a bumped elbow on the desk, as we work through grammar problems. I don't want any misunderstandings about my availability. Consequently, when a student named Saleh appeared on my schedule for Tuesday, I prepared for that kind of reserve. I am usually something of a toucher. Without even realizing it sometimes, I will reach out and lightly touch my interlocutor's arm during a conversation. It's mostly unconscious, but it might have to do with trying to make certain the other person is engaged in the conversation. Maybe it's a holdover from my singing telegram days, when flirtatiousness was de riguer . I don't know. Whatever the reason, I am aware of my behavior and make every effort to curb this habit with Saudi men. So I was completely surprised w...

It just came out of my mouth without any thought. "Et voila! Tres bien!" I was sitting in Arabic class practicing a little scene with my two conversation partners, and the French phrase just popped out. The three of us had finished greeting each other, asking how each other was doing, telling where we were from and what our occupations were, and introducing each other in turn. We had effectively exhausted all of our Arabic vocabulary. The French phrases then leapt from my mouth, confusing my conversation partners and embarrassing myself. We all laughed, then went back to practicing our boring little scene. These last couple of weeks, my brain has been working overtime to memorize not only the sounds of Arabic words and phrases, but also the alien-looking script for those words and phrases. I have mastered the look and sound of the numbers one through ten, and I can greet my Arabic-speaking students in their native tongue without much stumbling. Bu...

One looks like a bird. Another resembles a wiggly snake with a long tail. Some look like lacy edging, with dots above and below a row of scalloped half-moon shapes. Slowly, these bits of Arabic writing are beginning to look like words to me. Yesterday, I recognized a word on one page in my textbook that I had seen and written three pages before. When I turned back to that page to check, I found that I was correct. I had recognized a word written in Arabic! What had all been completely nonsensical scribbles just three weeks ago were now beginning to take shape as ordered communication. And this has started me really thinking about the arbitrary nature of all writing systems. Why do our Latin alphabet characters look the way they do and not some other way? Why are some of the characters in, say, the Cyrillic alphabet so strange to our American eyes? How is it that we have come to associate certain sounds with certain written characters? And who came up with these systems of ...

"Did he say 'hadre-TIK' or did he say 'hadre-TEK'?" Eihab asked after one of the male students in my class tried to reproduce something a character in a short video had said. "A brief silence hung in the room, and then several of us chorused, "'Hadre-TEK'!" "Oh did he?" Eihab halted in his path through the row of tables, looking around with raised eyebrows. I had chorused back the feminine pronunciation with my classmates, but I honestly couldn't be sure. Discerning the nuances of these most foreign syllables was often a crap shoot. Most of the conversations we had listened to so far were a jumble of nonsense for the first few tries. Only after repeating single words ten or fifteen times, seeing them written in Latin characters, and hearing Eihab articulate them slowly for us could we even begin to recognize the beginnings and ends of words in the vignettes he showed us. "It is called 'Learning Ara...

Assalaamu c alaykum. I've heard this phrase a lot in movies and on TV, but I never knew what it meant until now. Nor did I know how to correctly pronounce it until now. After two days of Arabic 101, I can greet a person in a variety of ways, including a casual "hi" and the aforementioned more formal Islamic greeting; introduce myself by name; tell where I am from; express pleasure in meeting someone; and say thank you. All of this I can articulate in clumsy, deeply accented Arabic. Our professor, Eihab ("EE-haab"), is from Egypt and is very enthusiastic about teaching us his native tongue. From the moment our 90-minute class begins at 9:55 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Eihab moves constantly. He paces back and forth in the space at the bottom of our graduated rows of tables and chairs, flapping his arms and gesticulating with his hands as he repeats pronunciation of phonetics that are quite foreign to our Midwest palates. He often ventures up into the ...

A psychic in Bangor, Maine loses her car keys in a lightening storm. A park ranger wears a fedora at Venice Beach during a cold snap. A couple on vacation in the South Pacific sips from a tea kettle, witnesses a tsunami, and relocates their home from Tallahassee, Florida to Des Moines, Iowa. These are some of the silly stories my ESOL class came up with in our continuing theme of storytelling. I devised a kind of card game to spark their imagination based on a method of prompts one of my college writing professors used to use. I wrote occupations, cities, objects, and weather conditions on individual index cards, then had the students select one of each from face-down piles. Their task was to incorporate all four selections into an oral story. Our task as the audience was to guess what their selections were. The main object of the game is to incorporate the odd items as smoothly as possible, so guessing them would be difficult. I had hoped this would force my students to stretch ...

We’ve been talking about love a lot lately.  Last week, a friend of mine from college, Amy, came to teach my ESOL class as a guest, one of the requirements of the TESOL certificate she is completing along with her MA in Composition. The main thrust of her lesson was having our group read a short story together.  She eased us into the story with a series of statements about love that we could agree or disagree with and give explanations for our responses. “Every person has a pre-selected soul mate,” read one. “Love is enough to make a relationship work,” was another. “It is important for people in a romantic relationship to share the same cultural history,” generated the most conversation. We all pretty much agreed on our answers to the first two statements. Yuwei spoke about his own relationship with his wife, Ying, to explain his opinion. “We were attracted to each other at first, yes,” he began, “but over time, we built trust and respect. The relationsh...

Yuwei frowned at the white board, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded yet.  We were working on some verb tense exercises I had given my ESOL students a week earlier. They had sentences and short narrative paragraphs wherein the verbs had been replaced with spaces to fill. My students had to choose between simple present or simple past, present or past progressive, and present or past perfect, depending on the context. For the most part, these exercises were easy for my students. Yuwei mentioned while we walked in together from the parking deck that these were similar to exercises he had done in his fourth grade English class. That oblique criticism made me question the appropriateness of assigning them, my ability to gauge my class’s needs, and, indeed, my qualifications as the teacher of this class.  I usually feel like an impostor in this class. Sure, English is my mother tongue and I have a master’s degree. But my degree is in creative writing, not pedagogy. Tru...

Simple life forms become more complex over time; a life of complexity yearns for simplicity. Beautiful artwork is food for the soul. Respect can become a habit.  My students expressed these ideas in the paragraphs they wrote about our trip to the Akron Art Museum last week. They all enjoyed themselves and seemed to get something out of the experience, even Van who exceeded her own minimum standard of three sentences. “I guess there are ten,” she said, “but they are short, simple sentences.” “Did you do that so you wouldn’t make any mistakes?” I asked, half joking. She nodded with her usual mischievous grin. Luz Alba’s prose was the most poetic, discussing how artists express their “states of mood” through vivid colors and abstract scenes. Hers was the phrase about art as soul food, a line that brought to my mind Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and music as the food of love. Santos, the newest addition to our class, had a lot to say about the origins of life an...