English Lessons

by Jolene Singh

Mezimene's sonorous singing rang clearly above the voices of her classmates. A, B, C, D . . . L-M-N-O-P . . . W, X, Y, and Z. Wednesday night language classes all started the same way; we introduced ourselves and a neighbor: I am Mezimene. He is Francisco. All eighteen students came for the same reasons. Learning American English would allow them to pass the U.S. citizenship exam and interview, to advance at work, or to find better employment.

Listening, speaking, and writing were our tasks. The women did very well; they learned to collaborate and worked together filling the gaps in their understanding of the reading or writing assignments. Most of the men struggled to stay awake as we worked into the late evening hours, lagging behind in their lessons-but Francisco managed to excel and always stayed on track. Tired, weary-the students trickled in before 6:10 pm, coming from work or taking care of children. They paid forty dollars for six months of classes, money invested toward achieving their goals and dreams in America.

I had never taught adults before, but embarked on the endeavor full of idealistic hope and fervor. My students came to America from Ethiopia, Somalia, Haiti, and Cape Verde. None were younger than forty and some were already in their sixties, but that, for me, was the charm of teaching the class: nurturing the desire to find new opportunities through citizenship or assimilation into the American way of life.

I saw the class as an avenue of passage, a beacon, a training ground, where the students could complete the difficult passage from being seen as outsiders to becoming full-fledged Americans, even of a hyphenated variety: Ethiopian-American, Somali-American, Haitian-American, and Cape Verde-American. Finding out the goals and aspirations of my students was as important as marking down progress notes about their reading and writing skills. I was not there to teach language in isolation, or phonics alone; I felt called to teach my class about American English in the real world, in their world.

Yet there were those who disagreed with me: the alphabet and kinesthetics practitioners, who touted the importance of writing the alphabet over and over again at each class session and engaged in physical activities that would reinforce classroom learning. The program director was one of these devotees, and I watched as she began instruction one week.

The program director was a tall, bony woman with wild, frizzy hair and a smile that seemed more snide than kind. I do not doubt that she had the best intentions, but watching her interactions with the class made me feel that her approach was, at best, condescending, paternalistic. She began the lesson with singing and recitation of the alphabet. Then she used flashcards of lower-case and upper-case letters to test visual recognition and comprehension. She asked the students to rise from their seats and explained the competition: a player would be asked to sit down for any wrong answer delivered, and the last man or woman left standing would be the winner.

Though the game seemed rather childish, it was an interesting attempt at inspiring a healthy sense of competition and fun, not an altogether bad idea. But I watched as the director demanded that the students decipher letters scrawled on small yellow cards by a quick, sloppy hand-small x, small j-refusing to understand the ambiguity of the writing-forcing the students to feel defeated when the cards were indistinct and unclear in a game that was supposed to promote the spirit of fun and competition. I seethed with anger and could not stop myself from objecting when she claimed that a card with 'q' was an upper-case rather than lower-case letter. Now, Ms. Program Director, we must be consistent. The students all know that "q" is lower-case and "Q" is upper-case. Moïse, you can stand up and stay in the game.

Perhaps most upsetting was the "beach-ball activity" that followed the alphabet game, which no one won: all were eventually forced to sit down. We pushed the desks away and stood in a big circle. The program director spun a large plastic ball around in her hands and introduced the rules as follows: We would throw the ball around the circle to a different person each time. The receiver of the ball would say his name and say something about the person who threw the ball to him. The program director modeled the activity with a student and the game commenced. Some students were so weary that they began to fall asleep on their feet and quickly lost interest in the game. One pulled up a chair to sit down and was promptly scolded. The ball was flung all over the classroom, the students were often too distracted to catch it, and they begged and pleaded to do something else. But the program director seemed highly amused and the game continued until 7:30 pm, when the students were allowed a ten-minute break to pray as Islam dictates, to call home to their spouses and children, or to take a long-awaited rest.

The humiliation of the students continued once class resumed. In the second half of the lesson we discussed a selection from a book of personal stories. The week before, we had started to talk about Grace McDonald and her husband, Fred. Grace and Fred had two children: one boy and one girl. The students were excited to talk about their sons and daughters who lived near and far, in houses back home or in the ubiquitous apartments of Roxbury and Dorchester counties. I encouraged the students to make drawings, quick sketches, really, of their family members. We could later come back and identify the people in our families: mom, dad, son, daughter, grandchildren, sister, brother, and so forth. All the stories we read became linked to themes, like family or work, that guided our discussion.

According to the personal stories booklet, Fred was retired. When the program director asked the class the meaning of "retired," I beamed proudly as Anna, a retiree herself, responded, "He has no job. He does not work anymore. He can work in the house." Then the program director continued, "Anybody pay him?" Anna responded dejectedly, "No. Nobody pays him."

I was deeply dissatisfied with the picture of Americans that arose as I observed the class' lesson under the program director. Instead of opportunity, only incongruencies and inequalities emerged. Most upsetting was the suggestion that the students were caught in a liminal state between being foreigners and becoming assimilated into an American culture that had set rules and expectations evident only to those already within the "belonging" community. There was no effort to see the students as Americans; they were immigrants, people finding their way in only after adapting to a new language, new customs, new rules, new rites of passage. My students were treated like kindergarteners, rather than as adults with big, yet reachable, goals and dreams.

Perhaps not all of the students would "make it" in America, in the sense that they could retire with a pension plan or Social Security benefits; others might not even become citizens. Still, to limit myself or my students, even in thought, would be a great offense, not merely a disservice, but an assault on the hardy hope that breaks down formidable boundaries and obstacles. I would not conform to a system where mastering the alphabet superseded instruction of a different kind: of compassion, hope, and understanding.

In a country where high school children are enrolled in test-preparation courses that teach to the test rather than teaching traditional mathematics or verbal skills, I yearned to do the same for my students: teach to the citizenship exam and interview and train the students to fill out job applications. I photocopied worksheets from library books where the students practiced filling out their biographical information. We talked about our families, our backgrounds, our jobs. We came to know one another as a community of people looking to achieve "success" in our own unique ways, and we prodded each other on.

I stayed with the students for the term and was deeply sad when we were made to part, but I knew that we had been successful. The bond we shared was akin to triumph; we were able to supersede the expectations that even our supporters and advocates had discounted. Our collective naïveté allowed us to overcome the inevitable limits imposed by traditional American English teaching standards. Language and grammar in its most elegant forms-the alphabet, clauses, declaratives, interrogatives, subjunctives, pluperfects-aspired to a rigidity and exclusivity owned by native-born Americans, the young masses who were guaranteed access to education and literacy. My students hoped for a different kind of competence: a blue-collar sensibility that would allow them the freedom to work and travel freely, without translators and intermediates.

Our American English lessons were fashioned from a pluralistic understanding of the American promise, the belief in an all-inclusive land of opportunity. We embraced an instructive style bereft of the standard rubrics, instead immersing ourselves in the cultural idioms necessary to navigate everyday life. More than the rudiments of language, my students needed to receive empathic instruction: not falsely proffered compliments to boost their confidence, but coaching from someone competent in their specific strengths and deficiencies. Informed by my students and inspired by them, I learned to better serve them; I only hope that they were enriched by the process as much as I.