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Pat Donvito

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I was a little uneasy about teaching English to immigrants. It seemed quite different from the teaching I had done in the past. Mostly I had taught economics courses at the graduate level. Then the biggest problem was that graduate students like to ask tricky questions and try to humiliate the professor. I could not imagine that to be a problem with the immigrants. They would not be capable of asking trick questions, even if they wanted to.

As scheduled I went to meet my class which was held in a creaky old building in an inner city neighborhood that was rather rough. It was the Adult Education building of the Sacred Heart parish. The Catholic sisters who ran the program did manage to keep the old place scrubbed clean and neat.

There were five levels of English being taught. I was assigned to the second level. Level one students knew no English at all, and so on up the scale.

My preparation for the class mainly consisted of looking over an assigned textbook. I probably gave more thought than was necessary over what I should wear, and decided on a suit, dress shirt and tie. I thought I would let the students know that I was serious about their learning English. This was not going to be a casual effort, and to give the right signal, I would not be dressed in casual clothes.

When I arrived in class, I found about twenty students waiting, seated in rows of wooden chairs. They were mostly young adults, but some were older. Every shade of skin complexion, was represented, with about half appearing to be Hispanic. The others were from various countries. As I later learned, there were students from Haiti, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia. Also a couple were from Arabic countries.

I stood up to begin, and as I did the whole class leaned forward and stared intently at me. I already began to feel that I was on unfamiliar ground. Normally, graduate level students don’t even bother to look up when you go before the class. As I came to realize, the immigrant students were staring to catch whatever I would be saying. They may have been straining hard to comprehend, but what I saw were twenty pairs of dark penetrating eyes fixed squarely on me.

Mainly to break the spell, I called out, “Good morning.” A few in the class answered with their good mornings. There were a few stragglers who followed the cue. But most sat in silence still staring.

“I am the teacher,” I announced, and then went to the blackboard and wrote my name.

After that short respite, I walked up to a woman in the first row who was smiling agreeably. She seemed approachable. “I am Mr. DonVito. Who are you?”, I asked loudly enough for all to hear.

She just sat there and continued smiling sweetly. And I waited. Then the young man beside her leaned over and whispered in Spanish, “su nombre (your name).”

“Mafalda Morales,” she answered softly.

“Say: my name is Mafalda Morales, or I am Mafalda Morales. Complete sentence. Completo.” Mafalda lowered her eyes, kept smiling but said nothing more. I decided to move on and try again elsewhere. To an Asian woman farther down the first row, I said, “I am Mr. DonVito. Who are you?”

She quickly looked down at her open textbook and pretended to be completely absorbed in it.

It was becoming plain that these people really knew no English. A few may know a word here and there, but that was about it. So how does one begin when there is no communication at all? I anxiously went to the textbook looking for some help. The first chapter started with “See how Freddy plays with his little yellow dog.” They would not understand such a difficult and complex sentence. And I would not know how to explain it. Just how does one explain English when there is no common language for reference?

I was in trouble. But I told myself that I must not appear to be in trouble. I must not get flustered or upset. If I got upset they would get upset. Smile, I instructed myself. So I smiled broadly at the whole class. They all smiled back. I said, “Hmmm” and stroked my chin, as though I was pondering something profound. I wished I could sit down for a half hour or so and think this situation through. I was certainly not prepared for this. I hate not being prepared. But how was I to know that the students knew so little or no English, or that the textbook was useless.

There were only two bits of advice I could remember from the one teachers’ orientation meeting that Sister Vivian presided over. First and foremost she said we must be patient with the students. Okay, I would be patient with them. But would they be patient with me? They seemed prepared to learn, but I was not prepared to teach. The other instruction I recalled was that only English would be used in class. I knew some Spanish and French. At least enough to handle Freddy and his yellow dog. It would be easier to call in some Spanish and French. But Sister was right. It would not be fair. There were also Arabs and Asians in the class. What about them?

Not knowing what else to do, I started as before. “Good morning,” I said in a loud voice. The students answered with their good mornings again. Only this time more joined in. “Repeat. Good morning,” I said again, motioning for all to join in. They said it again, even more forcefully this time, and with fewer stragglers.

“Repeat,” I called out, and they did. Okay, I thought, now they know what the word repeat means. Now we are getting somewhere. I can have them say anything I want now by having them repeat after me. My education was beginning. As I also learned, I may not be able to use any of my Spanish or French, but I could put my hands to good use. When I was talking about myself, I pointed to myself. When talking about a student, I pointed to the student. When I talked about the whole class, I waved over the whole class. When I talked about the table, I pointed to the table. Hands turn out to be very useful.

I also found the blackboard to be useful. Teachers don’t use blackboards much any more, I hear. Considered old fashioned. But with the blackboard I could concentrate on individual words and their variations, as in verb conjugations. Also, students could see sentence structure more clearly. And they could sound out letters to improve their pronunciation. Furthermore, I could have them copy from the board into their notebooks for further study. You can do a lot with a blackboard, which I don’t think would be possible with all those visual aids now so widely used in schools.

That was how I got a toehold on how to teach a varied class of new immigrants English as their second language.

Actually, I had underestimated the students’ knowledge at first. They seemed to know numbers, up to a point. They knew the words for family members: mother, father, brother, sister and so on. They knew days of the week and months. And they seemed to know job related words, and words needed for getting around town and for buying at the store. This should have been obvious, of course. These were the subjects most familiar to them. As to the textbook, immigrants could relate very little to Freddy playing with his yellow dog, and that was not the worst example. There was one passage in the textbook about a husband and wife going out to dinner and then to a play. Immigrants don’t go to plays or go out to dinner. When they are in a restaurant they are usually laboring in back. I worked a bit on that lesson before realizing that the students were lost. Digressing, I asked what a play was. “Does anyone know what a play is?” I tried to find out. Then a young man stood up saying, “Play. Play.” Then he held an imaginary soccer ball and gave it an imaginary kick. Well, I said to myself-- So much for theatre going. I found that instruction had to be wound around their daily lives: the job, the family, buying in the stores, and getting around town. But doing that meant adapting the teaching material. This should have been obvious, of course. These were the subjects most familiar to them.

I would come home exhausted. As I told Mary Lou, “Those sessions can really take the smoke out of you. It’s like being overseas and trying to hold up your end of a conversation. Spending as little as an hour conversing in French--listening hard, trying to call up a needed word, mentally conjugating to find the right verb, intently watching facial expressions for clues as to what was being said--just one hour of that would leave me drained. That’s the way it is in class.”

It actually came as a surprise to me as the weeks went by, to realize that the students were actually learning English. It is like most forms of growth. You can’t see it happening, until it has happened.

I was concentrating on conversation drill, instead of the way I had learned foreign languages, which was basically by analyzing the language. I was teaching them as though they were children: by imitation, repetition, and being corrected. Only when it was unavoidable did I resort to explaining grammar. Otherwise, it was drill, drill, drill. Rapid fire drill. Question and answer. Keep them on their toes and moving. They seemed to enjoy it because they were actually speaking English, which was why they came to school in the first place. Hearing themselves speaking the new language gave them a feeling of accomplishment.

One problem was that you could never be sure that the students understood what they were saying or reading. It seemed that in many of their countries, reading is taught phonetically, which enabled them to sound out letters. I have at times seen students breeze right through a lesson only to discover that they did not comprehend what they had read. That became especially obvious one day when a Sister substituted for me. I was late for class, and a Sister went in my place. Arriving twenty minutes before the break I took a seat and watched the Sister in action until I took over after the break. I really felt deficient watching her because she was covering a level of material that I had not been able to reach. She seemed to be doing a much better job that I was. The students sat quietly and attentively, appearing to be absorbing the lesson. Sister seemed to be getting better results.

After the hour break and I got before the class again, I proceeded at the same level I had seen Sister teaching. But after a few questions, it became plain that they did not have any idea what Sister had been talking about. I guessed that immigrants had to become good at faking comprehension. But if you are constantly bombarding them with questions, you quickly can see how much they understand.

The students that were not Hispanic seemed to progress at a faster rate. This puzzled me until I found an explanation. The Hispanics, at least in Washington, have reached community size. They can get along without knowing English. As well as speaking Spanish in the home, they often speak Spanish at work. In many restaurants, Spanish has become the language of the kitchen. For the cleaning crews in the downtown office buildings, Spanish is often sufficient. This is also true for many construction crews, such as excavation, concrete masons, and painting contractors. Entire crews are Hispanic, and only one needs to be able to communicate with the outside.

The English language is not needed for household provisioning. There are many neighborhood Hispanic shops. Also, it is not necessary to be able to speak any language to shop in the self service supermarkets. Baskets filled from the shelves are carted to checkout, tallied automatically, prices are displayed electronically, as well as the total. You can spend a lot of money without uttering a word. The supermarkets prefer it that way.

Because I learned to fashion conversation drill around their personal lives, the immigrants revealed a great deal about their jobs, where they lived, the transportation they use, and their families. Most lived in apartments, and with numerous relatives. They would say that fathers and mothers, uncles, aunts and nieces, were all living together in a downtown apartment. Vacations may mean trips to Europe or touring New England to many, but to immigrants, a vacation meant time off from the job to stay home. For a few, there might be a trip to New York City to visit relatives.

In recitations I avoided certain personal matters. I never posed questions about their lives in their native countries, even though I was curious about that. I would ask what country they were from but nothing more. Nor would I inquire about why they emigrated to the United States. Those questions could be painful, especially for Central Americans fleeing war and terrorism.

My oldest student was Marta. I really had to admire her effort. She was a grandmother well into her sixties and never missed a class. She was always there and always attentive. But she seemed to make little progress learning English. Even though she was interested, she had little need for English. Marta lived with her son, his wife and their three children. Spanish was spoken in the family. Their only newspaper was the Spanish language newspaper. Marta cared for the children during the day when the mother was at work. It was while the children were at school and daycare that Marta came to school.

When the mother returns from work, Marta goes to her job as a cleaning woman in a downtown office building and is there well into the night. Then it is back to the apartment on the late bus.

At home and at work, Marta speaks Spanish. She does not have enough involvement with English speaking situations to learn the language, or even to feel the need to do so. But there she was every day there was class, in her dark print dress and creased cheeks, clutching her textbook. I would see Marta looking hard at her opened book, her lips moving. Then I would ask her what she had read, but she didn’t know. But that wasn’t what bothered me. It was when after each class, Marta came up to me and clasped my hand tightly and thanked me. I accepted her thanks gladly, but I had not done anything for her.

Marta was not the only one who thanked me. It was a new experience for me that many of the students came up after class to thank the teacher. And others would call out thanks as they file out the door after class. I cannot recall any graduate student ever thanking me. And to tell the truth, nor can I recall ever thanking a professor when I was a student.

I learned that teaching needs some humor, too. It is difficult to concentrate for two hours on the gibberish of a foreign language, which is what English was to them. The teacher should try to keep it light, and provide some comic relief occasionally. The students fall in too. One day a comely young woman came into the class. After she took a seat I wanted to add her name to the student roster. “May I have your name, please?” I asked. “And telephone number, too,” called out a young man from the other side of the room.

Most of what I was learning came from the students. But I did seek and get advice from others. I was counseled by my son Paul, for example.

Being the youngest, Paul was our most recent student. Paul holds that fear has a place in education. He says that some level of fear must be instilled in students in order to make them move along briskly. Fear, Paul pointed out knowingly, is an effective motivator.

“Now, you don’t want to terrorize them”, Paul cautioned. “But the best results are obtained with a palpable degree of apprehension. And the best way for that is by calling on the students to recite. Call on them by name. That really makes it personal. Let them know that at anytime they could be nailed. Call on them randomly, not alphabetically. Or those at the beginning of the alphabet will rest while you are calling on those down the alphabet.

To cram more conversation into class time, I would start exchanges between student. Then I would initiate multiple exchanges among the students and go from one group to another listening in, guiding, correcting, and encouraging, which was important. Being lavish with praise is very useful. But it must be genuine. If a student responded poorly, I reacted with a frown, and I would admonish them to practice more. But if they responded well, I gave them a verbal pat on the back.

At first I was a little concerned about keeping discipline. It should not be a problem. After all, the students were adults. Still I knew that if there were any disciplinary problems they would have to be handled wisely and adroitly. Just how does one do that with students that have little capability to comprehend? I had not had much experience with disciplinary problems. I had never had any trouble before with students. But this was a new situation, and uncertainty always accompanies the unknown.

As it turned out, the only problem that sometimes occurred was students talking to one another during class. To some degree for some, class time was seen as an opportunity to socialize. That problem was not serious, and I devised an easy remedy. Whenever a student started chatting, I would fire a question at them. Students do not like being called on, especially when they are not being attentive and don’t know what is going on. That would stop the chatting.

There is a contradiction with the students that would puzzle me. When they are in class they are intent on learning. But they often did not come to class. Absenteeism was high. Classes were crowded at the beginning of the terms, then steadily diminished. Attrition was also high among the volunteer teachers, resulting in the combining of classes.

Possibly the low fee was responsible for the high drop out rate. Maybe the students just didn’t have enough money invested in the course to worry about. As I was told by Sister Vivian when I was introduced to the program, “When students ask about the cost, it is $10.00 per term,” then she added, “but if they don’t have the $10.00, we can talk about it.”

There were about fifty class sessions in the term, making the cost about twenty cents per class. That is not very much even to a minimum wage worker. It’s less than the cost of a candy bar. However, the time required to go to class was obviously a burden. Most worked long hours. One young man who worked in a restaurant said that he left for work at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and did not arrive back home until 2 o’clock the next morning. To work such long hours and then attend school is not easy. In the beginning, going to school to learn English may sound like a fine idea, but as the term wears on, the added burden becomes heavy, especially when you don’t really need to know the language anyhow.

Although I would have liked to have known, I never asked any of the students how much schooling they had had. So little I would have judged that they may have been embarrassed to be asked. After getting to know some of them, you could imagine that things would have been different for some of them if they had had educational opportunities. Some of the students really liked school. They liked being in a classroom and being taught by a teacher. Some seemed to be attracted to the abstract world of words and ideas. Ramondo was like that.

I was wary of Ramondo at first, mainly because of the way he looked. He had a heavy unsmiling Mayan face. Slant eyes and wispy moustache. He wore rough work clothes, often smeared with plaster here and there. As I learned during recitations, Ramondo was a plasterer’s helper. He soon showed himself to be one of the better students. From the beginning when other students got up and left for their ten minute break, Ramondo stayed in his seat rapt in his textbook. When class ended he never seemed anxious to leave. Sometimes, after we were well into the term, he would ask me questions after class. And not always simple questions. He had been slow in approaching me. I came to believe that he was wary too. No telling what he had been through back in Guatemala.

Once after class Ramondo wanted to know what a light year was. He was confused, which is understandable. Year indicates time, but light year as I explained, was not a time measurement but a measure of distance. My lack of knowledge of physics and Ramondo’s lack of English made this whole exchange tortuous. I had to explain that light actually travels, which I still find difficult to accept. It travels very fast, at 186,000 miles per second, I explained. So you find out how many seconds there are in a year and multiply that number by l86,000, which turns out to be a very big number. Ramondo understood it all, and asked intelligent questions as we went along. I was glad we did not get into it too deeply or I would have been over my head. Ramondo may have had a better facility for physics than I had.

In the United States, the surest path toward personal advancement is education. So if you like learning, you are already on your way. Ramondo liked learning. If he had had the advantage of a freely available education when he was younger, he would probably now be a doctor, scientist or educator. But not much can be done about it now. Ramondo is not young enough to start again, and he must earn a living in a country that is foreign to him.

There were others like Ramondo; others whose futures have been compromised because they happened not to have been born in the right country. I thought Claude was another, who was Haitian and also a construction worker.

Being tall and muscular, Claude had difficulty fitting himself into a seat with writing arm. He would sort of fold himself in. Because he had a problem getting in and out of his seat you might think he would just stay put, but Claude would get out of his seat during class and go to the blackboard to make a point. I came to believe that he just liked it up there in front of the class.

Claude did well with his lessons. It was apparent that he was pleased to be in school. He was especially taken with abstract concepts. He liked numbers. Whenever numbers came up in an exercise, Claude was sure to unfold himself and go to the blackboard. He would take up the chalk and put figures on the board. Claude was very poised at the board, chalk in hand. There were times I thought he was going to take over the teaching. I would get the gist, but it was hard to get his point. The rest of the class just stared vacantly at Claude. So when he came to a pause, I would say, “Thank you, that was very good. Now let us all turn to page 23 in our books.”

Claude still smiling would bow slightly to show his appreciation for the opportunity to lead the class, and go back to the maneuver he used to get back into his chair. With his love of numbers, I could imagine that if Claude’s circumstances had be different, he could have been a teacher of mathematics. I could imagine his smiling blue-black face explaining differential equations to a class. But for now, Claude, I would say to myself, just go back to your seat and listen.

I thought differently about Victoria, a nineteen year old from Mexico who always turned in a perfect exam paper. I called her aside and told her to do whatever was necessary to go to college. I also told the administrator of the school that Victoria’s progress should be watched and further education should be encouraged.

I could have a missionary zeal for spreading the English language. The world needs a common language for universal communication, and it is logical and practical that that language be English. Most of what is known in science, medicine, engineering and commerce is recorded in English. Knowing English means being able to have access to it all.

I was determined to get used to the wearing of hats in class.. As time went by, however, I saw fewer and fewer hats. Maybe the other teachers told them to remove their hats. Maybe it was the nuns. Nuns would do it. Nuns have been teaching for thousands of years, and they know how to handle situations. They would not have to go through analyzing the custom and its propriety. A nun might just say, “You there. Take off that hat.” If the man should ask why, she would say, “Because I told you to. That is why.” The man would remove his hat and the case would be closed.

I did have one disciplinary incident, at least I considered it one at the time. Afterwards, my sons assured me that it hardly qualified, considering present day disciplinary problems. It happened when I was a substitute teacher for one of the evening classes. The students were alert and lively. There were several men in the class of the type I had seen before. In my imagination I saw them as ex-jungle fighters of Central America. They looked hard and lean and seldom smiled. They had Indian features with deeply sunburned complexions, leathery and dried out from the hot sun. They had squint eyes as though from staring far ahead before coming within range of rifle fire. They were from the lower classes, from those classes that society everywhere expects to do most of the fighting for them.

The jungle fighters usually showed up in groups of two or three and sat together, toward the rear. That night there were three together. One wore a light colored cap with small brim pulled down close over his eyes. As before, I was wary of them. If they wanted to make trouble they could. Early on I had decided how to treat them, which was exactly equal. I would call on them just like the others. No more, no less. If they recited well, I would compliment them. But if they did not, I would give them my frown. Although it was tempting, I would not be deferential toward them. If they conversed, as sometimes happened, I would call on them. However, I did not joke with them as I sometimes did with the others. I wasn’t pushing my luck. Either my approach worked, or the possibility of trouble existed only in my mind.

That night, as usual, I was somewhat annoyed by the jungle fighter’s hat. I ignored it successfully as I moved from student to student drilling them. When I turned to the hatted jungle fighter with a question, I saw that he had thrown his leg over the chair’s writing arm. It was later that I was informed by my children that a leg over the writing arm is not a serious breach of etiquette by contemporary standards. But when I saw it, my eyes locked on that heavily shod boot dangling nonchalantly in the air. But I said nothing. I just stood there fixated, not meaning to. I don’t even think I had my frown on.

The class became still as I kept staring, and after a while, during which it became apparent what the problem was, he slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, eased his leg back down. I then went on with the recitation.

The hatted one was a fairly good student, as I would tell him at times. After his recitation, I said to him, “Pablo, you have a good pronunciation. If you work at it, you will speak English well. It was true. But I also know as a parent that an admonition should be followed with some praise. That was my only disciplinary incident, and it did not really amount to much.

The immigrant students would be curious about the teacher too. To feed this curiosity the students would sometimes slip personal questions in during recitation. After acknowledging one young man’s raised hand, he asked, “Are you a real teacher?”

Supposing he wanted to know if teaching was my profession, I answered, “No, I am not, I am an economist,” and then went on with the class. Sometime later, another hand was raised for a question. “What is an economist?” I answered that an economist does office work. Many nodded with understanding. To them it was not a vague answer. Immigrants with entry level jobs understand few occupations. They know of restaurant and hotel work, construction work, shop work and office work. In their minds, all white collar occupations are lumped together. And so for them I gave a satisfactory answer, and for me a convenient one since I can have trouble explaining what an economist does even to native born Americans. Also, sometimes I wonder myself.

During one of the class breaks, I noticed two middle aged women huddled together talking and glancing over at me. When the class resumed, one of them raised her hand for a question, and as she put her question, “What name is DonVito?” I explained that the name was Italian. The two looked at one another and nodded.

I found digressions useful in teaching. After that question, I called the students’ attention to a wall map of the world, pointing to Italy. Then I named the other countries of Europe. I formulated questions as I went along for recitation.

It was better when you could draw students into a subject. My major complaint with the textbook was that the content related very little to the student. It is true that English can be learned by forming drills around, “Tracy is wearing a blue polka dot dress.” But the students don’t really care about Tracy, whoever she was, or the dress she is wearing. But when history, geography or politics serve as the subject, the students will hang on to every word.

Ever the practical economist, it is possible to get more for the same effort. You can at the same time teach English as well as other subjects.

Personal questions did not always lead to useful digression. One young woman asked the question, giggling all the time, “Teacher, how old are you?”

“I am old enough to be your father. Now let’s get back to the present participle.”

You could not help but think of their prior lives. As far as I would go was to ask what country they were from. When they answered, I would usually say what a beautiful country it was. That would please them. But you could not count on it. There was an upper middle aged woman who said she was from Guatemala. I said what a beautiful country it was. When I did, her face hardened into a stone mask. You had to wonder what happened back there. I imagine that there are many horror stories among the immigrants.

Another student that I wondered about was a young woman from Nicaragua. She was a pretty girl with fine features and lustrous hair pulled back in the Spanish fashion. She always took a seat in the far rear, away from the door. She never smiled and her eyes were always casting anxious glances back and forth, and toward the door.

I wondered why she acted that way. Something must have happened, which I would never know. Anything could have happened in Nicaragua. Your imagination could run wild as to what. I wondered if she had brothers because she was always alone. Brothers often accompanied their sisters to the school and would be waiting for them at the door. If she had brothers, what happened to them? Were they killed? Might have been. You could only imagine it. Perhaps it happened one evening in their village. I pictured it was while the family was in for the evening meal. They heard the trucks on the road coming into the village. The trucks geared down to a noisy halt and the soldiers jumped out of the back, landing hard on the dirt with heavy boots. They shouted and hit at the doors until they broke open. The family was frozen with fear as the soldiers crashed in.

Or maybe it wasn’t soldiers. It may have been guerrillas. Or possibly Sandinistas, or maybe Somoza troopers, or the Contras. Who knows?

So the sister is here in another country now and she has brought her fears with her, probably to stay. But I should not take up class time wondering what happened. She is one of many students. My job is to keep to the lessons. I have come to that sentence in the book that the students should be able to handle now, “See how Freddy plays with his little yellow dog.”