I have been teaching since 2000. That’s when I left a career of a few decades of teaching high school English. It was a nice round number, easy to remember. I also remember one morning that I taught, the morning of 9/11, which was fairly early in my volunteer teaching career. I’ll always remember that day – drawing that picture of the buildings and the airplane and trying to explain what was happening. I’ve taught at a few different sites, I taught at MLC Northeast and at Pillsbury House, but Sumner’s been my home. For me one of the rewards of teaching is the inspiration I draw from my students. I sometimes feel that I get more out of it than they do; the corrective perspective it offers on my own life. My own small grievances are brought into perspective when I know more about their lives and their resilience.
I’ll share with you what may have been my single most rewarding experience in my relationships with my students. I teach at the advanced level. I’ve done different levels at different time, but am now teaching the advanced level. In our class we had a really beautiful young Somali woman who was quite a bit younger than the other students. She didn’t seem to invest much effort or much of anything in what we were doing, so I wound up taking an interest in her. A suggestion I would offer to other volunteers is that, when opportunities arise for talking with students one on one, take them. She used to sometimes arrive a little bit early to class, and it took me a while before I figured out this was an opportunity. I tried to get my preparation for teaching done so I could build a little bit of a relationship with her. I know a colleague of mine is very good at inventing excuses to have a student stay after class to talk about something. Very often it’s the times when you can talk with students one on one that you can have a transformative effect on your relationship with them. I started off saying something which was true, which was that I thought she was beautiful. Are there any young women – or people – who don’t appreciate hearing that? Something else that may have helped was that a friend of mine and I decided to go to together the Somali mall to get henna on our hands. My students were very interested. They didn’t make a big deal about it, but they noticed. I think that may have been another small step in building my relationship with this young woman.
On another occasion I wore to class a kimono. I have a student who’s Japanese and I love Japanese kimonos. It was no big deal, but she noticed. I think it’s important when we can not just affirm our students through things that we say, but in what we do. They’re here in America feeling that the culture they love and cherish is something that makes them odd ducks. And it’s affirming when something we do lets them know that we really appreciate something that’s part of their culture.
So I started sharing a little more with the young Somali woman and she wound up starting to become a more active participant in class. All of her teachers noticed the change. In one of my conversations with her before class I asked her, “What’s going on in your life?”
One thing that I’ve learned in my 10 years of volunteering is about the students who come to our classes. They’re there because they have a language need, but also because often, in one way or another, they’re stuck. They’re stuck in their lives. Sometimes they’re stuck in a bad marriage. Sometimes they’re stuck in a family that doesn’t know how to help them move forward in this culture. Sometimes they’re stuck with no job. I’ve sure seen a lot of that in the last year. And we help them get unstuck. I’ve learned that as much as I hate to lose students, when we see them move on, that’s our greatest success.
I asked her, “Would you like to be working?” She said yes, that she’d like to be working and she’d like to be a doctor. So then I said “Would you be interested in volunteering at one of the hospitals? Would you like me to look into that for you?” She wasn’t quite sure. So I got the materials, and I showed them to her. Her interest was very tentative, and at first she declined volunteering. Then later on, she said “Let’s do that.” And it never happened because then another opportunity entered her life. She found out through a friend about a program that she could try at MCTC. So we’ve lost her, but for those of us who taught her, she went from a student that we regarded as almost unreachable to one of our most committed and ultimately most successful students.
So my advice: when they present themselves, use opportunities to speak one-to-one with students. And second, go get henna.
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