by Azadeh Amirsadri
I was an English as a Second Language teacher in a suburban high school in VA from 1997 to 2002. I taught levels 1 and 2, beginners and intermediate levels, and had a total of five classes each year. My students were from all over the world, and my five years with them were some of the best teaching experiences I have had. Every day of the week, we would gather as a family, joined by our otherness, and go through school and life together.
On the first day of school, I would go over their schedule and show them where their classes were, since they were usually grouped together in physical education or electives, and take them to their lockers so they could practice opening and locking them, an activity that would sometimes take the whole period. I would also take them to the cafeteria to show them about getting lunch, avoiding pork products for the Moslem kids, if they chose to, and get an alternative lunch. The county had little pink cards with the picture of a pig on them that were put next to the pork products, so that helped them. They had to memorize their student ID to pay for the food at the end of the line, and I‘d remind them that they didn’t have a lot of time for eating and cleaning up afterwards, 30 minutes from start to finish, and some lines were longer than others, so maybe bringing lunch from home could help them not rush as much. However, the sight of school pizza, fries, and chocolate milk was too much of a competition with lunch from home.
Students would sometimes arrive at any time in the middle of the school year after getting tested at a central registration center in the county, and slide right into any level they tested in. Everyone in class, except two kids, had someone who spoke their language in the school, and when they landed in my class, they had someone who could show them the ropes of an American high school.
There was a girl from Cameroon who didn’t have anyone else in class who spoke French, so I would speak to her when she needed help, and the others would tease her that she was my favorite. She was a bit older than the others, but not very mature, and would get into arguments with them. I was fascinated by how the students argued with their very limited English in level 1, using the profanities they had learned and knowing it wasn’t a nice thing to say, but not having any other words to convey their anger and their dislike of each other during fights.
There was one student only from Sri Lanka, I’ll call him Sanji, who showed up one day, insisting he was American now because his mother had married an American man. He had lived with his grandmother in Sri Lanka after his father was killed, and his mother decided to come to the United States to start a new life here and eventually send for him. It took the mom more than eight years to be able to arrange for Sanji to come to her, and by then, he just wanted to stay home with his grandmother, not go to school if he didn’t want to, and play with the monkeys in the public park near his house. His mom had married an American, had had a new baby, and had to reintegrate her son into her new life. She was a beautiful woman who wore fancy outfits with high heels at back-to-school night and told me that she was worried about her son because he could be destructive at home when he was angry or when he got into trouble. For example, he had taken a nail and had dug little holes in the wall to show his frustration with her. Her husband was a very gentle and kind man who worked as a custodian in the county and looked tired. He was trying hard to establish a relationship with his new stepson, but because of their language barrier, he had to have his wife translate everything. Sanji respected his stepfather and resented his mother. A week before back-to-school night, I had all my students in the computer lab writing a short autobiography and saying how they felt about being in high school in America. Sanji wrote that he didn’t like living with his mother and wanted to go back home. When I told the class that these short essays would be shared with their parents, he deleted the whole thing and wrote how happy he was here and how much he loved his new life, all the while laughing and telling me, “Miss, it’s not true, but my mom will be angry with the other one.”
One day, in the middle of class, right after lunch, Sanji packed up his book bag and announced that he was going home because he was tired. “Miss, I go home now,” and made the sign of going to sleep by putting both hands under his head. By then, the other students enjoyed getting involved in his antics and told him, “No, Sanji, you can’t! You have to wait for the bell at 2:45!”, so he decided to lie down on the floor, under his desk, and take a nap. I let him be, to avoid a struggle, knowing very well that he was going to join the class in a little bit.
Another student in that class was Hsiao, a 14-year-old from Taiwan who lived with his mother and sister, while his dad was back home working and sending them money. His sister was a year older than him, and very shy, quietly whispering when she had to talk and almost at the point of crying when anyone asked her to speak louder. She was in a different Level 1 class than Hsiao, which was a good thing because she would have been mortified by his behavior.
Hsiao was very smart and one of the few students who encouraged everyone else to speak English when students spoke in their native language to each other. I was constantly telling him to let others be and to mind his own business. One day, he declared himself my helper and told everyone I had picked him because he was my favorite. He would jump to erase and clean the board (still blackboards and chalk) and volunteer to go outside to shake the erasers. His exuberant energy was both entertaining to the students and, at times, annoying. He would draw pictures of himself on the board with me standing next to him, and all the others were small X’s. He was also obsessed with Roger Maris, the baseball player, and would not stop sharing about him and his statistics. I knew more about Maris back then than I cared to know, as he was relentless. Maris was woven into his essays and oral presentations, along with an infinite number of drawings of Maris in different baseball poses.
One year, when the school was overcrowded, a lot of classes were moved to trailers and quads, so I shared a trailer with three other teachers, each of us with our own classrooms. Being away from the main building gave me some freedom to have my students move around and go for short nature walks, but mostly allowed me to get Hsiao, with his high energy and constant motion, moving by running errands to the main office to check my mailbox. He loved volunteering for these runs, and the students were relieved for the short break from both being around him and Roger Maris information. At times, especially towards the end of the school day, some of the girls would announce loudly that “Miss, Hsiao needs to run”, meaning let him out of the class. So I would tell him to go run around the quad a few times, keeping an eye out for him from the window and telling him when it was time to return. The girls just loved participating in this decision and having some say over when he was too hyper to stay seated and work. They giggled at his behavior or, at times, were annoyed with him. The boys just looked at him, shook their heads, and would say “Hsiao is crazy again,” leaving it at that.
Hsiao and Sanji did not like each other. They were different in so many ways: culture, educational background, family, and socio-economic status.
Hsiao got a lot of attention by being funny and a good student, whereas Sanji’s attention-seeking ways did not always work for him in the classroom. He would say things like “I want to go play with monkeys” and make monkey sounds that would make the students laugh, and then he would get angry with his peers for laughing at him. An argument would erupt, they would say mean and hurtful things to each other, with the F word flying all around. I had a feisty Peruvian girl who would yell in Spanish at them, and I learned quite a few curse words from her. I had to stop the fights, give a consequence of after-school detention to either Hsiao or Sanji, since it usually started with them, console the Indian girl who cried when people’s voices were loud, and refocus the class on the lesson.
The school year ended with an assessment to see who would be promoted to the next level and who would have to repeat. Hsiao did very well and went on to level 3, but he would stop by my class sometimes, and one time decided it would be a lot of fun to scare me by jumping out of the bushes and yelling surprise as I was walking to the quad. Eventually, he got busy with his new classes and new friends and graduated on time.
Sanji had to repeat level 2, and because of the lack of formal education and first language literacy, he had a lot of catching up to do. He ended up in an alternative high school, and I am not sure whether he graduated or not. However, his kind stepfather facilitated his getting hired as a custodian in the school system.
I think about the students quite often, and once in a while, much more rarely now, I run into one of them at a store or some other random place. I look at their adult face and the grown person they have become. And I still love the little new kid in my class from a long time ago.