The Fiercest Students

I used to blog quite proudly about my students.

Mahvash (top) and Khodadad
Two graduates in LA's downtown garment district

Lately, though, I've been resenting the fact that they can't or won't learn English. My Advanced ESL students have been here 5, 10, 15 years and still can't write a sentence—or two, and definitely not a paragraph—about their lives. 

Perhaps the problem isn't their want of trying, but the geography of Los Angeles. When I worked for Cultural Affairs we spoke of this as "bridging the diversity gap" between communities. But with freeways isolating neighborhoods and lack of public transportation, the bridges were never built and the gaps never filled. Diversity remained in its own quarters. Korean students never need to step outside Koreatown's borders in the mid-Wilshire district. My Persian students can get all their needs met by speaking Farsi in the area called Tehrangles (aka: Little Persia), along Westwood and Pico. What then is the motivation for learning English?

Visiting the Taper Auditorium

Central Public Library

Let me put myself in my students' shoes. They are tired, they are weary, they don't trust the natives: we speak too fast, are rude, don't give them the time of day. Immigrants are what they'll remain forever in our eyes, or until they get their citizenship papers, but even then, nothing changes.

And yes, they're partly to blame—yet who can blame them?—tied as they are to their communities through family, commerce and familiarity. But still... many of them never leave their neighborhoods. They've never visited LACMA, two blocks from school, or Griffith Park, a mile away. The older ones have grown accustomed to their lives, settling for a four-block square. But the younger ones want more. After graduating they go on to LACC, or Cal State LA, or any number of vocational schools. They are motivated to learn English...but perhaps, even more, to learn a little Spanish for their work.

Ah, sigh. My students may drive me crazy with their messed-up English, but I salute them for at least trying. 

And Sunny, who just graduated, I will miss you more than most. Despite your size, you were a handful, one of my fiercest students ever.

Sunny

at LACMA, on a recent field trip

Road Trip!

Road Trip!

My daughter left this morning for Oklahoma to visit her grandma and her grandma's new rat terrier, with her friend Dylan, the guy in the red shirt. Here they're saying good-bye to Henry, with backpack, and to me the mom taking the picture, who just lent them her car and gave them enough gas money to make it to their first stop, the Wigwam Motel in Holbrook, AZ. 

Wigwam on Route 66
(photo credit: LA Times)

I didn't want to embarrass Maya and her friends (and believe me, they would be too!) with exploits of my road trip with my old friend Sally Wilder in the seventies, when we drove from Louisville, KY to Redwood City, CA, but the road was long, the wind fierce and the icy creeks in Utah where we bathed utterly bracing (not to mention we ate all our food before crossing the bridge into Indiana). Despite traveling with a cat and ending up in dorm rooms with strange men, it was a rite of passage that every young person was taking at the time. So Maya, I'll miss you, I'll worry about you, but you're fulfilling your duty as a free spirit and pursuing what's been laid out before you by generations of nineteen and twenty-year-olds, and that, I'm all for.

~~~

 

Mina M., a Persian Jew from Tehran, has been my student for the past eight months; she's always cheerful, always first to class, so it came as a complete surprise when I asked her the other evening what she was going to do after graduation and she burst into tears. We all sat there totally bewildered: what had gotten into Mina, the cheerful one?

Mina's struggled more than other Farsi-speaking students to learn English (married at 17, first baby a year later), but you can't say she hasn't tried, and lately her comprehension has taken off in leaps and bounds. Now when I ask her how she's doing, she's actually able to say, just fine.  But she recently found out that if she wants to continue, she'll have to pay a lot of money, which brought on the stream of tears.

What must it be like to make progress in another language— to suddenly comprehend what's going on around you—and then be told to stay home? She complains that no one in her family—three children, two grandchildren and an older husband—will speak to her in English. Los Angeles' Farsi speaking community is the second largest Iranian community outside of Iran (estimated at 500,000 to 600,000 residing mainly in the Pico, Westwood area, dubbed "Tehrangeles"). Mina lives in the middle of it and has no other contacts outside its borders; she doesn't need to speak English to survive, yet these classes have given her a form of independence she hasn't had before— being able to navigate this city on her own.

Last night Mina came to class her old cheerful self. She told me that she's going to ignore the directive from the office, and continue class under the radar. She didn't exactly put it that way, but she did say her English has never been "more better," and so she's not going to stop. She must, she will go on.