Lost in Translation

I used to teach ESL at a large university in a nearby city. It was a lot of fun, but it did not get the bills paid. Here's another pre-baby teaching story.

One semester, I taught Reading 1. Reading 1 is the “fresh off the boat” class for students who can barely put full sentences together. I don't know how they ever expected to survive the next semester or even the next year in actual college classes, but I always did my best to help them muddle through paragraphs and strengthen their practical skills for surviving their new lives in this foreign, English-speaking country.

Restaurants and food was always a great unit to cover. One thing I have learned as a teacher of international students is that everyone loves to talk about food; it doesn't matter where you're from. So one day, I started class off with a question. I always like to compare their home cultures to American culture, so I ask away and we discuss what you can and can't do here. I began by asking the class, “Do you ever go to a restaurant by yourself?”

They were totally silent, and visibly uncomfortable. Maybe they didn't quite catch what I said. I restated the question: “Have you ever gone to a restaurant alone?”

AWAK: As we all know

I used to teach, in my pre-baby life. It was funny as heck, and my students and I laughed on a daily basis. Here's an essay I wrote after a particularly funny day.

For anyone who has ever had students from China, you know that any good essay, project, presentation, or -heck- paragraph, begins with that beloved, ingrained phrase, “as we all know.” The best part is that most of the time, we don't all know it. I've gotten such beauties as, “As we all know, Chairman Mao founded America during the Qing Dynasty,” and, “As we all know, flossing makes your teeth loose and fall out.” So for me anyway, this little phrase is usually a red flag to announce that something wrong this way comes.

My first year teaching, I co-taught a listening and speaking class with a 40-year veteran teacher. He was in his late sixties, and was a veritable walking textbook of lesson plans. He'd truly seen and done it all. We made a great team, and the students loved our overly-enthusiastic-20-something-VS-the-crotchety-grandpa shtick. I have never had so much fun teaching a class since.

Early on in the year, we assigned a presentation project for which the students had to research something about American culture or history and teach what they learned to the class. The subject was pretty open and simple, but students liked it because it allowed them to pursue whatever genuinely interested them and had drawn them to this country in the first place. We had a presentation on how American high schools work, how Americans go shopping, and another on basketball. It was going really well, and my co-teacher and I sat across from each other with the class in the middle as we watched and assessed.

Then, Barney stood up. “Barney” was his chosen American name, and despite cautions of forever being identified as a large and loving purple dinosaur, he insisted on “Barney.” I've had weirder names over the years, including: Mavis, Mildred, Cherry, Machine, Felix, Rainbow, Berry, Azure, Daisy, Paolo, Hazmat, Deshandra, and variations of classics brought on by misspellings, such as “Cholé” for Chloe and “Bard” for Brad (who unfortunately didn't care for poetry or for being asked if he did). And there were always a dozen Jacks. Big name over there, apparently. Did I mention that all of these students were from China? I thought Chinese Paolo took the cake until a coworker of mine who had taught in China once had a student who went by “President Ronald Reagan.” No no – not just “Ronald,” or even a familiar “Reagan,” but the fully titled “President Ronald Reagan.”