The Bias Machine

One thing I never really think about in the ESOL classes where I volunteer is politics. Of course, last year when I learned that Project Learn changed all of its classes to a schedule of six weeks on--two weeks off, due to budget constraints, I knew it was a political decision. But generally, the refugees I work with do not have the vocabulary to discuss politics, and that is more than fine by me. The time in these classrooms is an oasis for me, a tightly-focused escape from all the irritating realities of everyday life, a bubble of time and space dedicated only to vocabulary and syntax.

Last Tuesday, that bubble was burst by the City of Akron.

Have you heard about the sales tax increase the city wants to put on this November’s ballot?  

Have you heard about the new sports arena The University of Akron and the city want to build downtown?

Have you heard about how the tax increase is linked to paying for both the new arena and safety services, like police and firemen?

Have you heard about the surveys the city is conducting at community meetings around town to “raise awareness” of the city’s need for increased safety services, as well as money to pay for them?

Well, the “survey” came to ASIA, Inc. on Tuesday. The official pitch is that the city wants to gather information about “the city’s values” and how to best serve those “values.” It’s hardly a secret that the real goal of this “survey” is to build public support for the tax increase and the arena by making the citizenry feel they are not safe enough, that we need more police and EMS workers and firemen on the city payroll. Oh, and that somehow the new arena is linked to those services, and somehow its construction downtown will make us all safer.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it to you.

The refugees in my Tuesday/Thursday ESOL class have all been in the US for less than a year, many for only a couple of months. The majority of them have extremely limited English skills and can barely put together full sentences. A few have jobs in factories but still have difficulty fully understanding safety signage and basic instructional verbiage.

On top of that, these refugees have all spent more than a decade in refugee camps in Thailand or Nepal, where food rations and clean water are limited, sanitation may be entirely missing, and education is basic and sparse. Before the camp, almost all of these people were farmers. And they lived in a fairly lawless state, where soldiers and politicians routinely lie and cheat and steal, where laws are ephemeral and malleable for the elite, where human rights and civil rights are not even close to universal.

These are the people the city wants to hear from. Now, I agree that refugees should have a voice, that they need representation and assistance and full rights under the law.

But how are they supposed to compare the amount of taxes US citizens pay to how much those in the other top 30 developed countries pay? And how can they compare the amount of state and federal funding the city gets now compared to what it received in 1981? And how can they rate whether crime has increased or decreased in Akron in the past 30 years?

Even with an interpreter, which ASIA provided, I’m sure they had a difficult time understanding how to answer these questions or what these questions had to do with them.

Or even how to answer them! We were all given little remote control devices, about the size of a small cell phone, in plastic cases attached to bright orange lanyards. The questions were displayed on two separate PowerPoint screens, one in English, one in Nepali. All the questions were multiple choice. The remote devices were confusing, even to me! Each little button had letters and numbers on it, and there were three or four buttons that seemed to do nothing at all. Many of our students don’t have cell phones of their own and aren’t accustomed to using remote-control devices for TVs or other appliances. Many in the lower-level group have never used a computer.

Of course the City of Akron wants these new arrivals answering these question, though, because their answers will inevitably skew the overall results in the city’s favor.

Are you satisfied with the level of service you receive from the city? Do you think we need more policemen? More firemen? More EMS workers? Do you think it is easier or harder to find a job now than it was in the last 2 years? Was the revitalization of downtown worthwhile?

I’m pretty sure none of our students have ever even been downtown. But what are they going to say? Are they going to criticize the government of the country that took them in and gave them refuge? After a lifetime of experience with a government that stole their land, persecuted them, and kicked them out?

I was pretty upset when I learned that the city was linking the money for safety services to money for building a sports arena in downtown. But I am flat-out outraged at how the city is going about building its case for the ballot issue. Linking safety services to a sports and entertainment facility is tantamount to blackmail, and that’s pretty low. But it’s not really anything new in American politics.

Exploiting new arrival refugees to skew an already biased political survey and advance an agenda that will profit only a few and cost all citizens much, well, that’s pretty crappy. Even in American politics.

The Sound of Success

The man whose office is off the conference room where we have ESOL class is very, very patient and tolerant. We are not generally a quiet group.

This week, I kept my half of our class working on the alphabet. I brought in a set of “tactile” letters from Project Learn, cards of single capital letters that are made of various materials, like fuzzy pipe cleaners or velvet or thick foam. I also brought in a canister of small plastic letter tiles, so the students could search for letters and match what I wrote on the board, then return the letters to the pile and start again. These were fun and got everybody out of their seats for a while. The side discussions in Nepali were overwhelming at times.

Three new volunteers came to class this week: Joyce, a white woman just a little older than myself; Carmesha, a tall, twenty-something black woman with lots of eye make-up; and Rayshawna, a sixteen-year-old who goes to a year-round high school and volunteers for class credit. They have all been much less reticent, and therefore much more successful, than John was a few weeks ago. I overheard Joyce use the words conjugate and pronoun, which was promising, but I also heard Carmesha employ Ebonics while explaining present tense conjugation (“That’s right; he be lifting, so it’s ‘he lifts.’”). I’ll call it a wash.

These newcomers make it possible for our two groups to continue after Rebecca leaves at 11:00 to teach a class at the university. I don’t think I could handle both groups on my own for an hour. While Joyce and Carmesha worked on verbs with the more advanced group, Rayshawna and I worked on a little phonics with the other half.

I wrote the entire alphabet on the white board again, and we all recited it together. (The students still don’t acknowledge the word alphabet, but I’m letting that slide.)

“So, these are all the letters,” I said, circling the whole group with a finger. “But some letters are different from others.”

I erased all the vowels, leaving the blank spots where they had been, and wrote a-e-i-o-u in a line underneath the other letters. I then drew a square around them and wrote vowels under them.

“These are called vowels, and they are different,” I said. “So let’s work on these, the consonants.”

I drew another square, around the consonants, and simply plowed forth, despite the confused looks on some faces.

“B,” here I underlined B and wrote it big on the blank half of the board, “makes that buh, buhsound. What words begin with b?”

Brows furrowed and lips moved silently; great mental effort was going on. Finally, Rayshawna silently held up a book.

“Book,” Mali said quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself.

“Yes! Book!” I exclaimed, startling everyone a bit. I wrote it on the board. “B-o-o-k. Book. What other words begin with buh-buh b?”

We did this with each consonant through g, then took our break. I knew I’d have some difficulty coming up with concrete vocabulary for J and K, so I wrote some notes during the break. Job and jar were good, as all of these students either had a job or were seeking one, and there was a jar of pens on the table. What else? I came up with joke. I knew it would be a stretch, but I decided to give it a try.

 “What starts with this juh-juh J sound?”

They had become comfortable offering vocab they knew, like cap, dog, and good, but the letter j was kind of new. Job and jar were easy, as anticipated.

“J-o-k-e. Joke. What is joke?” I asked, palms and shoulders raised. The Bhutanese love to laugh; there was always a lot of laughter in both classes I volunteered in—kind, inclusive laughter that helped me feel like part of the group. Whenever I acted out a new word or had trouble remembering someone’s name, we laughed together. And I often wrote the day of the week or the date incorrectly on the board, so they could find and fix the error, and then we all laughed at my mistake together. So I knew they could get this concept, if only I could communicate it to them.

“What is a joke?” I asked again. Earlier, when demonstrating the sounds of b and hard c, I had taken a piece of paper with the word cabinet printed on it off the cabinet and taped it to my chest so I could show them the word while pronouncing it and underlining the letters. Now, I took that piece of paper and taped it to my chest again.

“I am a cabinet,” I said, and just let my arms fall to my sides with a blank expression on my face. Two beats. “Am I a cabinet?”

Bhim and Saraswati looked at each other, grinning a little but uncertain. Le had his hand over his mouth again; Bhuda’s face was blank, but he was leaning forward and studying me intensely.

“I’m a cabinet,” I repeated, pointing to my chest. “Am I a cabinet?” I raised my palms and shoulders. “Nooo, it’s a joke!”

I tossed both hands forward, palms down, in the motion of get-outta-here, shook my head and made an exaggerated laugh.

“It’s a joke! I’m not a cabinet! It’s a joke; see?”

They all laughed and commiserated in Nepali for several minutes, with much head-nodding and the unmistakable sounds of humoring my corny humor. I laughed at myself and turned a little red. Rayshawna shook her head at me over a little grin.

“That was bad,” she whispered.

Yes. Yes it was. But I think they got it.

The kn combo was a bit perplexing, phonetically speaking, but we made a lot of progress with the word knock. I wrote it on the board under the word knee, and pronounced it several times.

“What is knock?” I asked, palms up.

Nothing.

I ducked into the office just off our conference room and said quietly, “I’m going to close your door and knock on it; okay?” The kind-looking Asian man smiled and nodded. I closed the door and turned to my students.

“What is this?”

“Door!” they responded in unison.

“Good! Now what do you do when you go to someone’s house?” I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “Helloo! Anyone home?”

Saraswati knocked her own knuckles on the table.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s knocking! You knock on a door!”

Everyone tapped their knuckles on the table. Le and Dhan got up to knock on the walls. I gently knocked on Bhim’s head and repeated, “knock-knock, knock-knock!” He laughed heartily. I saw that he had written knockin his notebook next to the word door, with what looked like a translation to Nepali next to it.

Later, when I reviewed all our new vocabulary words for the day, knock was the one they all knew without hesitation. And the one they demonstrated freely, on the table, the wall, the door.

I’m not sure how anyone gets work done in this place while we’re in there causing a ruckus on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I often see different people go into the little kitchen at the far end of our room to get coffee, then stand in the doorway stirring and watching us, bemused grins stuck on their faces. Who knew language acquisition was so loud?

Before and After

Preposition usage is one of the most difficult aspects of learning a new language. When I studied French as an undergrad, my colleagues and I were always confused about which verbs require de after them and which require à. There was no rule for the choice, only an ambiguous guideline about the intent of the verb. Very French.

English is crazy with preposition use. I once made the family I lived with in France laugh wildly by running down a partial list of how the meaning of the verb to get changes with different prepositions: we get up in the morning, get down with our bad selves, get in on a deal, get out of work, get over a loss, get under the covers, get around a problem, get to the point, get behind a candidate, get out in front of a crisis, but can’t get next to you, girl! Get it?

So I can understand how confusing prepositions are for new speakers of English. I helped Rebecca’s class work on beforeand after this week.

First, I wrote out the entire lower-case alphabet on the white board.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing to the three lines of letters.

Silence and blank stares at first. Then a chorus began:

“A, b, c, d, e, f, g…”

They ran through the whole thing in clashing cacophony, each of them pointing in the direction of the board while reciting.

“Yes, very good!” I said. “But what is this called?”

I waved my hand in a circle toward the board, trying to indicate the group of letters as a whole.

Blank silence. Then:

“A, b, c, d, e, f…”

So they know how to recite the alphabet, but they don’t really understand how the alphabet works. I don’t think they quite get the idea that letters are the moveable, functional components of words.

If I had to learn Chinese or Arabic, I wonder how long it would take for me to recognize the individual elements of the written characters, rather than merely memorizing whole characters by rote. Probably a very long time.

The exercise Rebecca had chosen for the day’s lesson looked fun and simple at first. A photocopied page from a workbook showed five exercises that looked like mini crossword puzzles, with three vertical columns and differing numbers of horizontal rows in each exercise. The far left and far right columns each contained letters from the alphabet that are one letter away from each other, with the middle column left blank. For example, if the left column contained a c, the right column would contain an e. The object was to fill in the blank center column with the letter that occurs between the two other letters in the alphabet. In this example, the center column should be filled in with d, because d comes after c and before e. The letters filled in would form a word. The exercise enforces the memorized alphabet, as well as the two new prepositions before and after.

Simple, right?

I put a copy of the exercise sheet on a clipboard and held it against my body so the class could see it.

“Let’s look at number one,” I said, using my dry-erase marker as a pointer. The first exercise was also the longest, with a seven-letter word. And the first letter was something of a stumper.

“What letter comes before b and after nothing?” I asked, as if nothing were a linguistic concept they already knew. The worksheet showed a blacked-in square to indicate nothing. For those of us who have filled out official forms all of our lives, the black-shaded box was clearly a representation of nothing. But to Bhutanese farmers with little or no formal education? How can a black square mean nothing?!

On the white board, where I had also written before / after underneath the alphabet, I drew an empty line before the letter a. Then I drew exaggerated arrows from the b to the a, and from the empty line to the a, while I repeated the question.

“What comes before b,” exaggerated arrow, “and after nothing?” Then I tapped my marker on the letter a, hoping they might even guess from my clues.

A heated debate in Nepali erupted at the table, with much pointing at the white board and the papers, and generally furrowed brows. I repeated a few times and finally drew a box around the letter a.

“It’s a, right?” I said. “So write a in that first square.”

I wrote the letter in the square on my form, and the students did the same, their Nepali conversation continuing. I sallied forth.

“Now,” I said pointing to the second row. “What comes before e and after c?”

More exaggerated arrows; more heated, unintelligible debate.

Finally, Saraswati, a woman about my own age with deeply creased skin and a blank spot where one of her font teeth should have been, seemed to have figured out the code.

“D?” she said, smiling tentatively.

“Yes!” I almost jumped on her. “That’s right! Dcomes before e and after c! So we write the letter d in the box.”

This is progress, I thought! The third letter was exactly the same as the second, so I naively thought it might make a few light bulbs go on. I was overly optimistic.

“Okay, the next one is the same, so what comes before e and after c again?”

Le, one of the younger students who insisted on keeping his hand over his mouth when he spoke, ventured a guess: “T.”

“What is it, Le? I couldn’t hear you. Would you move your hand, please?”

“T!” he said again, more confidently. He also pointed at the white board with his pencil, as if to punctuate his answer.

“No, it’s not t,” I said, tracing my arrows again and drawing a box around the letter d. “It’s the same as the one we just did.”

“S?” Saraswati tried again. That’s when I realized they were totally confused and simply guessing random letters.

We continued through all seven letters, ever so slowly. I went around the table, pointing to the boxes on individual papers, hoping somehow it would sink in. Most of the students had an incorrect letter in at least one box, even after I showed them mine with the correct answers on it. Saraswati had all the correct letters filled in on hers, but still couldn’t decipher the word. Of course, she couldn’t; it was vertical. We don’t write words vertically!

So I drew seven short lines on the white board in a row and asked Saraswati to come up and write her answers in them. After she wrote out a-d-d-r-e-s-s, I asked her what the word was.

Blank stare.

Slowly running my finger under the word, I pronounced it for them.

“A-aa-d-rr-ess.” I intoned slowly. “What word is that?”

And finally the light bulb.

Saraswati’s brow cleared and she smiled, covered her face with her hands for a second. “Address,” she said, as if to say oh, yeah, now I see it.

We got through one more word, city, before class time was done.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re finished for today. We’ll work on the rest of these next week.”

To my amazement, they all stayed at the table instead of getting up to go to the bathroom or get their lunches from the refrigerator. Bhim even held up his paper to me, pointing at the next exercise with his pencil, as if he really wanted to continue with this.

“No,” I said. “We’re finished for today. Next week we’ll do more. Or you can work on these at home, if you like.”

When he finally understood that we were done, we smiled his shy, boyish smile and nodded.

Before I started volunteering with these ESOL classes, I think I had a certain idea about how language education works, about how language works. Tutoring other college students only reinforced that idea: memorize the components of the language—vocabulary and verb conjugations—then move them around to express ideas with increasing speed and complexity over time. My idea of language was very linear.

With refugees, however, nothing is linear. They have memorized the sound of certain phrases by rote, for example “whatisyouraddress.” But they have no idea which part of those sounds has the meaning of address. And, likewise, they seem to not fully understand how the letters of the alphabet are not just a string of memorized marks and sounds, but the building blocks of words.

A big part of this is, of course, a culturally skewed perspective. I come from a family and a country that values formal education, and that education is parsed out very linearly: alphabet and numbers, then sentences and simple math, then paragraphs and algebra, then books and calculus. Much of Bhutan is still agrarian; many of our refugee students never used pencils before coming to the US. I'm sure my students could teach me a lot about gardening, if only I could speak Nepali.

I am going to pursue this exercise to its conclusion next week, no matter how long it takes us. And I might go shopping for magnets that are the letters of the alphabet, so the students can more clearly see how letters move around to form words, but are also part of the entire group. (That was my husband’s idea.)

Just like I did in French, I will get up every morning, get down to business, get over my fear of teaching, and try to get it right. I know that’s what these refugees are doing, even if they don’t have the vocabulary for it.  

The Stranger

It’s always unsettling for a woman alone in a secluded parking lot to encounter a loitering man who does not appear to be simply parking a car and going about his business. I don’t think most men understand how vulnerable women sometimes feel in situations like this. I’m certain the man I encountered Tuesday morning in the ASIA, Inc. parking lot doesn’t.

He—tall, Caucasian, with thin, graying hair and wire-rim glasses—was standing between two of the half dozen or so minivans already parked in the gravel lot when I pulled in. The lot is secured inside a perimeter of chain link, but the low, burnt-out factories behind it create a bleak, lonely landscape. I’m glad I only come here during daylight hours.

As I got out of my car, locked it, and walked along the chain-link fence toward the sidewalk by the street, I made particular eye contact with the stranger.

“Morning,” I said, hoping he got my tacit message of I see you; what are you doing here?

“Morning,” he replied.

Then he started following me.

I turned to look at him, to make sure he knew I knew he was following me, as I made a left on the sidewalk. At the door to ASIA, Inc., I turned again, my hand on the metal bar of the door.

“You going in?”

“Yes,” he replied, eyes not meeting mine.

I held the door behind me for him, then hurried past the unoccupied front desk and into the main classroom where Rebecca holds her ESOL class. I had only the most fleeting thought of this stranger producing a concealed weapon or bomb with which to wreak havoc on the premises. 

None of our students had arrived yet, but Rebecca was seated at the long table made up of eight or so banquet tables pushed together, checking her phone messages. We chatted for a bit and students began filtering into the room, bringing melodic conversations in Nepali and a slight aroma of curry with them. I said hello to the ones whose names I could remember from the week before.

After a few minutes, the tall man from the parking lot entered the room. He tersely introduced himself to Rebecca and me as John, another volunteer for this class from Project Learn. He did not seem amused when I made a small joke about already having met him in the parking lot.

Once most of the students were settled around the huge table, and before we embarked on the myriad of forms the student have to sign each day. Rebecca asked our newest attendee to introduce himself to the class.

“John,” he said, averting his eyes so they rested squarely on the table.

Rebecca allowed only one moment of uncomfortable silence to pass before expelling a small, involuntary laugh and helping him out in a stage whisper: “Could you say ‘my name is John’?”

“My name is John,” John said to the table.

“And where are you from, John?” Rebecca intoned to the class.

“Akron.”

No pause this time: “I live in Akron,” Rebecca corrected.

“I live in Akron.”

And with that exhaustive introduction concluded, we moved on to the sign-in forms.

Rebecca and I flitted around the table from student to student, helping them see where to sign on one form, where to write their Social security numbers on another, how to indicate the start and end times of the class. A few students had to fish out their ID cars for SSNs, though the majority have their memorized by now.

After the sign-in was complete—more or less; there’s always someone who forgot to bring his SSN and doesn’t know it yet—I led the lower-fluency group through an exercise of filling out a faux job application while Rebecca worked with the higher-fluency group on job-appropriate vocabulary.

Through all of this, John sat in the same chair, often with his arms crossed unwelcomingly, only occasionally indicating to one of the students on either side of him that something they had filled out was incorrect.

His stationary presence highlighted my kinetic energy. I made an almost constant arc around the end of the table, moving from student to student to offer praise or correct the format of a date or explain how the area code differs from the phone number. The students unilaterally filled in the space for “country” with “Bhutan,” not realizing that on a job application, this was part of the current address, not a question of origins.

John spoke to me only one time during the hour and a half these exercises took up. I could tell he was addressing me because he looked directly at me for the first and only time.

“I don’t think 2-3-4 is a real area code; is it” he stated rather than asked.

“It is, often for cell phones around here,” I replied with a smile. His mouth smirked a bit, as if I had disappointed him with my contradiction.

At about 11:00, we took our ten-minute break. John discretely disappeared and did not return when we reconvened.

At the end of the next hour, after successfully wrapping up an exercise of writing and identifying the new vocab words chair and pencil, Rebecca and I briefly discussed John’s sudden entrance and exit. We both wondered if we’d ever see him again.

When it comes to volunteering in these ESOL classes, I have never thought twice about just jumping right in and participating. From that first day in Susan’s class last May, to my first day with Rebecca last Tuesday, I have hardly felt a second’s hesitation about talking to the people from halfway across the world who want to learn my native language. I figure there is very little harm I can do them, and almost no harm they can do me, by trying to communicate and understand each other on some level. It’s amazing what I can get across with facial expressions, gestures, and a limited vocabulary.

My mom thinks John might have been a recovering alcoholic whose sponsor encouraged him to try volunteering as a way of filling the void once occupied by drinking. Either that, or maybe he’s had a stroke or is in the early stages of dementia and can’t communicate well.

I think it’s less dramatic than that: not everyone is cut out for volunteering or teaching ESOL. 

The repetition of basic vocabulary exercises can be really boring, while simultaneously requiring a great deal of energy to keep the group on track.  And it’s super hard to avoid waxing into condescension while explaining, for the three-hundredth time, the difference between the letter u and the word you. Maybe John expected to work with students who spoke better English; maybe he thought the forms were a waste of time; maybe he expected more of a traditional classroom-type of set-up. Maybe he felt there was no place for him because Rebecca and I had the whole class pretty much under control.

Whatever his inner dialogue, I doubt we’ll see John again at ASIA, Inc., and it’s just as well. I like being the only volunteer in a class. Daily victories are few and far between for me right now, so I’ll take this one with a tiny glint of facetious pride.

Tuesday, June 3^rd, I won at volunteering.