Monday, September 22, 2008

I Just Met a Girl Named Maria

Well, last week I met Maria, the woman who has been assigned yours truly as an ESL tutor. Becoming an ESL tutor has been a dream of mine ever since my early college days when a guy brought me along with him as a date to a fraternity “exchange” with a bunch of kids who didn’t speak English. I LOVED mingling with these kids, laughing as we tried to understand each other. (Didn’t love my date, though.)

So I knew I wanted to tutor ESL. I went through a rigorous (about 30 hours) training that also required me to shell out money in order to become one, and then I waited several months for a “match.” (Don’t know what the delay was—apparently the people who want help sit on that waiting list for years sometimes.) As you know, I've been trying to teach myself Spanish because I have always been particularly drawn to Hispanic people. So naturally I hoped for a Hispanic student. I was very happy when I went to my match-meeting and met Maria.

Maria is from Mexico—some city that I can’t pronounce or figure out. She has been in America for four years and knows almost no English. It’s amazing how insulated some of the areas of the city are—she can pretty much do whatever she wants because so many places in West Valley speak Spanish. (I wonder if she’s one of my husband’s patients . . . ? He practices in West Valley and has many Latino patients. I’ll have to find out.) But her kids are in the school system and doing well in English and I guess she’s eager to assimilate as well.

I can’t express the admiration I feel for someone being brave enough to step out of her comfort zone and learn a new language like this. She really could go her whole life without English, but she won’t. Statistics say it will take her at least four years, if not more, to really be speaking and understanding well, especially if she continues to speak Spanish at home and around the community. So this will be a long, slow process for her. But she's determined enough to get herself to the ESL center and go through the testing and sit on the waiting list. And determined enough to get to the library twice a week to meet me.

As with my fears regarding homeschooling, I am mostly afraid of failing her by leaving loopholes. But, also as with homeschooling, I think that she will be OK anyway. She’s got enough interest and drive that when she encounters something I might have left out, she’ll ask. I think my job is just to be patient and positive and show up and talk with her. (I do, however, prepare a curriculum each time.)

Maria brings her two-year-old son with her to our meetings. And I got a fantastic idea over the weekend: I will bring children’s books (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) and have Maria read them to her son for part of our time together. Ha ha! That way she doesn’t feel like I’m treating her like a child with baby books but she’ll get the same benefits that any child gets from such repetitive picture books. I may even give her the books to keep. (We have so many that P. has outgrown.) Ooooh, and I’ll bring along the alphabet puzzle, too. And the number puzzle. Ahh, I’m a genius.

This whole thing just delights me. I am so happy to be able to do it.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

A great September

Still haven’t been writing lately.

Scary thing is, I haven’t missed it.

I’ve just been having such a great autumn, enjoying and living to the hilt. I’ve loved church, loved watching football, loved playing games with my kids. Loved visiting the cabin a couple of weeks ago. I’ve enjoyed jogging, practicing guitar, learning Spanish. I met the woman I will be tutoring English to (Maria) and I’m excited about that.

The kids are off track and I’ve been taking them to parks and throwing a ball around. I started up with my women’s choir again. I’ve been filling in as poetry editor for Segullah, and brainstorming ways to get more poetry submissions.

I’m bored with writing picture books and sick of my novel. I think I want to try another novel soon, but I’m putting it off because life is so nice right now! Why throw myself into something that will haunt me?

So I’m having a season of Just Being. And it feels fantastic. (And yes, by the way, I HAVE been feeling better physically lately. Thanks for your prayers.)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Some tidbits from Stephen King's "On Writing"

"Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic."

"Use the first word that comes to mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. . . If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word--of course you will, there's always another word--but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean."

"I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing."

Such the athlete

This morning I ran for 40 minutes. Well, jogged. Kinda slowly. Still, this is a HUGE accomplishment for me. I have NEVER run this long before in my life. I have passed through periods in which I have jogged regularly, but I never got beyond 30 minutes, and somehow I had always seen that as some kind of a limit for me. But no more!

I’ve always thought of myself as a weakling and challenged physically. I was the brunt of some major teasing in elementary school and junior high school for my inability to hit a volleyball, catch a baseball or connect with a soccer ball. And some of the worst teasing actually came from my junior high gym teacher (her nickname for me: “bird arms.” Talk about a teacher having a lifetime effect on a kid!). So it has only been since adulthood that I have made goals physically and actually reached some of them.

So this is a big deal for me. I know it’s really a little thing, especially since it was ON THE TREADMILL and not on real ground at all. Still, several months ago I was jogging five minutes at a time, so it has been a long, slow process.

And where to go from here? A marathon? No, no! I’m trying to extend life and its quality, not shorten it! (Although a half-marathon sounds interesting . . . maybe next year?) My goal is to get to 45 minutes and then hold there and try to increase my speed—also to start cross-training at that point. (I realized the need for this when I climbed the 250 steps of the Bunker Hill monument last month and about died.)

Thursday, September 04, 2008

Reading Flannery

I'm having a blast reading the letters of Flannery O'Connor in The Habit of Being. It is so good that, only 1/4 through it, I declared to hubby that I was sick of copying down my favorite quotes and needed to own this book. (I do not buy many books.) Being the amazingly sweet and supportive person that he is, he ordered it from amazon that very evening.

I predict that I will be sharing a lot of nuggets with you here. And now I present today's thought-provoking observation:

"I think it must be easier on the nerves to publish poetry because it is not generally misunderstood as it is not generally read."

Tee-hee!

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

School fund-raisers

Can I just say that I think there is something absolutely immoral about using children to raise funds for anything? I’m talking particularly about the obscene School Fundraiser. You know, the ones where the kids attend an assembly (parents not invited) at which professional “motivational” people show them slides and videos of all the cool STUFF they could earn—slide after slide, visual after visual, blatantly appealing to the kids’ GREED for stuffstuffstuffstuffstuff—and then spend ninety seconds explaining how they hit people up to order STUFF in order to earn these rewards. Disgusting!

I happened to sit in on the assembly this year because of a mistake in scheduling for my classroom volunteer time. You would not believe the cheers and screaming from these kids when they saw what they could earn. Of course, the presenters show the smallest prize first (a glow-in-the-dark necklace! For just five orders!) and then they move gradually up to the biggest (an i-pod! For just 250 orders!). These kids practically took the roof off the gymn with their screams when they saw that. And of course, here they came at the end of the day with their precious catalogs and PRIZE BROCHURES clutched under their arms, ready to hit up the parents, the neighbors, grandma and grandpa and dad’s coworkers so they could get their precious i-pods.

(And I won’t even get into the amazing rip-off that these catalogs are full of. $9.00 for 7 ounces of chocolate-covered almonds?????)

What a very clear refresher course in some of the reasons I do NOT like capitalism. I’m sorry if that is offensive to your “this country was established by God on the godly principle of greed--oops I mean capitalism” philosophy. But I do NOT believe it is healthy to bombard people constantly with visions of stuff they don’t need—especially when these people are young children. It’s hard enough to try to limit the materialism in my children’s world without their SCHOOL CRAMMING IT DOWN THEIR THROATS!!!! It sends mixed signals when a child’s school (a major force of authority in his life) appears to “assign” him to go out and sell stuff. No, I’m wrong. It is NOT a mixed signal. It is a very clear signal about society—-but one I HATE, and one that has NO BUSINESS being in the schools.

If you need money, ask me for it, please. None of this child prostitution.

(Wait a minute. They DO keep asking us to write checks in the form of higher taxes for education. And I am absolutely willing to pay them. But there are many, many people unwilling to do so. Capitalists, all of them. [Insert winking smiley here because I want you to still like me even though you are a gun-totin' patriot].)