Failed Teacher I

Maria is a 50-year-old Mexican who speaks no English. She has never been to school, not even in her own language. She has lived in the U.S. six years. Her children - there are seven - taught her to read and write some Spanish. She lives in an area that is primarily Hispanic and she can find all her services in Spanish: doctor, dentist, shopping for groceries, work done in her house.

I am a recently-trained ESL volunteer with a literacy association whose mission is to work one-on-one with housebound people and those who cannot afford English classes. Maria was my first student.


Her house is one of those ubiquitous split-levels with picture windows and fake shutters. It's in a modest suburb with large lots. Hers is gaily dotted with ornaments, a donkey and a cart, for example. It also has plastic and real flowers in the gardens. There is a statue of the Virgin Mary and a small ceramic Rottweiler by the back door.


Her bright kitchen - it has a skylight through which the sunlight makes Maria hot - is not small and it has decent wood cupboards and appliances. When I was there, usually some kind of cooking filled the room with good smells: big pots of peppers and tomatoes for canning, tamales, dulce de leche.


Maria and I sat at at a round colonial table covered in plastic. A vase of fresh flowers and a bowl of fruit always rested on top. And for almost a year, we would open our notebooks and begin what was supposed to be a two-hour session.


In order to communicate with her, I had spent a good part of the summer teaching myself Spanish. In the fall, I began classes at a local college and advanced to Level III. I am fluent in French and have a teaching degree in English, (and Art) and have taught grades 8 - 13. I was also a newpaper columnist for two major dailies in Canada for fourteen years and often gave workshops in creative writing, fiction and non-fiction. As well, I was an itinerant writing teacher for English kids around Quebec and for inner city ones in Montreal.

I thought I was totally prepared to help Maria learn English.


But she didn't learn. After months of meeting at that table, Maria could barely say English greetings or name members of a family. "My brother has two sons. They are my nephews." I would arrive and say "Hello, Maria. How are you?", hoping just once for an "I am fine, thank you. And you?" They were words she repeated from flash cards every week but always when I arrived, she'd smile and nod for me to sit without saying a word.


I had expected that each week we would review what we had covered the previous week and then learn something new. That's how you learn a language. By building on what you've been introduced to, what you know. And in order to know, you have to memorize and repeat, repeat, repeat, either the new word or a verb conjugation. That's what I tried to do with Maria: introduce, assure she understood and repeat, repeat, repeat.


Interestingly, after we went over the vocabulary, she would read quite well one of the little stories I'd written. But I began to realize she understood nothing. Nothing I was preparing for her was sinking in, even though we'd go over it week after week. This was all rudimentary stuff, simple, necessary verbs: to be, to have, to go, to come, to want. And basic word use: greetings, family members, numbers, days and months of the year, articles of clothing, food, drugstore items, parts of the body etc. As well as my trying to connect with her in Spanish, we used the Oxford Picture Dictionary. It's a wonderful book for entering a new language, with extensive illustrations of all life's objects and interactions. I also used a variety of other ESL books for guidance and I created a lot of my own picture boards, flash cards and stories.

I would arrive at Maria's at 2:00 pm on Thursdays and for about an hour, perhaps three-quarters of an hour, she concentrated quite well. But then she began to watch the clock. Sometime after 3:00 pm her grandson's bus stopped just past her house and she had to go and get him. As well, sweet, smart two-year-old Betsy was at our sessions and a lot of the time either Maria or I would have to distract her by drawing or showing her a book.


Once Chavita, a kindergartener, burst though the door, it was game over. He was a vivacious boy and loved it when I spoke to him in English. His response was immediate and enthusiastic. He would often help Maria if I tried to continue the lesson but he usually needed a snack or he was playful with Betsy and Maria was distracted. Then the children's mother, Maria's daughter Lope would arrive home and they would greet her gleefully. By then it was about 3:20 and the class ended with Maria and Lope chattering in Spanish and my saying, "Good-bye Maria. See you next week."


Three-quarters of an hour a week of second language instruction with a 50-year-old unschooled woman. Not only that, the lesson was her last real contact with English until the following week. I don't know how many people there were in her household - at least ten - and she was their caretaker. They all spoke Spanish. Her teenage daughter, Nayelli, did speak fluent English, but she was an ambitious student and had far too much of her own homework to help her mother. And I got the sense that even her children who could speak some English got impatient with her. So, from one short session to the next, Maria was involved in her keeping her home functioning and got no practice.


I was extremely discouraged. I would ask Maria, (in Spanish), "What am I not doing you want me to do?" "What are you not learning you want to learn?" "Are you bored?" "Are you tired?" "Is it too difficult?" "Is it too fast?" "Is it too slow?" There wasn't anything she wanted to learn that we weren't doing but she did find it too slow. But how could I go any faster when she wasn't absorbing what we'd already covered?


After much thought, I decided to keep on going as we had, trying to progress little by little, even if Maria really wasn't. I made sure she wrote out and repeated everything I gave her. I told myself even if she picked up only a few words, that was success.


And then I was advised by the supervisor that Maria had to be "assessed". After a certain number of hours of instruction, the association needs to know a student's progress for the benefit of its fund-raising. I was horribly aware, having tested Maria myself, that after months, she still knew very little.


I told Maria that another teacher wanted to visit with us to see how our lessons were going. She seemed unphased. But then, nothing phased Maria. She had an easy sense of humour and could laugh at her own or my (Spanish) mistakes.

And then an interesting thing happened. Maria began not to show up, even after I'd confirmed a few hours before. I'd ring her bell, knock on her door and there's be no response. It had occasionally happened before: a dental appointment, someone arriving to take her shopping. But this time it was four weeks in a row. And there was no explanation.


It seemed like my failure. I'd put enthusiasm and hours of research, planning and creativity into teaching Maria and I felt utterly let down. I was studying, (with pleasure) her language. Not only that, I'd grown fond of her and I was hurt. I thought we'd developed a kind of friendship. One of the principles of the literacy association is that it is an exchange of peers. There's no teacher-student hierarchy. Maria and I had fun together and I adored Betsy and Chavita.


In the end, after discussing it with the supervisor, I decided not to continue with her. It was too distressing, too discouraging not to see some results from all my commitment and, to be honest, treated with such a lack of consideration when I felt I had been so considerate. I felt there must be some determined student out there who could benefit from my efforts. Maybe my teaching methods were all wrong for Maria. Maybe my expectations were too high.

My Spanish was not good enough for me to explain all this to Maria on the phone and I didn't want to use Nayelli as my go-between so I wrote Maria a letter, in Spanish, (it took me ages) explaining that I'd been worried about her lack of progress and my ability to teach her. We might not be a good match. I said I hoped she'd get a new teacher who would be more successful than I and emphasized that to learn another language, you had to do spend lots of time and do lots of hard work to reinforce what you study in the lessons. I sent her much affection.

The point is this. If Maria had been a whole classroom, and my salary or my tenure was based on the class's success on standardized testing, I'd have been fired. This, notwithstanding my training, my experience, my hopes and my keenness and my prolonged, hard work. Were Maria or her circumstances responsible at all for her inability to learn or was I simply ineffective?

Now I have Ana, who is fifteen years younger and has a grade six education. She has been in the U.S. eleven years and speaks some English. Quite a bit, really. She practices a lot, she says. She wants to study with me more than two hours a week. If I can manage it, I'll try. But after one class with her, I'm going to have to really prepare to keep up with her. Perhaps, with time, my student will come to speak English well.

We'll see.