Today, I met with one of my participants for our last day of Job Readiness Training. On Friday, we met to work on interview questions and through her broken English and my over-enunciated so-called care-taker speech we worked out some answers that she could give to questions like, "Tell me about yourself" and "Why should we hire you?" On Monday morning, she went to her interview at a resort in Atlantic City for a housekeeping position. Monday afternoon, her case manager told me she'd been offered the job and we had a small celebration in the hallway in front of her office, her on her way to another meeting, me on my way to my office via the copier.
So this afternoon, my participant came in for our last day of Job Readiness Training and as she got herself settled at the worktable in my office, I said, "Congratulations! I heard you got the job!" She looked up at me and sprung from her chair and hugged me around my midsection. She was all smiles and in that moment, it didn't matter about language barriers or provider-participant boundaries because she was happy and I'd had the opportunity to play a small part in that happiness.
Twenty years from now, I don't know if that girl will remember today; more likely than not, it will fade into a tangle of days labeled "first days in New Jersey" or "first few years in the US" or "just out of high school", but I think I will remember. Or at least, I'd like to.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Cookies
A couple weekends ago, we had four teen and pre-teen girls come over and help us make cookies for our new neighbors. We were looking for ways to meet our new neighbors, to begin getting to know them and to begin sharing a bit of our lives with them.
We had a great time with the girls making cookies and decorating goodie bags. We decided to make cookies only for the apartments in our building. As it turns out, there are 24 apartments in each building, and we are the seventh and final building. That means that there are 168 apartments here! We made sugar cookies from the Real Simple December 2009 issue and some devil's food cake chocolate chip cookies from one of the girls' recipes. We also got some Hershey's Kisses and Reese's peanut butter cups to fill the bags. Michael worked on printing business cards with our contact information on them.
We went out on the following Sunday afternoon to give the cookies to our neighbors. The first two doors we knocked on had no response, but we were welcomed warmly at the third door. We chatted with our neighbor there for a fifteen minutes or so before we moved on to our other neighbors. Most doors stayed closed, and we left our little bags on the doorstep, hoping they'd find them soon. Of the people we met, most of them talked to us from cracked front doors or behind screen doors, suspicious until we explained we were neighbors just saying hello. Even then, people seemed confused--one girl asked if she should pay for the cookies.
There's still another 6 buildings worth of people we haven't met. I'm feeling a little bit the way I did my first week in XZ, unsure how to connect with people. We might need to make a lot more cookies...
We had a great time with the girls making cookies and decorating goodie bags. We decided to make cookies only for the apartments in our building. As it turns out, there are 24 apartments in each building, and we are the seventh and final building. That means that there are 168 apartments here! We made sugar cookies from the Real Simple December 2009 issue and some devil's food cake chocolate chip cookies from one of the girls' recipes. We also got some Hershey's Kisses and Reese's peanut butter cups to fill the bags. Michael worked on printing business cards with our contact information on them.
We went out on the following Sunday afternoon to give the cookies to our neighbors. The first two doors we knocked on had no response, but we were welcomed warmly at the third door. We chatted with our neighbor there for a fifteen minutes or so before we moved on to our other neighbors. Most doors stayed closed, and we left our little bags on the doorstep, hoping they'd find them soon. Of the people we met, most of them talked to us from cracked front doors or behind screen doors, suspicious until we explained we were neighbors just saying hello. Even then, people seemed confused--one girl asked if she should pay for the cookies.
There's still another 6 buildings worth of people we haven't met. I'm feeling a little bit the way I did my first week in XZ, unsure how to connect with people. We might need to make a lot more cookies...
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tiramisu
I don't remember the first time I ever ate tiramisu, but I know that whenever that was, I transcended. My fork had brought to my tongue the very essence of what heaven must be: a thing that cannot be described save that it is complete and utter joy.
I was born a lot closer to the equator than to tiramisu. And there's joy near the equator, too, for sure: fresh tortillas, refried beans, and plantains. But our foods are not delicate foods with subtle flavors. They are bold like the hot sun, the high mountains, and the wide desert. At a very young age, I learned how to slice plantains, how to mold tortilla dough in my hands, how to work a spoon around a frying pan to get the beans thick and heavy. In my country, we eat with our hands, licking our fingers, cleaning our plates with the last piece of a tortilla.
Tiramisu is not this kind of food. It is delicate, it is refined. It is a dessert served chilled in stemmed glassware, eaten with a tiny fork or spoon. It is the clinking of silver on glass and soft opera music filling the space between tables in fashionable restaurants. And so for me, tiramisu has always been enchanting and ethereal, something so other, a foil to my brashness and audacity.
It is this foreignness that makes tiramisu so transcendent, I suppose. It is the moment in which my body, my person, my self slows down and not with greedy hands in my bowl but with conservative little spoonfuls that I contemplate the joys of being. But this "joy" was always at the hands of someone other. My hands, so rehearsed in the Honduran kitchen, could not be the delicate hands that with gentle affection layer lady fingers and marscarpone cheese. Or so I believed, all these years since that first divine taste of glory.
But I have found, at last, the truest Epicurean joy, not in eating tiramisu, but in making it. My body, my person, my self slows down with whisk and egg whites, lady fingers dipped one by one in chilled coffee, cocoa powder carefully dusted over those dainty layers. In its subtle persistence, Tiramisu, I have discovered, is bold in its own right.
I was born a lot closer to the equator than to tiramisu. And there's joy near the equator, too, for sure: fresh tortillas, refried beans, and plantains. But our foods are not delicate foods with subtle flavors. They are bold like the hot sun, the high mountains, and the wide desert. At a very young age, I learned how to slice plantains, how to mold tortilla dough in my hands, how to work a spoon around a frying pan to get the beans thick and heavy. In my country, we eat with our hands, licking our fingers, cleaning our plates with the last piece of a tortilla.
Tiramisu is not this kind of food. It is delicate, it is refined. It is a dessert served chilled in stemmed glassware, eaten with a tiny fork or spoon. It is the clinking of silver on glass and soft opera music filling the space between tables in fashionable restaurants. And so for me, tiramisu has always been enchanting and ethereal, something so other, a foil to my brashness and audacity.
It is this foreignness that makes tiramisu so transcendent, I suppose. It is the moment in which my body, my person, my self slows down and not with greedy hands in my bowl but with conservative little spoonfuls that I contemplate the joys of being. But this "joy" was always at the hands of someone other. My hands, so rehearsed in the Honduran kitchen, could not be the delicate hands that with gentle affection layer lady fingers and marscarpone cheese. Or so I believed, all these years since that first divine taste of glory.
But I have found, at last, the truest Epicurean joy, not in eating tiramisu, but in making it. My body, my person, my self slows down with whisk and egg whites, lady fingers dipped one by one in chilled coffee, cocoa powder carefully dusted over those dainty layers. In its subtle persistence, Tiramisu, I have discovered, is bold in its own right.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Stephen Krashen and Rosetta Stone
I've been an ESL teacher since March 2008, so I'm now beginning my fourth year (really!? how did this happen!?) in this not-so-glamorous career. Not coincidentally, it's been four years since I graduated from Iowa State; I'm now working on my fifth. And in all the time that I've been in Linguistics and ESL, I've not really ever spent very much time studying second language acquisition. I mean, not really. I studied language documentation in college, and I had a weekend class in Virginia and another weekend training in Sam and Joan's apartment one hot summer in Wuhan. I tried a lot of different things while I was teaching in China and I've tried some different things with the families I tutor here in the US. And sometimes it works, and sometimes I'm rather unprepared. I mostly operate on my understand of how language works and equipping people to understand language, more than actually guiding them through any acquisition process.
And I have been, in all this time, fairly biased against Rosetta Stone. I have discouraged a great number of people from buying it, even though I have never (before today) used it. I believed Rosetta Stone was more Skinner-style Behaviorism, only cuter with its colorful pictures and voice-recognition software. But this last week, at work, I spent some time reading the Rosetta Stone manuals (and Rosetta Stone Manager manuals--which is actually, potentially a really cool tool...) and totally buying in to their "Dynamic Immersion (tm)" marketing scheme. I almost believed it, chided myself for being so judgmental, they do believe in natural language, so much so that they trademarked a phrase to describe it!
And then today, I had the opportunity to "enroll" myself as a student in Rosetta Stone. And I have decided it is, essentially, a really interactive, never-ending worksheet with no instructions. It is the best worksheet I have ever had the privilege of filling out. It talks to me, it has colorful pictures, it listens to me, it asks smart questions that guide my learning, and best of all, it tells me when I'm wrong. Immediate feedback is a pretty powerful tool when it comes to teaching. But it is, in the end, a worksheet. It gives a series of examples then asks a series of questions. Maybe it's not Behaviorism, but I can't imagine it's natural language acquisition.
I ordered a book by Stephen Krashen last week. Amazon tells me it will arrive between Mar 18 and April 4. I don't know much about Stephen Krashen, except that he used to teach at USC, and that a really smart lady I used to know studied with him and really believed him. And everything I know about ESL, I learned from her. I have a feeling that Stephen Krashen (back in 1981 when the book was published) will have a thing or two to say about Rosetta Stone.
It's not all bad news, though, guys. Language is hard to learn, as much as we wish that wasn't true. It takes a baby brain 2-4 years to start even figuring the the thing out. And our old, post-pubescent brains just aren't wired for these kinds of complex pattern-recognition problems. We, over time, learn to see what we've learned we need to see. So if we're going to learn language, we need things that will show us what we might not see, and Rosetta Stone will certainly do it better than moving to Italy or China and doing the non-trademarked version of "dynamic immersion". So I take it back. Go ahead and buy Rosetta Stone and use it and grow and learn. It's better than holding out for the yet-to-come perfect language learning program.
And I have been, in all this time, fairly biased against Rosetta Stone. I have discouraged a great number of people from buying it, even though I have never (before today) used it. I believed Rosetta Stone was more Skinner-style Behaviorism, only cuter with its colorful pictures and voice-recognition software. But this last week, at work, I spent some time reading the Rosetta Stone manuals (and Rosetta Stone Manager manuals--which is actually, potentially a really cool tool...) and totally buying in to their "Dynamic Immersion (tm)" marketing scheme. I almost believed it, chided myself for being so judgmental, they do believe in natural language, so much so that they trademarked a phrase to describe it!
And then today, I had the opportunity to "enroll" myself as a student in Rosetta Stone. And I have decided it is, essentially, a really interactive, never-ending worksheet with no instructions. It is the best worksheet I have ever had the privilege of filling out. It talks to me, it has colorful pictures, it listens to me, it asks smart questions that guide my learning, and best of all, it tells me when I'm wrong. Immediate feedback is a pretty powerful tool when it comes to teaching. But it is, in the end, a worksheet. It gives a series of examples then asks a series of questions. Maybe it's not Behaviorism, but I can't imagine it's natural language acquisition.
I ordered a book by Stephen Krashen last week. Amazon tells me it will arrive between Mar 18 and April 4. I don't know much about Stephen Krashen, except that he used to teach at USC, and that a really smart lady I used to know studied with him and really believed him. And everything I know about ESL, I learned from her. I have a feeling that Stephen Krashen (back in 1981 when the book was published) will have a thing or two to say about Rosetta Stone.
It's not all bad news, though, guys. Language is hard to learn, as much as we wish that wasn't true. It takes a baby brain 2-4 years to start even figuring the the thing out. And our old, post-pubescent brains just aren't wired for these kinds of complex pattern-recognition problems. We, over time, learn to see what we've learned we need to see. So if we're going to learn language, we need things that will show us what we might not see, and Rosetta Stone will certainly do it better than moving to Italy or China and doing the non-trademarked version of "dynamic immersion". So I take it back. Go ahead and buy Rosetta Stone and use it and grow and learn. It's better than holding out for the yet-to-come perfect language learning program.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Growing Up
Lately, I've been feeling waves of adulthood overcoming me. This afternoon, as I drove down Landis Ave, I thought to myself, "I own this car. I own something that costs a couple thousand dollars and I am 100% responsible for it's welfare." Okay, so not 100% since Michael deals with the car stuff, but if it breaks down or I get into an accident that's on grown-up me and grown-up Michael.
And yesterday at the Doctor's, she and I talked about my cholesterol. I have never had a conversation about my cholesterol before.
And today, I interviewed for another position (long story; I probably won't get it and I'm okay with that) and as said thank you and good bye to my interviewers, I thought about how freaked out I would have been about that this time last year. It was a phone interview over a conference line with a panel of three interviewers. EEEK! But I was okay today, confident in my own skin, unafraid to ask questions and make comments. I don't think I impressed them very well, but I'm okay with that. They might not think much about living in China for two years or planning a year's worth of advertising for a glass manufacturer, but I'm impressed. And I'm impressed that their impression of me doesn't much affect me.
I walked back out to my car to go back to my office (I'd come home for lunch and the interview), and thought to myself, "This is grown up Elena. I like it."
And yesterday at the Doctor's, she and I talked about my cholesterol. I have never had a conversation about my cholesterol before.
And today, I interviewed for another position (long story; I probably won't get it and I'm okay with that) and as said thank you and good bye to my interviewers, I thought about how freaked out I would have been about that this time last year. It was a phone interview over a conference line with a panel of three interviewers. EEEK! But I was okay today, confident in my own skin, unafraid to ask questions and make comments. I don't think I impressed them very well, but I'm okay with that. They might not think much about living in China for two years or planning a year's worth of advertising for a glass manufacturer, but I'm impressed. And I'm impressed that their impression of me doesn't much affect me.
I walked back out to my car to go back to my office (I'd come home for lunch and the interview), and thought to myself, "This is grown up Elena. I like it."
Thursday, February 17, 2011
A New Job for Elena
On Monday, I received an offer letter from an organization called PathStone, in reference to the position I had interviewed for two weeks before. And on Monday, I resigned my job at Worldwide Glass Resources, Inc., and I accepted the position at PathStone. I will be an Adult Education Instructor, working with migrant farm workers on ESL, GED, and job readiness training.
Very exciting stuff.
I start March 1.
Very exciting stuff.
I start March 1.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Trouble, They Say, Comes in Threes
First, the fridge died. I came home to bloody meat, unfrozen frozen pizzas, and warm milk. So Michael called the landlord who said,
So Michael went to Walmart and bought some Styrofoam coolers and fit what he could in them and put the rest of it on the chairs on the porch. We had frozen pizza for dinner, so Michael went back outside to get it. When he came in, I said:
That same day, though, the toilet was beginning to behave the way a person on his or her deathbed might: weak, making strange noises, coughing up things from deep inside... When the landlord came to deal with the fridge, he also brought a plumber with him to check on the toilet. They snaked it and didn't find anything, so the landlord told us just to keep an eye on it. A few days later, we hosted Bible Study at our house and moments before the first knock at the door, the toilet threw up all over the bathroom floor. Thankfully, there was any solid waste involved in the situation, but it didn't exactly make for an atmosphere to receive guests. Michael called the landlord the next morning,
One day, shortly after the fridge incident but before the toilet/Bible Study incident, I went to Walmart to do some grocery shopping. I wandered around, taking my time, looking at things I didn't need and picking out some things I don't usually buy. After a while, I proceeded to check out, and the girl at the register scanned all my items and pronounced my total. I reached into my bad to get my wallet and fish out my debit card, except that my debit card was no where to be found. It was, as I instantly recalled, inside my little notebook that I had taken out of my purse to call the real estate agent. So, embarrassed, I asked the girl to cancel my order, I called Michael to bring me my card, and I sat in the Subway inside Walmart waiting for Michael. I am, apparently, not the first Walmart customer to pull such a stunt. When Michael arrived with my card, the girl scanned the canceled receipt and we paid and walked away with our purchases without having to un-bag or re-scan them.
Two out three good endings is not bad if you ask me. Though I'm okay with not having many more troubles.
Landlord: I can't come until morning.
Michael: Oh. Well, what should we do with the food.
Landlord: Well, it's cold outside. Just put it outside.
Michael: Oh. Um...Okay...
So Michael went to Walmart and bought some Styrofoam coolers and fit what he could in them and put the rest of it on the chairs on the porch. We had frozen pizza for dinner, so Michael went back outside to get it. When he came in, I said:
Me: I just had a thought--can that stuff stay out there overnight? I mean, what about animals and stuff?So he started the pizza and went back outside to find a bag of beef cubes (for stew) torn open and pieces of meat and blood on our welcome mat and on the porch! So, we put all the food in the car overnight, and Michael took it with him to work the next morning. The landlord did come the next morning, and we came home to a new fridge that afternoon.
Michael: Oh, yeah, we need to figure something out. Let me start the pizza and then I'll deal with the rest of the stuff.
That same day, though, the toilet was beginning to behave the way a person on his or her deathbed might: weak, making strange noises, coughing up things from deep inside... When the landlord came to deal with the fridge, he also brought a plumber with him to check on the toilet. They snaked it and didn't find anything, so the landlord told us just to keep an eye on it. A few days later, we hosted Bible Study at our house and moments before the first knock at the door, the toilet threw up all over the bathroom floor. Thankfully, there was any solid waste involved in the situation, but it didn't exactly make for an atmosphere to receive guests. Michael called the landlord the next morning,
Michael: The toilet overflowed last night.He came and inspected it the next day, but told Michael he thought it was fine and to just keep watching it.
Landlord: Ugggggghhhh.
One day, shortly after the fridge incident but before the toilet/Bible Study incident, I went to Walmart to do some grocery shopping. I wandered around, taking my time, looking at things I didn't need and picking out some things I don't usually buy. After a while, I proceeded to check out, and the girl at the register scanned all my items and pronounced my total. I reached into my bad to get my wallet and fish out my debit card, except that my debit card was no where to be found. It was, as I instantly recalled, inside my little notebook that I had taken out of my purse to call the real estate agent. So, embarrassed, I asked the girl to cancel my order, I called Michael to bring me my card, and I sat in the Subway inside Walmart waiting for Michael. I am, apparently, not the first Walmart customer to pull such a stunt. When Michael arrived with my card, the girl scanned the canceled receipt and we paid and walked away with our purchases without having to un-bag or re-scan them.
Two out three good endings is not bad if you ask me. Though I'm okay with not having many more troubles.
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