Learning Something New Every Day

June 25, 2014June 25, 2014 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

My goal recently has been to learn to use my iPAD as much as possible before heading to Ethiopia a week from today. At this time next week, I will be on a 14 hours and 45 minutes flight to Dubai on Emirate Airlines. That gives me about six days to keep learning. With the help of my more computer literate friends, today I learned how to download photos from my iPAD to my iMAC and to connect my iPAD to iCloud. In the midst of all this, guys are working on my house roof because when it rains just the right direction with the wind blowing, it leaks in particular places, depending on the direction of the wind and rain. Here is a photo of them up high in the sky working.

Yesterday, I decided to play with my iPAD camera so I can take some good photos as we wander around Dubai and Ethiopia and post them for all of you to see. I am reading the 2012 Man Booker winner, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Henry VIII is not someone I would want to like me. Once he was done with one wife, he had her executed or divorced. The only exceptions are Jane Seymour, who died two weeks after giving birth, and his last wife, who outlived him. I read while on my patio. The evening view struck me as very photographable so I took several.

The view from where I sat reading.

The sunset from the edge of the patio–two views.

Of course I knew about Henry VIII more or less, but wow, he and Cromwell….This book is sufficiently fascinating that I may download (the next thing I am going to learn to do) Wolf Hall, the book that you are supposed to read before you read Bring Up the Bodies, onto my iPAD so I can have something to read on that long, long flight. People who have flown Emirates tell me there will be about 60 movies available, but I may have to see that. Really?!

Yesterday, I also took my grandson to his soccer lesson at the WTAMU soccer field. It has rained so much here that once when I thought I was just walking through grass, I ended up wading in the water.

Immigrants

June 5, 2014June 5, 2014 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Since teaching senior English is my new teaching assignment, I started reading books I have not read that were short listed for the Man Booker Prize. The first, which I just finished, is We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. I marked two quotes that hold special relevance for me for very different reasons. The first one: “And besides, I’ve been getting all As in everything, even maths and science, the subjects I hate, because school is so easy in America even a donkey could pass.” I laughed out loud when I read this. Talk to many students born here and you would think school is hopelessly challenging. Last school year and for many before, I taught math, algebra 1 and geometry mostly. Half do not know their multiplication tables which makes teaching them how to factor polynomials quite a challenge or at least a lot harder. Ask something truly simple, “What is 1/3 of 3?” They stare and shrug.

In the past six years, four exchange students have lived with me, two from Thailand, one from Brazil, and one from Argentina. They all took math, including AP calculus for one. For all of them, English was a second or third or fourth language. One commented that except for trying to read Beowulf and Canterbury Tales (they were all seniors and senior English is British literature), it was quite easy compared to school at home. Two of them took either AP or honors classes. Parents here complain that school is too hard, there is too much homework. Really?? I chat with my friends from countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, South America. I listen to my students and I cannot help but wonder what will become of this country if we do not have immigrants. Yet, many citizens complain about immigrants. These same complainers often lack the skills to get the best jobs, to rise upward in part because learning these skills is hard work.

The other quote illustrates just how difficult it is to come here from a war torn or violent or economically depressed country you love but must leave and how angry some who feel stuck there may feel. “Just tell me one thing. What are you doing not in your own country right now? Why did you run off to America…Why did you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right. Tell me, do you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to put out the fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn into water and put themselves out? You left it…you left the house burning…”

I cannot imagine how to respond, how to feel. I am from here, have always lived here except for one brief stay elsewhere. Traveling even with friends and family from another country simply is not the same. Amarillo is a large refuge center with displaced people from Sudan, Myanmar, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other places. Even those with degrees often must work at horrid menial jobs others rarely want, e.g. killing and butchering livestock. One of my good friends teaches English at a nearby high school. She has one class in which only one student is a native English speaker. Although I can read and speak some Spanish, I think just how difficult it would be to learn history and literature in Spanish. I look at my house and know 100 % that without immigrant labor, I would not have this house.

If you live in the United States and are not 100 per cent Native American, you are either an immigrant yourself or the child of immigrants. Many have forgotten what their immigrant ancestors knew. Perhaps they need to remember.

Teaching English for a change

June 3, 2014June 3, 2014 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Years ago, four day before school started, the principal informed me that I was going to teach freshmen English and a special course for all these juniors and seniors who had passed the state test but not one single English class. The goal–we were on a quarter system then: teach a year of English per quarter or at least do that for the seniors. Of course, everyone knew that if I did the traditional curriculum, such a thing would prove impossible. I took a look at the students. Smart (at least some of them), rebellious, lazy, unmotivated, potheads probably–some openly admitted it, and various combinations of these sorts of things. For fun the previous summer, I had taken a week long course on how to teach junior Advanced Placement English–I know, a strange idea of fun, but I loved it. Four days gave me little time to prepare so I decided I would use the freshman book for the freshmen, but incorporate what I had learned in the AP English course. For this other special class, I decided to try some really different tactics, including starting with a really different book than any had probably ever read. Because of the language–swear words in Spanish for starters, and because of the topics, e.g. prison, it seemed necessary to get the permission from the head of the English department. The book: A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca, one of my all time favorite books and a superb example of figurative language. The department head gave permission much to my astonishment–she must have taken a look at the students and decided anything was worth a try. The students actually read ahead, looked the author up online, found out he was giving a reading in Santa Fe and contacted him. We did go to Santa Fe for the reading and actually had lunch with him and his wife and baby–who would now be a teenager or nearly so. One of the students who went contacted me a couple of months ago to tell me he still had a signed copy of one of Baca’s books.

After that year, I taught math for years–algebra, geometry. Occasionally, I even cotaught chemistry or remedial science for those who had not passed the state test. About three weeks ago, the new principal called me in and asked me what I wanted to teach. I said English. He asked me how about senior English?! Next school year I will be teaching British literature. Now, I am trying to think how to make Beowulf and Canterbury Tales readable and exciting. I was told I could also incorporate modern British literature so I started looking at the Man Booker (sort of like a British and former British colonies version of the Pulitzer or something of that sort) short list. Much to my astonishment, I have read a lot of the authors on this list, but mostly those from the colonies like Nigeria and India. Now I am reading We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. This book won the Pen Hemingway and was short listed for the Man Booker. Probably more familiar authors for many readers would be names like Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Amitav Ghosh, and Kiran Desai. If any of you who read this blog have others suggestions for modern British literature, send me the names. The students may be in a temporary (or longer) state of shock when they find out they really do have to read, but they will get over it and might even discover its fun.