Would you want to learn your new country’s language while staring at a computer screen, navigating intermittent Internet, straining to hear your teachers’ voices against the soundtrack of your active household, and typing your questions and answers into a chat-box? Me neither. Yet Khadra, Abdulhakim, Maryam, Irene, Mohammed, Rosa, Patenga, Faiso, Teebe, and other students learned to write English this way during the 2020-2021 school year.
Minneapolis, Minnesota is blessed with residents who have migrated here from around the world. As just one indication of our diversity, ninety different languages are spoken in the homes of our public school children. The Adult Education Program of the Minneapolis Public School District provides English language classes (among other subjects) to adults of all ages, many of them working towards citizenship. I served as a volunteer in Writing 2, serving with brilliant teacher Diana Mulcahy. This year, we studied three paragraph styles: narration, description, and definition.
Twin Pandemics (Narration)
We did not know to say ‘good-bye’ during our last class together in mid-March of 2020. Our governor’s order – ‘Stay at Home’ – came too suddenly. I would have said ‘Farewell. Be safe. Take care.’
In the early weeks, in the relative safety of my situation as a retired law professor, I worried about the students’ more precarious situations. I suspected that some were working even harder than before filling orders in the Amazon warehouse. I was certain that many had lost their jobs as restaurant cooks and dishwashers, as wheelchair attendants at the airport. I feared most for those who worked as personal care attendants in nursing homes, work that had brought them satisfaction but now posed invisible, possibly mortal risk.
Then at dusk, May 25th, 38th and Chicago: George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Minneapolis was engulfed in a long overdue racial reckoning. The protests were powerful, the message unmistakably just. But with nightfall came vandalism, looting, fires, and two deaths. Our school was in the middle of it all, a short stroll from the Third Precinct Police Station that was set afire, the post office that was left in ruins, the Target Store that was ransacked.
One bright morning between those nights, I checked on our school. It stood unscathed amid its neighbors, some still smoldering, some shouting with graffiti. Many small Black- and immigrant-owned businesses had been damaged. I wondered whether these May days and nights reminded my students of why they fled their countries of origin to come to the United States.
In the early weeks, in the relative safety of my situation as a retired law professor, I worried about the students’ more precarious situations. I suspected that some were working even harder than before filling orders in the Amazon warehouse. I was certain that many had lost their jobs as restaurant cooks and dishwashers, as wheelchair attendants at the airport. I feared most for those who worked as personal care attendants in nursing homes, work that had brought them satisfaction but now posed invisible, possibly mortal risk.
Then at dusk, May 25th, 38th and Chicago: George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Minneapolis was engulfed in a long overdue racial reckoning. The protests were powerful, the message unmistakably just. But with nightfall came vandalism, looting, fires, and two deaths. Our school was in the middle of it all, a short stroll from the Third Precinct Police Station that was set afire, the post office that was left in ruins, the Target Store that was ransacked.
One bright morning between those nights, I checked on our school. It stood unscathed amid its neighbors, some still smoldering, some shouting with graffiti. Many small Black- and immigrant-owned businesses had been damaged. I wondered whether these May days and nights reminded my students of why they fled their countries of origin to come to the United States.
Schoology (Description)
From September 2020 through May 2021, Writing 2 took place through Schoology, an online learning program. We hunkered down in front of our computers: I was in my sprawling rambler by the Mississippi River; I imagined my students in the two- and three-story apartment buildings where Latinx families live or in the high-rises that house Minneapolis’ African communities. In Schoology, our cameras turned off, we were mere royal blue tabs with first names. As we arrived to class, the tabs lined up down the left side of my computer screen. When a student spoke, her tab pulsed at the top of my screen, and I strained to hear her voice. I heard her household too: the bubbling of Somali or the thrumming of Spanish; children chattering, doors banging, pans clanking; the tinny sound of her child’s teacher online. With no visual of her, this soundtrack deepened my sense of her. Sometimes a student would appear, disappear, and re-appear as his Internet connection flickered; I imagined him, untethered, floating in space between our homes. The lessons that our teacher Diana prepared – paragraphs to analyze, grammar rules to study – appeared on the screen. Students typed their responses into the chat-box. Many classes, I took a few students into a virtual ‘conference room’ to work on a lesson or pulled one student’s paragraph from my email for a one-on-one editing consultation. I typed words into the lesson or, as awkwardly as a first grader, circled and wrote words in red with my cursor. I also clapped and cheered—a lot. And I asked, ‘Does this make sense?’ Often the students answered, ‘Yes, teacher. Thank you, teacher.’ At the end of each two-hour session, I was exhausted by this stripped-down distanced learning: so stuffed with English language, yet learners only virtually present.
Three Ladies Liberty (Another Narration)
May 2021, an edgy time: When will spring finally settle in? How do we get the vaccine? Has enough changed since last year?
In Writing 2, we focus on adjectives: those magical words that tell a story with precision. Diana shows the class a photograph of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. First, we work on some new vocabulary: pedestal, torch, symbol. Then we ask our students to generate adjectives to describe this statue, and the students offer the obvious ones. Tall – how tall? We could look it up. Green – or is it blue? We’ll call it blue-green. Loose clothing, maybe like people wore in ancient times? Diana then presses for the advanced adjectives, the ones that convey feelings, emotions, interpretations. She offers ‘impressive.’ No tabs pulse in response.
A slight pivot and the lesson takes flight: Diana asks about similar statues in our students’ home countries. A student from Mexico speaks of the resplendent golden Angel de la Independencia, on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City, a female angel of victory symbolizing Mexico’s liberation from Spain. A student from Somalia speaks of Hawo Tako, a legendary female fighter for freedom memorialized in both a statue and the country’s currency. Now tabs pulse and voices chime out: ‘Strong.’ ‘Proud.’ ‘Beautiful.’ ‘Powerful.’
In Writing 2, we focus on adjectives: those magical words that tell a story with precision. Diana shows the class a photograph of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. First, we work on some new vocabulary: pedestal, torch, symbol. Then we ask our students to generate adjectives to describe this statue, and the students offer the obvious ones. Tall – how tall? We could look it up. Green – or is it blue? We’ll call it blue-green. Loose clothing, maybe like people wore in ancient times? Diana then presses for the advanced adjectives, the ones that convey feelings, emotions, interpretations. She offers ‘impressive.’ No tabs pulse in response.
A slight pivot and the lesson takes flight: Diana asks about similar statues in our students’ home countries. A student from Mexico speaks of the resplendent golden Angel de la Independencia, on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City, a female angel of victory symbolizing Mexico’s liberation from Spain. A student from Somalia speaks of Hawo Tako, a legendary female fighter for freedom memorialized in both a statue and the country’s currency. Now tabs pulse and voices chime out: ‘Strong.’ ‘Proud.’ ‘Beautiful.’ ‘Powerful.’
Resilience (Definition)
According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, resilience is ‘the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.’ A second definition is ‘the ability of a substance to return to its original shape after it has been bent, stretched or pressed.’ I hold my students as exemplars of resilience. With them in mind, I question these definitions of resilience as too tidy. My students’ recovery has not been ‘quick’ – it has been 24/7, a grind with no breaks in the action. And ‘stretched and pressed’ as they have been, they have not returned to their ‘original shapes.’ As we parted this May, all of the tabs pulsing in frenetic ‘good-byes’ and ‘thank you teachers’ and ‘see you next falls,’ I saw them as better than ever: more durable, more flexible, more buoyant. One of the students captured their resilient spirit when she wrote about her favorite season in her last essay: ‘Spring is the season that resolves all the year’s problems.’
After several decades as a law professor, Deborah Schmedemann now volunteers with new Americans, teaching adult English language learners and participating in her church’s refugee and immigration justice ministries. Her essays have been published in various anthologies. She lives in Minneapolis, Chicago, and a lake-side cabin in Wisconsin.
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