Slow Progress

I have a multi-lingual student in sixth period. He has only been in the States for about four months, and he is struggling to keep up with the language. The private school for which I work is his only education, meaning he is not getting any outside help with learning to speak English.

My private school is pretty fabulous except that it doesn't have multi-lingual program. That means that this student first encounters words like "love" and "desire" in esoteric Romantic poems.

Despite his grades, he quite intelligent. His comments are thoughtful but stunted in vocabulary. I made an impromptu visit to his math teacher, and she agreed with my assessment. The student excelled at the algebra because it is only numbers, but word problems posed a huge challenge.

I've been meeting with him during lunch about three times a week to try to help him. We read from Kindergarten phonics books while we slowly chew our peanut butter sandwiches; it's nice to know that a Russian national and Asian American can find common ground in PB&J.

Then, during sixth period, we jump forward about eight years into high-brow literature like Beowulf and Shakespearean Sonnets. In class though, it's much more difficult to devote so much time. Some students are aching to move faster while my Russian apprentice dissects every word, slowly leafing through his $60 Russian to English tome.

"Mr. Judo, what 'occur'?"

"Like 'happen.' When did it happen? When did it occur? The same." I find myself using an English I've never spoken before. My sentences are terse, and simple in their brevity. It's as if we've come to have a special language between us; a rhetoric somewhere between Russian and English.

He's challenging me in ways I never expected. I often ask him to look up the words, but many times I try to give him real-context examples to help solidify the impersonal text from the dictionaries. Sometimes, words are easily reduced to a simpler form. "What 'frenzy'?" "Like really angry."

The challenge comes when the words have no reduction. Today, "leaflet" really stumped me. I didn't want to concede a Merriam-Webster sterile response, but he didn't know what was "pamphlet" either. After about 30 seconds of rhetorical dancing, and my other native English-speaking students giggling, he finally understood.

Progress is slow, but enjoyable. Today, he read "once" correctly. Just three weeks ago, over lunch, when reading "Once upon a time," he said aloud "Awn-kay ee-pon a tim." Slow progress is still powerful.