An Education

Learning while teaching

Last year, I began working as an adult literacy volunteer at my neighborhood library. I’ve dabbled in volunteer work before, and for a long time pictured myself building houses like Jimmy Carter, but when I realized my carpentry skills were inferior to my ability to read and write I decided to go with my strengths. The online literacy-tutor training program was a bit of a grind, but I ground through it and got my certificate and set up a schedule to work a few hours a week.

My first student—if that’s the correct term—was a compact, shy woman with long silky hair and a wounded air. She told me she was from India and worked as an online beauty influencer and wanted to improve her English, because that’s the language she used on Tik-Tok. I had imagined my first student would be someone working their way through a thorny piece of literature, but I was here to serve, no matter what the cause. Her English was actually lovely, with a rounded, melodic accent, but she kept apologizing for it, as if any misspoken word gave me pain. I assured her that she spoke beautifully.

Photo by Ivan Shilov on Unsplash

The following week, when she came back, she told me, in a gush of confidence, that she had just extricated herself from an arranged marriage with an abusive man, who had insisted she stay at home all the time—literally all the time—and forbid her from having any social contact at all. He was never home, and flaunted a mistress or two, and refused most interaction with their young son, who was autistic. She told me all of this in her lovely accent, with all the right words, and then she added that her husband had recently left her and moved back to India and could not be reached for alimony, or interaction with their son, or to finalize their divorce. The more she confided in me, the more eloquently she spoke. “Your English is wonderful,” I told her, realizing that her husband must have been telling her that she could barely be understood. I understood her perfectly.

I didn’t see her after those two visits, but I hope the husband is still seven thousand miles away, so that her language skills remain intact.

I tutored a lot of women with terrible husbands. One of my regulars was an Israeli architect with three sullen, dark-haired daughters, whose ex-husband had also left her in the lurch. I helped her write a resume, and she came back week after week because she kept changing her mind about what kind of job she wanted, and we needed to revise the resume accordingly. She didn’t want to practice architecture anymore, that much she knew, but she had a Walter Mitty-like reinvention of her dream job each week: Marketing, then screenwriting, then real estate development, then back to marketing. Between resumes, she also had me help her write angry letters to her synagogue complaining about inadequacies in the parking, seating, after-service snacks, and so forth. I think she was just furious at the husband who had ditched her and their dark-haired daughters; even the resumes seemed to be a fist-shaking and rage at the way things were.

One of my favorite students was a Taiwanese stunt man named Eddie. His English was newly-minted and tentative, but he was a diligent student, and he liked me to drill him on vocabulary and pronunciation and then grade him on how well he’d done. One week, he came in with a script and asked me to run lines with him: He had decided to audition for acting roles. The script was stupendously stupid, a sci-fi concoction. He was auditioning for the role of a Chinese scientist, who in the script spoke like a half-wit—in trying to demonstrate that the scientist wasn’t a native English speaker, the screenwriter had written lines that made him sound like an infant. But that was the part Eddie wanted, so we went through it carefully. I played all the other parts, which was fun. Eddie was getting very good at his lines, but when I saw him the following week, he told me that his visa was expiring and he had to return to Taiwan to reapply. He was in a good mood in spite of this inconvenience, because a movie he’d filmed in Estonia the previous summer had just come out, and the artwork had a little image of him in the corner, crouched in a fierce battle pose. It was a martial arts movie, so not really in my wheelhouse, but I was so proud of him, and sorry to see him go.

Almost every week, a Chilean woman came in and had me help her write notes to various people—her neighbors, her landlord, her friends. Usually, the notes had some passive-aggressive intention, so they were tricky to write. For instance, she was offended that she had given her neighbors a book for their daughter and had never gotten a report from them about whether the daughter liked the book. She wanted me to write a note to them that somehow let them know that she had intended to give them more books, but since their response to this book had been inadequate, she would not be giving them more. This required me mastering verb tenses that I didn’t even know existed—future perfect continuous discontinuous tense, maybe? She challenged my verbal skills in a whole new way. Another week, she asked me to help her write a note to another neighbor suggesting that the neighbor keep her dog off the stairs in case she, my student, wanted to bring her cat on the stairs, because her cat might not like the dog. I dared to ask her why she didn’t simply keep her cat off the stairs, but she looked at me blankly, her grasp of English suddenly loosening. I returned to the note, once again challenged by the verb tenses—do not do the thing you didn’t yet do, in case it interferes with the thing I might do. Baffling. I did my best.

SHOW NOTES

—Confession: I did not dig the Han Kang book at all, so I bailed out halfway through it. Please argue with me if you found it brilliant. It was excruciatingly slow, and the repeated description of snow started to feel pointless and uninspired, and I wasn’t engaged with the characters at all. But maybe it’s just not my kind of book. I just started AUSTERLITZ by W.G. Sebald, hoping I connect with it more.

—APPLE CIDER VINEGAR, on Netflix, is hilarious. I love any story about scammers, so this was my cup of tea. Highly recommend.

—My worst-dressed list, for the 149th year running, is dominated by the handlers at the Westminster Dog Show. What a troubling display of ill-fitting print suits, semi-sheer stockings, and flimsy flats! The acute irony is, of course, that these same individuals spend countless hours fussing over the appearance of their dogs. The dogs looked good; the handlers’ bad outfits were truly eye-popping. This year’s Best in Show judge had it right, wearing a simple black pantsuit with a bit of sparkly embellishment. Otherwise, yikes.