by Helen Thorpe
“Large,” said Hsar Htoo in a tiny voice.
Mr. Williams had called on Hsar Htoo because the boy so rarely spoke; if the teacher didn’t ask him to talk, Hsar Htoo would happily have said nothing all day.
“All right, Uyen, can you say more? What else can we say? Uyen, what else? About our own class?”
“It is big,” said Uyen.
“Our classroom is big,” replied Mr. Williams.
“Um, the whiteboard,” said Uyen.
“Is it big?”
“It is large.”
“The whiteboard is large,” echoed Mr. Williams. “Okay.”
He turned to the other sister from Mozambique.
“Grace, let me hear more about our classroom.”
“The chair is short,” replied Grace.
“Okay,” said Mr. Williams.
A native speaker probably wouldn’t have said the chair was short, but Mr. Williams let that slide. He was cautious about correcting the newcomers—too much criticism and they fell silent, ashamed of how badly they spoke English. Generally, he tried to think of a better phrase, and then, without actually telling the teenagers that they were wrong, offer it as a potential alternative: “Or, you could say, the chair is small.”
Naming tangible objects was one way to make his students feel a little less lost. Mr. Williams walked around the room and pointed out additional things for them to name.
“Table,” the students called out.
Mr. Williams pointed at Mr. DeRose.
“Teacher,” they chorused.
Then Mr. Williams pointed toward a locked cabinet on the far side of the room.
“What other things do we have in our classroom?” he asked. “Guys, what are those back there?”
“Computers,” Nadia said softly.
Mr. Williams clapped at her success. Nadia and Grace had gone to school in the nearby suburb of Aurora for part of the previous school year. They also had the advantage of speaking Portuguese, a Romance language with many parallels to English. Mr. Williams believed they might know more words than anybody else in the room, although it was hard to tell during the preproduction phase, when all of the students were busy doing so much listening.
“Is there another word?” he asked, seeking to challenge his more advanced pupils. “How about if we say laptop computers? Or just laptops?”
Silence. A few of the students wrote down the new word, “laptops.”
“What else?”
“Blinds,” said Nadia.
“Okay, we have blinds,” said Mr. Williams, noting that Nadia’s vocabulary was impressive. “Windows and blinds.” He pointed to the windows, so that the other students could grasp what he was talking about. “And what’s this right here?”
“Fan,” said Stephanie.
“We have a fan,” confirmed Mr. Williams.
The temperature was going to climb to eighty-one degrees later that day and the classroom caught the full brunt of the morning sun. The teacher had the fan running at top speed, making a noisy hum. Mr. Williams asked his students to write sentences using the words they had generated, and then he walked around coaxing them along.
“Good!” he said over and over again. “Good!”
Constant encouragement—that was how he shepherded the foreign speakers toward the second phase of language acquisition, which was called “early production.” He sprinkled praise in the direction he wanted the students to go, as if he were putting down breadcrumbs to mark the path forward. To keep the kids talking, he told them over and over what they were doing right (never what they were doing wrong). After the lesson about classroom objects, Mr. Williams imparted the names of several states located near Colorado, and then worked on giving and following commands, something they had to understand throughout the rest of the school day. When they were not in Room 142, the students took classes in math, science, physical education, and the arts. They took math and science in special sections designated for ELA students, while they took gym and the arts with everybody else in the school. But they spent roughly half of each day with Mr. Williams, staying with him for multiple periods; in total, they spent twelve hours a week in his room. Studying English so intensively was grueling, and Mr. Williams tried to give them some kind of relief each day, such as standing up to speak, or playing games, or drawing—anything that would get them out of their purple plastic chairs and break up the monotony.
* * *
English contains roughly a quarter of a million words, and most native speakers of the language deploy about ten thousand of them. During the preproduction phase of language acquisition, which could last for three to six months, ELA students might acquire perhaps five hundred words. The students would be able to understand that many words in English, even though they might not be able to retrieve them and use them in a sentence properly. When they reached the second stage, early production, they might have a working vocabulary of about one thousand words. In both the preproduction and early production phases, second-language learners tend to be better at memorizing and repetition, but they struggle with producing original phrasing.
Mr. Williams had a few students who were already capable of early production, but many kids in his room remained stuck in preproduction. During this time frame, it was often hard for them to show Mr. Williams what they were learning, because they stayed so quiet. He knew to expect this, but to an outsider like me this period was baffling. I found it difficult to get a sense of students’ personalities when we could not talk to each other. It was even hard for me to hold on to the names of some of them because their names sounded radically different from what my ears were used to (for a while, I was writing Hsar Htoo’s name in my notebook as Sartu). What drew me to Room 142 was this very conundrum: I wanted to learn more about where these teenagers had come from and I wanted to puzzle out what their collective presence in this room said about the world. Which parts of the planet were producing the most refugees, and what were those people fleeing? In a deeper sense, being in this classroom allowed me to ponder what it meant to be fellow human beings who shared one globe, some with privileged lives, and some with lives that were much, much harder. Needless to say, Room 142 also turned out to be a fascinating vantage point from which to observe the presidential election.
The room spoke to me for personal reasons. My Irish-born parents immigrated to this country, and being with foreign-born kids and their families reminded me of experiences with my foreign-born cousins, aunts, and uncles. In the end, though, I found Room 142 most meaningful not because of what it reminded me of in my own past but for all it taught me about places I had never been—in some cases, places I had never even heard of before. Because I was learning as much as I could about the different countries represented in Room 142, trying to absorb as much as I could about each of the kids on a personal level when we didn’t share a language, and simultaneously trying to discern what it was the ELA teacher was doing, it took months for me to sort everything out; I might as well have been in preproduction myself at the start of the school year. There was a lot of flux in the room, with kids coming and going, and a few kids turned up who spoke languages I did not even know existed. Ultimately, I had to make a chart of the languages they spoke to keep it all straight. As the weeks and months flew by, however, the kids and I did learn essential things about one another. Imperfectly, for sure, but better than I imagined would be possible during August and September, when the kids were so quiet and Mr. Williams was talking so much but saying only such basic things.
I saw right away that I was lucky to be in the presence of this teacher, who thought about the well-being of his students from the first bell until the last. He wondered, for example, what effect I might have on his students. Sometimes, Mr. Williams and I stepped upstairs to the second-floor copy room, where teachers and paraprofessionals went to make photocopies or to eat their packed lunches, and we talked about my role in his classroom. “I think it helps them, to tell their stories, don’t you?” he mused one day
. And I could hear, behind the simple-sounding melody of his assertion, the harmony of a real question in his voice. “Maybe—it depends,” I answered. “Some of them might have lived through traumatic things, and they might not want to tell their stories. That’s fine. I would never push them to say more than they want. They have to feel empowered by the act of telling their stories.”
With this in mind, we came up with some ground rules. I would wait until the students had settled into school before trying to interview them; generally, I gave the kids several months to acclimatize. I also hired interpreters so that I could speak to each student in his or her home language. The interpreters and I met with individual students during their lunch period to explain my interest in their teacher and their classroom. If they expressed the desire to talk further, I asked about their backgrounds in a short interview, conducted in their home language. The students were free to say as much or as little as they desired. If it seemed that they had witnessed armed conflict, I did not ask them for details. Instead, I said I would like to meet their parents. I kept the interviews with students to half an hour at most—unless they invited me home—and I tried to have a light footprint, emotionally. After a while, I got to know three refugee families at a much deeper level. One family was from the Middle East, one was from Africa, and one was from Southeast Asia—the three regions producing the largest numbers of refugees. Understanding these families better enhanced my understanding of everything I saw transpire in the classroom.
Once I had explained my presence to the majority of the kids, Mr. Williams began asking me to help out a little bit, reading with the kids or playing some of the instructional games that he had invented. But I went to great lengths to communicate clearly with every student that I was not a member of the South High faculty, that I was a journalist visiting the classroom so that I could write a book, and that it was their choice whether or not to be included. In the end, twenty-one of the twenty-two students who spent large parts of the school year in Room 142 said they wanted to be part of the project. On the whole, my sense was that they felt a strong desire to tell the world what it was like to arrive in the United States from somewhere else, so that more people would understand how hard it was to negotiate such a transition. And they very much wished for people who lived in developed countries to know what was happening in places that were less fortunate.
* * *
Because teenagers are teenagers all the world over, the kids in Mr. Williams’s class were keen to interact with one another (far more so than they were to interact with me or their teacher), although they generally could not communicate by talking. I found it touching to watch their earliest attempts at friendship. In September, Stephanie started spending a lot of her free time with Nadia and Grace, the two sisters from Mozambique; they did not share a common language, but Spanish and Portuguese were similar enough that they could pretty much understand one another.
One day, upstairs in the bright, airy fourth-floor cafeteria—a cathedral-sized room with great banks of windows—Stephanie saw Uyen sitting at a table all by herself and asked the new girl from Vietnam if she would like to join the others. Uyen could not decipher either Spanish or Portuguese, but she and Stephanie figured out how to communicate, using the Google Translate application on their cell phones. Stephanie typed a text message in Spanish, used Google Translate to swap her words into Vietnamese, and asked Uyen what kind of movies she preferred. Uyen wrote back in Vietnamese, used Google Translate to convert the text into Spanish, and said that she loved horror movies. “So do I!” wrote Stephanie. One of Stephanie’s favorite movies was The Conjuring. Uyen said that was one of her favorites, too. Also, they both loved shoes. They agreed via Google Translate that the coolest shoes in the world were Converse High Tops, which they both wore to school every day. Stephanie and Uyen began holding hands in the hallways and eating lunch together all the time. Once Mr. Williams walked into the classroom to behold Stephanie sitting in Uyen’s lap, as Uyen stroked Stephanie’s hair and called her “my baby.”
Over lunch in the school’s cafeteria, Stephanie told me that she had been born in Denver and had attended school in the United States until the age of seven. When her parents separated, her mother had returned to Mexico, taking along her three daughters. Stephanie repeated third grade in Mexico and continued her schooling there through ninth grade. Then her mother began dating a new boyfriend, and the family went through a period of strife. Ultimately, her mother decided that she could no longer manage her teenage daughters, who were ignoring her commands. She sent all three girls back to Denver to live with their father. Stephanie was glad, because she had not liked her mother’s new boyfriend; also, she found her father less histrionic than her mother. Stephanie seemed highly pleased to have returned to the United States.
Uyen and I spoke much later, after her English had improved radically. She said she preferred to talk without an interpreter. We were sitting in the bleachers in the school’s enormous, echoing gymnasium, watching other students play dodgeball. Uyen’s parents were also divorced, and, like Stephanie, she had moved to the United States to live with her father. For Uyen, however, the change had been painful; she had never lived outside of Vietnam, and she was intensely homesick. Her eyes filled with tears when she mentioned FaceTiming her mother every day, but she believed her father’s invitation to live with him in the United States gave her a chance at a better future. When she arrived in Mr. Williams’s class that fall, Uyen was still adjusting to living with her father, a stepmother, and two half siblings for the first time, even as she was making the epic adjustment to a new country. I could see why a friendship had sprung up so quickly between her and Stephanie. Neither was a refugee, but both were dealing with the consequences of broken families, which was another form of hardship.
While Stephanie had forgotten most of her English during the years she had spent in Mexico, lost words began reappearing in her mind within a few weeks. Uyen had studied English in Vietnam, and she seemed determined to keep up with her new best friend. Nadia and Grace also called out answers frequently. Of all the factors that affect how easy or hard it is for a given student to learn English, what linguists call “language proximity” generally has the greatest effect. Portuguese and Spanish both evolved from Latin, and sentences in those languages are basically structured in the same way as English sentences (a subject, followed by a verb, then an object). English and the Romance languages also share a vast number of cognates. While English is a Germanic language, it includes so many words of Latin origin that more than 30 percent of its vocabulary is either the same or highly similar in Spanish. The two languages include thousands of perfect cognates (altar is translated as altar) and thousands of near-perfect cognates (furious is translated as furioso). Because of the great similarities between English and Spanish or Portuguese, Stephanie, Nadia, and Grace were having an easier time than the other students acquiring their new language. Saúl would progress rapidly as well once he recognized how much Spanish had in common with English, but he had not yet spent as much time in the United States as Stephanie, Nadia, or Grace.
English is much harder to learn for speakers of Asian languages. Most Asian languages are tonal, employ characters, and structure sentences differently. Because of the dominating presence of Portuguese missionaries starting in the seventeenth century, Vietnamese is written using the Latin script, and this facilitated Uyen’s ability to write in English. Hsar Htoo did not have the same advantage, however, for all three of the languages that he knew fluently—Karen, Burmese, and Thai—used other kinds of lettering. And Hsar Htoo could not rely on finding cognates between Karen and English or Burmese and English. The languages he spoke and the language he was trying to learn shared no common ancestry and did not even employ the same sounds. For Hsar Htoo, acquiring English would be more difficult than for anybody else in the room. When Mr. Williams posed questions to the class, the four girls frequently volunteered responses. It was the two boys—Saúl and Hsar Htoo—that
the teacher had to prod into talking.
* * *
Even as Mr. Williams was trying to manage his original students, he kept having to incorporate additional kids into Room 142. At the end of September, the newcomer class doubled in size when six new students arrived over the course of four days. The fall months typically generated a rush at South, for the city’s refugee resettlement agencies were hustling to assist all the new arrivals sent to them at the close of the fiscal year, when international aid groups tried to meet year-end quotas. Amaniel, the next student to arrive, was fourteen years old. He was originally from Eritrea, a country with an authoritarian government and a long history of conflict with its neighbor, Ethiopia. Amaniel had transferred from another school, and had already lived in the United States for long enough to adopt the habit of wearing his pants down low. He had to hold on to his belt buckle to keep his jeans on his body when he strode around the classroom. Amaniel also wore multiple gold necklaces and had a star cut into his hair. He spoke Kunama, a language spoken by one of Eritrea’s ethnic minorities.
Solomon and Methusella arrived the following day. The two boys, obviously brothers, were both shy, quiet, and handsome. They had high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, which lit up when they smiled. In the weeks that followed, I noticed them wearing the same articles of clothing over and over—sports-oriented T-shirts and tracksuit jackets in carefully matched colors—but their clothes were always spotless. Methusella’s favorite shirt was a yellow-and-red-striped Barcelona soccer jersey, while Solomon’s was a medium-blue long-sleeved New York Giants shirt. Methusella was fifteen years old, and Solomon was seventeen. They were from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they spoke Swahili. The DRC had been the site of the largest conflict anywhere on the African continent, and certain provinces in the DRC continued to experience serious violence even after the official ceasefire. If any of his students had witnessed bloodshed firsthand, Mr. Williams understood, it was likely to be these two striking, well-dressed boys.
