It's been a pretty normal two weeks here for J and myself. I've been staying busy with sub jobs (thank goodness) and J has been working hard at school. I recently took on an after-school job as a tutor to help add some stability to my schedule, so every afternoon Monday through Thursday I tutor an eighth grader here at the apartment.
My student, we'll call him Paul, is a fourteen year old eighth grader, repeating the grade to switch over from an all Chinese school into an all English school. He tested on the third grade reading level for English, and having subbed in the third grade this week I can attest to the correctness of that diagnosis. (Honestly, my third graders have a pretty good lead on this guy, but they do go to an uppity kind of school so I'm giving him a break in the comparison).
Now, obviously Paul is brilliant to be able to make the transition at all. He's still excelling in all his non-language based courses like math and science, but that being said, his English is awful (a word he doesn't know-but I'm not judging. My Chinese is virtually nonexistent). We've had some pretty hilarious conversations. It takes us about an hour and a half to go over the twenty vocab words he gets each week. Words like "detriment" and "oblique" take a bit of explaining. He's doing his best.
I've learned a lot from Paul these past two weeks. For someone with such a small English word bank, he still manages to wax philosophical in his own way.
Important observations
First: He wears plaid shirts exclusively, usually in shades of red and black. On what I can only assume is laundry day he has a bright green tee shirt that he subs until the plaids are good to go.
Second: He always runs up the stairs to our apartment (listening to the sound of the thuds, I think he averages three stairs a stride) so he arrives at each lesson completely out of breath.
Third: He laughs every time he reads a word he doesn't know, or when he learns the meaning of a new word, or when he finally understands the meaning of what you're trying to explain. Even if you're talking about something that isn't funny at all. (Last week we "discussed" poverty, martyrdom and the plague...yep. he laughed right through).
Fourth: He is very, very Chinese.
In our first meeting, I was trying to ascertain the most difficult thing about learning English in his view so that I could help him improve. He managed to explain that the hardest part of the process was making the decision to commit to the language, because he knew that becoming fluent with a language means taking on a portion of that language's culture, and he wanted to make sure that I knew that he really despises Western culture, its values, its slang. In essence he was holding back because he didn't want to become more like...me. He finished by saying that in the end, he knew his future would be vastly improved by learning English so he had made an intellectual decision to plunge forward with English studies, but it made his heart ache.
He wishes he said it like that-what he really said was something like "emotions- no, but intell...ect?" (pointing at his head) understand this is more good."
While slightly aghast at his candor, I was sincerely impressed with his insight. (And yes, he now knows to say "better" instead of "more good" in case any of you were cringing). It's true that once you learn a language well enough to let your thoughts roam about in its words, you naturally give a part of yourself over to it. How else could you ever understand metaphors or, harder still, idioms? All this coming from a boy who doesn't know what a comma is, or the words "assignment" or "essay" (yes, we started working on those first). Sheesh.
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