Progress, finally

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I think that if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Fatima has been in my class since January. She has since been joined by two more Afghan students, one girl and one boy, and today, finally, we had a part-time interpreter in the room with us, and I have never been more excited to meet someone in my entire life as I was this poor guy. We did some quick diagnostics stuff (a lot easier to have the kids see what math they understand when you can explain to them what you want them to do) and then I just asked him to ask them to tell him about themselves.

Fatima likes grapes. Like, that doesn’t seem like much, but it’s communication. There’s still a few days of Ramadan left but I am absolutely bringing this kid some grapes sometime soon. Two of them are from Kunar province and the third is from Khost province, which means all three of them were right on the border with Pakistan. I asked the translator to reassure them that if they wanted to talk to each other during class, that was absolutely okay– the three of them are as quiet as mice pretty much all the time— and I actually heard the other girl (who needs a code name) laugh for the first time. It was great.

I think it is actually Thursday, which is good, because I’ve thought the week was nearly over all week, and that kept being wrong, and if it’s actually Thursday than that ought to make tomorrow Friday, the actual end of the week. Nineteen days of school left.

Speaking of the end of the week, Wednesday (I think) was my nephew’s first birthday, so we’re going to be out of town all weekend to go to his birthday party in the north Chicago suburbs, so if you follow the YouTube channel, updates are probably going to be light. I didn’t post any new videos today for the first time since I started the channel because yesterday was that busy, and I think my plan right now is to do one video a day for tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, and then try and resume the normal schedule on Monday. We’ll see if I pull that off or not, but it’s the plan at the moment. At any rate, if I go radio silent over there, don’t panic. I haven’t quit anything, we’ve just hit a scheduling snag.

And now we’re getting somewhere

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

I am tired and annoyed for reasons that are not especially interesting, but today was a much better day at work than yesterday was, pretty much across the board. Fatima and I worked on numbers; she was already able to tell me one through about four or five, and so we worked on writing and identifying zero through nine, both as number symbols and the individual words. I have a similar process in mind tomorrow for letters, and I’ve bullied administration into letting a bunch of us out of a pre-scheduled meeting tomorrow morning so that we can all sit in my room and put our heads together to see what we can do. Apparently there are some funds available both through the program that brought her family into the country and through our own bilingual department, so we will see what we are able to get ahold of.

What we really need is to be able to secure the assistance of an interpreter. Even if it was only for an hour a day or something, some way these kids can actually talk to us would be tremendously helpful, and I’ve still had no luck in finding anything digital that can speak Pashto. We need a live person. I just don’t know yet how to find one. That’s the next big mission.

Oh, and I found something else out today that is gonna be super fun: I don’t know if this is official or not, but the word is there may be thirty more families landing in the district soon. Fatima has seven brothers and sisters, so if these thirty families are similar in size that’s quite a lot of new students to figure out. Speaking as an American, this is wonderful; speaking as someone who needs to teach these kids math, I’m shitting myself in terror.

(Mental note: try to figure out a way to ask her about her family. Brothers, sisters, that sort of thing. Second mental note: I know Islam really doesn’t like representational art; make sure asking her to draw her family or something doesn’t violate a cultural taboo. Third mental note: learn everything about everything.)

On actual helpful ed tech

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I am tired– okay, that’s always true, but it’s basically bedtime and I just wanted to take a moment for this– and so this will be a brief piece, but: my lesson for my 8th graders today involved something that I don’t do a lot in my classes: note-taking. I defined and provided a bunch of examples of rational numbers and irrational numbers, mostly me talking and writing on the board and the kids being surprisingly dutiful about writing it all down.

I have a student in one of my classes who speaks basically no English at all. She is– there is some debate about this, and every time I remember to just cut to the chase and ask her about it, she’s not in the room– either from Mexico or Guatemala, or possibly Guatemala via Mexico, I’m not sure, and she only speaks Spanish.

She uses Google Translate to get by in my classroom. I’ve got her paired with another kid who speaks a moderate amount of Spanish and they have their Chromebooks out at all times and the one kid will translate anything important I say into Spanish for her. Unfortunately, this wasn’t working very well today, since I was writing quite a bit and the other girl had to take her own notes as we were going.

She came up to me and told me (in English, which I was impressed by) that she didn’t understand what I’d said after the lecture, and the amazing thing is that between my own limited-but-not-nonexistent Spanish abilities and the translation software I was able to translate all of the notes for her in maybe an extra five or six minutes. At which point she happily– and, I noted, accurately– did her assignment.

I am very old-school in my teaching despite having spent last year literally working as an ed tech advocate. It’s nice when something works like it’s supposed to and actually makes my job easier.

On refugees and Christianity, again

Luther M. Siler9 Comments

24OPINION-diptych-articleLarge.jpg
On the right, Rouwaida Hanoun, a Syrian five-year-old who is, as far as I know, still alive.  On the left, Anne Frank, who is not.

There are– it is horrifying to think, but it is true– people who believe that the orange fascist currently occupying the White House is a Christian.  Many of these people are the same people who believed Barack Obama to not be a Christian, so it’s immediately and apparently clear that when they say “Christianity,” what they mean is “White supremacy,” and they have little to no idea of what Jesus actually preached, what he might have believed, or– rather importantly– what he looked like.

I noticed this morning that the post I wrote about refugees last year is spiking in page views again, which is not surprising.  The monster in the White House has chosen to ban desperately frightened and endangered people– the “least among us” who Jesus spoke of– from our country, has deliberately decided to let children die rather than incur even the slightest risk to people who look like him.  He has, of course, excluded his business partners from these calculations; if  you are wealthy enough for him to have business dealings with, you are a Person, of course; Rouwaida Hanoun is not.  When I wrote the post last year we had a President who, while he made bad decisions in any number of ways, I believed fundamentally cared about people.

Unfortunately, that is no longer remotely true, and the man who was trying to keep Syrian refugees out of my state at the time is now Vice President.  Most of the time, I have trouble believing our current President is actually human.  It takes every bit of moral strength I have to recognize that the demented narcissist in the White House deserves as much compassion and dignity as anyone else by simple virtue of having been born a person.  Somebody or something fucked this man up; I don’t believe he was born this awful.

But that’s beside the point.  When I wrote that post last year, I was trying to be nice and trying to be the voice of reason.  You may recognize the tone; I use it around here from time to time when I’m writing something I want to be taken more seriously than usual.  At this point, I’m going to take a different tack: if you don’t think these people should be allowed into the country, if you think refugees (and people with green cards!  People who have been here, and are now separated from their families simply by virtue of having been somewhere else when the ban went into effect!) should be banned from the United States simply because of their religion, you’re a fucking monster.  You’re not a Christian.  Christ himself would rebuke you– he already has, in fact, in clear terms in the Bible you claim to believe is divinely inspired and true in its every word.

You are a bad person if you agree with this ban.  You are a racist and a monster and a coward and every bit as much of a piece of shit as the people trying to keep the Jews out of the country in the 1940s were. You are the exact same people saying the exact same things for the exact same reasons, only with “Jew” crossed out and “Muslim” written in.  And while I don’t want this to be true and I try to be a better person, I really wish there was a Hell so I could see the look on your face when you end up there. Because Jesus has been clear on your responsibilities in this matter.  If you’re not a Christian, you don’t have to follow Jesus.  I certainly don’t.  But he was perfectly clear on this, and you are the bad guys.  

As I was writing this, word came through Twitter that the ACLU has won a stay against this executive order, which is good, as it was wildly illegal from the start.  I set up recurring monthly donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood today.  You should too.