Generation 1.5

Occasionally students are placed in my academic ESL class that are trying, through a state-funded program, to complete high school. They can be anywhere in age from 16 to 21. Typically they immigrated to the U.S. in early or middle adolescence, young enough to pick up the spoken language with some facility. However, in the process, they have missed out a couple of crucial years of formal education. Their academic deficits tend to be grave.

Sometimes they are functionally illiterate in both their native language (that is, the language their parents speak at home) as well as English.

Often, to survive high school and find a place to fit in, they have attached themselves to the lowest social echelon. Hence, the Ukrainian gangsta rapper.

Their social skills tend to be equally undeveloped. In short, they have difficulty with impulse control and with attaching consequences to actions.

They make an uneasy fit amongst the sea of studious Asian grinds and the older immigrants determined to find a way to translate their former selves into American.

I'm tired today (as I joke to one student, "I was born tired!"), and pretty grouchy. I have just given my students a reading test that was just a teensy bit too difficult for most of them, and I am feeling ambivalent about it. On one hand, the reality is, This is the reality. This passage, adapted from a U.S. News & World Report article, is typical (albeit more interesting) of the sort of supplementary readings any Sociology 101 instructor might expect his students to understand. On the other hand, this will sink the boat for a handful of students (including my earnest little Iraqi lady) -- they will need to take this class again. They can't write at college level if they can't read at college level.

One of my high school completion kids, a louche Pakistani youth, seems surprised to see my written instructions on the board, reminding the class they must submit their research essay when they return on Tuesday. "What research essay?" he asks.

I lose my temper. I raise my voice. The research essay we've been working on for the past two weeks. Where have you been?

The boy shrugs. He habitually waltzes in thirty minutes late, sits in the back row, refuses to interact or look up. He doesn't consider himself an ESL learner; he would rather see himself as a native speaker who simply isn't a very good student. He'd rather blame his lack of success on his poor attitude, laziness, or even low IQ than admit that he can't learn because he doesn't really know the language very well.

Because he doesn't know any language very well. He speaks a form of domestic Urdu with his family, and a form of ghetto English on the street. He can recognize street signs and brand names in either language. But he can't read a novel or a newspaper editorial in either.

Now I'll admit I don't know how to teach ESL to people who aren't literate in their native languages. I don't know how people who are illiterate learn. I don't even understand how they can think properly (that is, abstractly and critically).

I don't understand how someone CAN'T learn to read, awash as the world is in the written word. I somehow managed to teach myself before I went to school, and I was no child prodigy.

I'm not allowed to verbalize these sentiments. "Everyone can learn," is the mantra. "No one is un-teachable."

Well, perhaps. But that student is not going to learn in this class, and so we get to fail together.