Dwight just posted about a tree he worked on at the university greenhouse where he volunteers. It was pushing against the roof, so it had to be shortened. They actually shortened the trunk itself, which I find amazing. Click through for a link to the post.
Category: Volunteer
This is not normal
We heard stun grenades in the distance as we lay in bed last night: ICE was showing their displeasure with citizens exercising their constitutional rights. At school this morning, a guard station had been set up to prevent goons from entering the building. We kept the classroom door locked. Some learners opted to join the classes remotely. As I left the building, a helicopter was circling just a few blocks away.
An empty classroom
Went for a quiet walk to process my thoughts. I should have been in the classroom working with recent immigrants. Instead, school is canceled for the rest of the week. This follows yesterday’s ICE actions in Minneapolis, which included the murder of Renee Good and the tear-gassing and shoving of staff and students at their school.
Neighbors
Picked up a coffee at Open Book, with its welcoming marquee, before catching a bus to school. The route passed the second marquee in Cedar-Riverside (“Little Mogadishu”). In my first class, I worked with Somali-American women studying to be Certified Nursing Assistants. In the final class, students marked the end of the semester by bringing an abundance of delicious Somali food, including, of course, the obligatory sambusas.
The American Dream lives on in the classroom
It was a morning of Certified Nursing Assistant and English Language Learning with mainly Somali immigrants. These word choices by learners demonstrate the classroom as a safe space. Their attitudes were remarkable, especially given the appalling statements made by the POTUS this week. The fear of arbitrary race-based detention and deportation is a disturbing reality in Minneapolis today.
Focusing on core objectives
Over the years, I’ve learned it’s important to avoid over-correcting English Language Learners and focus on the primary learning objective. When marking sentences today, the goal was semantic comprehension: using vocabulary words correctly in sentences. It took effort to assess their grasp of meaning and context while being lenient on other mistakes. The impulse to correct everything is powerful.
Codifying instinct
As is often the case, I learned something about English in the classroom today that I only knew intuitively. A few specific verbs, like stop, remember, and quit, change their meaning when followed by an infinitive versus a gerund. ‘Stopped to go’ and ‘stopped going’ have different meanings. In fact, that difference might even make the bathroom gerund example in the photo nonsensical.
A bowl of comfort
I’d been looking forward to this yakisoba bowl at Zen Box Izakaya all day. I’d left home for school as the sun was rising after a late night (for us), and I’d taken on an extra class, a reading group. But it was a joy to work with the adult learners, always in good spirits, always trying hard despite fitting in their classes with family and job commitments.
Signs of the times
Spent my morning in a safe place, a classroom, where I get to practice kindness, patience, and respect. On the notice boards, instructions are posted that attempt to empower us in the face of external threats.
The irony of a Carnegie library
Worked with an adult English language learner in this beautiful Carnegie library as I do most Friday mornings. The library, located in a disadvantaged neighborhood where 38% of residents live below the poverty line, was built with funds from a benefactor who accumulated immense wealth on the backs of working people and presided over the worst labor conflict in American history.