Teaching Profanity

I looked around the room the very first day of my English as a Second Language Class and wondered what I'd gotten myself into. My class was comprised of three Polish guys -- Jakub, Krzysztof, and Aleks, a Nigerian named Solomon, Petras from Lithuania, Ousmane from Ivory Coast, a little South Korean girl named Noah, and C.J., who came to us from the nearly third-world Albany, Georgia. The average height of my students would have been around 6'7", but little Noah barely hit 5 feet, bringing the average down considerably.

I passed out copies of the required reading, Phil Jackson's Sacred Hoops. Now, I'll readily admit that I'm not an expert teacher. This was my first day in the classroom, and to top it all, I'd been given no curriculum. In fact, until I devised my own curriculum, I'm not sure one existed that focused on teaching teenagers from different continents enough English to pass the SAT in nine months. But the one thing I was absolutely sure about was that they had to read to be successful. And to get them to read, I had to find books that interested them. Phil Jackson has won more NBA titles than any coach in history. He was Michael Jordan's coach during the years the Chicago Bulls dominated the NBA. I was pretty sure he could keep those guys' attention.

And then I handed out the spelling and vocabulary books, explaining that since we needed to cram as many English words as we could into their brains before the SAT, they would be required to write five sentences, each using a new vocabulary word correctly, every night as part of their homework.

The next day, the boys and Noah arrived for class and turned in their vocabulary assignments. That evening, I checked over them for accuracy, and when I got to Solomon's, I laughed out loud.

The vocabulary word was "profane." And Solomon, the one his teammates called "preacher," because he was a just little over the top with his devotion to Christianity at the Christian school, and who struggled mightily with English, had written, "It was profane for the soldiers to stable their whores in the church."

He got an A. It was a perfectly correct use of the word "profane."

Most English majors, it seems, devise the same backup plan if all their other dreams don't come true.  The safety net?  We can all teach English.

I resisted teaching for many years, mostly because I didn't believe I had the patience to be a teacher.  But four years ago, I volunteered to oversee an international student program at my children's Christian school.  The school, over the course of two years, hosted nearly twenty high school boys from several different countries.   What they had in common was that they were all very, very tall, and they all played basketball.  

My boys came from Poland, France, Nigeria, Lithuania, Ivory Coast, Canada, and the Canary Islands.  A few did not even speak English when they came to the school.  The English teacher, a nice enough woman who had her hands full with the school's regular kids, put her foot down one day and refused to give extra help to the international students.

I was frantic.  Without a sympathetic English teacher, these boys would flounder.  And really, they needed a high-speed course focused on helping them pass the SAT and preparing them for freshman English -- assuming they actually made it to college.

The school administrator said to me, "You're so concerned about their English.  Why don't you teach it?"

And I responded, "I will."  

And then he said, "Oh, and we have a young lady from South Korea who is an exchange student with one of our school families.  She'll be in your class, too."

It's one thing to teach English.  But teaching English as a second language to ten young men and one girl, all from different countries and cultures, when I'd never taught before?  

I was scared.