The home-cooked arepa. The colorful pencil, offered during break. The stuffed doll brought back from Puerto Rico: There was nothing more touching than when one of my adult ESOL students took the time to give me a gift.
After a year of teaching, under almost all circumstances, I stopped accepting them.
Dependence. My students--mostly Latino--had a major cultural predilection to it. Growing up, they stood up when their teachers entered the room, and called them maestros. In the U.S., they were heavily dependent on the social-service safety net. They were women of color taught by a white male. If they had jobs, most worked as housekeepers, where they busted butt and kept their mouths shut. Everywhere they looked, the power differential was against them.
But for immigrants, any pathway to success in the U.S. must be a path away from dependence and toward independence.
Every time students asked me for my opinion during a class discussion. Every time they asked me for my perfect pronunciation. Every time they waited for my approving smile after giving me a slice of cake--built their affinity for me. It filtered their class experiences through me. It made me the source of All Language Knowledge. It made them rely on ... me.
Are there times to accept gifts? Absolutely, and I'll discuss that more in a future post. Are there times to jump in with a correct pronunciation? Sure. In the classroom, is some reliance on the teacher a good thing? Yes, at least at first.
But my students came in with tons of dependence, and didn't need any more from me, that's for certain. So with every subsequent decision, I started asking myself one question: How will this help my students become more interdependent and independent?
It's a question all of us ESOL teachers should be asking ourselves every day.
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