The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Sometimes, if the students did an art therapy project, they would line up at the front of the room afterward to show their classmates what they had made. (The school also employed a full-time social worker, Stephanie Onan, who routinely saw students from all sorts of backgrounds to discuss serious issues including child abuse, suicidal ideation, pregnancy, drug use, and various experiences common among the refugee population, such as rape, parent loss, and exposure to extreme levels of mass violence.) Miss Pauline always separated siblings, as Mr. Williams did when he broke the class into smaller groups. That morning, she beckoned to Jakleen for the first group. She and Mariam conferred hastily in Arabic; they seemed anxious at being separated. Mariam remained seated, her long hair pulled back into its habitual braid, as Jakleen, in her hijab, sullenly stuffed a pair of white earbuds in her ears and left the room with Miss Pauline. “I hate group,” Jakleen told me later. I thought it was probably good for her.

  Mr. Williams worked with the students who remained. After covering greetings, the school environment, and descriptions of time, Mr. Williams moved on to the kind of language that students might expect to hear on a visit to a store. Their textbook included various lessons on American culture, and this one had to do with different work environments. Mr. Williams put photographs on the Smart Board, showing types of jobs a person might have in America: a food server working at McDonald’s, a store clerk selling items at Walmart, a firefighter wearing all of his gear. The students discussed the images for a while. Then Mr. Williams walked over to the whiteboard and wrote examples of the sort of language that they were going to practice that morning.

  Worker:

  How may I help you?

  What size do you need?

  What color . . . ?

  Can I show you . . . ?

  Customer:

  I’m looking for some/a _________ [green shoes].

  Yes, that would be great!

  Mr. Williams asked the students to stand up so that they could behave as if they were customers trying to buy something. He told them to pretend that they had just walked into Walmart and needed school supplies.

  “Hi! How may I help you?” Mr. DeRose said to Mariam.

  Mariam looked bewildered. She had none of her younger sister’s ferocity, and her face radiated soft vulnerability mixed with a hint of panic.

  “Hi! How may I help you?” Mr. DeRose asked again.

  “Backpack,” Mariam said eventually, in an uncertain voice.

  “Okay, that will be three hundred dollars!” said Mr. DeRose.

  Stephanie burst out laughing at the absurd price, which threw Mariam into a state of embarrassed confusion. A rosy blush crept over her face. Had she made a gaffe? Mr. DeRose attempted to reassure Mariam that she had done nothing wrong, yet she seemed too chagrined to listen. The students practiced asking for various items they might need at school for another ten minutes, and then did a written exercise along the same lines. At the end of the lesson, Miss Pauline returned with the rest of the students. When the bell rang for lunch, Jakleen took Mariam’s hand and pulled her along on their way to the cafeteria in search of food. Like many of the other newcomers, Jakleen and Mariam had adopted the habit of pushing their way through the school’s jammed hallways and scaling four flights of stairs to the cafeteria, then turning around and walking back downstairs carrying disposable cardboard lunch trays to eat in Room 142. It was more peaceful there, compared with the chaotic cafeteria. Mr. Williams’s room represented an oasis of safety in an otherwise jumbled environment where everybody was unintelligible. As a result, the newcomers formed their own separate community, a little apart from the rest of the school. They stayed on the periphery of things. As I watched the girls go, I saw that Jakleen carried a pink backpack, while Mariam’s was lavender with white polka dots. Neither had cost close to $300, and the girls knew their price—Mariam’s skill at listening to spoken English simply was not good enough yet to hear that Mr. DeRose had said the words “three hundred.”

  * * *

  Over the course of the school year, learning would take place in Room 142 at varying rates, depending upon an interplay of factors. In addition to language proximity, exposure to trauma also influenced the rate at which students acquire knowledge. Miss Pauline had explained to Mr. Williams that students still coping with traumatic events were likely to have increased activity in the amygdala. At the same time, there was typically decreased activity in those parts of the frontal lobe where learning takes place. Mr. Williams could go over and over a given lesson, but if a student was in a triggered state, he or she might not learn readily, no matter how good the teacher was.

  By the middle of October, most of the students who had been with Mr. Williams since the beginning of the school year were starting to move into early production. Stephanie, from Mexico, and Uyen, from Vietnam, had raced ahead of other students and were producing full sentences already. Nadia and Grace, from Mozambique, showed high comprehension and were able to respond appropriately, albeit in sometimes muddled ways, which was typical of the early phase of production. The Iraqi sisters Mariam and Jakleen, on the other hand, seemed to ping-pong between high comprehension and no comprehension, and I wondered if traumatic memories might be interrupting their learning, but I didn’t know enough about their backgrounds to judge. Saúl, the unaccompanied minor from El Salvador, was starting to appreciate how many cognates English had with Spanish. Hsar Htoo, whose family was originally from Burma, appeared to be easing his way gingerly into early production; he was getting better at reading and listening, although speaking remained difficult. And Solomon and Methusella, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, were astonishing Mr. Williams with the rate at which they were rocketing from preproduction straight into production.

  Even as all this was happening, new students continued to show up throughout the fall, at the rate of roughly one per week. The next to arrive was Dilli. Impossibly tall, sixteen-year-old Dilli had a body like a reed, and her head was covered in wild skinny braids that pointed in all directions. She came from Eritrea and spoke Kunama—the same language as Amaniel, although Dilli seemed too shy to speak to anybody. She watched everything that happened in total silence, keeping her face impassive. I did not know anything about Dilli’s background for a long time, because it was hard to locate an interpreter who spoke Kunama, but eventually I learned that she and her parents had come to the United States directly from a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Her older sister had been left behind (she was married with children of her own), although Dilli’s family was hoping she might join them in the United States at some point in the future.

  Two more students from Dilli’s home country arrived in quick succession. Ksanet, an ambitious young woman who dressed in tailored blazers, appeared in the classroom in the middle of October. A few weeks later, Ksanet’s younger brother, Yonatan, joined her. At nineteen, Ksanet became the oldest student in the room; Yonatan was seventeen. They spoke Tigrinya, the primary language of more than half Eritrea’s population. Even though they shared a home country, Ksanet and Yonatan could not communicate with Dilli or Amaniel—the Kunama people constitute a small minority and their language is closer in origin to Luo, Dinka, and Maasai, whereas Tigrinya is a Semitic language that is more closely related to Arabic.

  Mr. Williams had taught many students from Eritrea before, and he was not surprised to receive four young people from that country in the space of one month. Shortly after Yonatan and Ksanet joined the class, some of Mr. Williams’s former students who spoke Tigrinya began haunting Room 142. A young woman named Luwam attached herself closely to Ksanet and began appearing in the classroom so regularly that one day Mr. Williams joked about Luwam being his newest student, before he shooed her out of the room.

  From his previous students, Mr. Williams knew that Eritrea shares a contested border with Ethiopia, and the two countries have warred frequently over that territory. Military service is compulsory in Eritrea and can last indefinitely; the army keeps young people for as l
ong as they need bodies. The oppressive regime has caused a large-scale exodus. Months later, Yonatan and Ksanet would reveal to Mr. DeRose that they had been thrown into prison when their family had attempted to leave. After they were released, they slipped over the border into Ethiopia, where they lived in a refugee camp before resettling in the United States.

  Lisbeth showed up in Room 142 toward the end of October, around the same time as Ksanet and Yonatan. She had hair that grew in long corkscrew curls, big brown eyes, a mobile face, and a personality as animated as an arcade game. Her wardrobe appeared better suited to a dance hall than a classroom, and she flirted with her teachers as well as her peers. Unlike the other students, she was almost never quiet. She presented a variety of behavioral challenges, but at the same time she acted like a catalyst. Her splashy, boisterous personality added an element of vivacity that had been otherwise missing from the classroom, and her intense desire to communicate with everyone transformed the social interactions taking place there. Basically, Lisbeth got everybody talking.

  Because I speak some Spanish, Lisbeth was able to explain to me that she had grown up in the same part of El Salvador as Saúl, an area known as Chalatenango. Stephanie, from Mexico, instantly befriended her. Within days of Lisbeth’s arrival, Stephanie was spending a lot of time pulling the new girl’s curls out to their full length, then letting them go and watching them spring back into place. In her first weeks, Lisbeth felt dazed by the scale of South, which was three times the size of the school she had attended in El Salvador. The building was vast and confusing—in one area, you could take half a staircase up to a level that was located strangely in between the second and third floors, and elsewhere there was an almost unreachable fifth floor, hidden inside the clock tower. All of the hallways in the enormous building looked exactly alike, each featuring shiny tan linoleum floors lit by long panels of fluorescent lights, and rows and rows of tan metal lockers. But Stephanie kindly walked Lisbeth upstairs to the cafeteria, showed her where her classrooms were located, and introduced her to Spanish-speaking friends. The two girls jabbered constantly in Spanish. This drew Stephanie away from Uyen (and distracted Lisbeth from paying attention to Mr. Williams), but soon Lisbeth adopted Stephanie’s habit of texting Uyen via Google Translate. Lisbeth also discovered that she could communicate fairly well with Nadia and Grace, who always understood her Spanish even if she could not entirely follow their Portuguese.

  Lisbeth was so chatty that Mr. Williams found he could not place her at the same table as Stephanie, Uyen, Nadia, or Grace. If he did, she would take over and nobody else would be able to work. After a while, Mr. Williams assigned Methusella to sit at the same table as Lisbeth; he hoped that Lisbeth’s effervescent personality would add some joy to Methusella’s life, and he hoped that Methusella would anchor flighty Lisbeth. Methusella was proving to be the most diligent student in the room, and Mr. Williams imagined that he would be able to concentrate despite the distraction. Instead, Lisbeth started coaching Methusella on popular phrases in Spanish, and pretty soon Methusella was greeting Lisbeth each day by saying “Cómo estás?”

  When Lisbeth arrived, most of the students were still remaining silent unless Mr. Williams called on them to speak—the room had continued to be preternaturally quiet. Everything began to change with Lisbeth’s arrival, however, as if the constant dialogue she was always trying to have jump-started the very idea of talking in general. Early attempts at conversation were terribly stilted. At one point, Methusella walked over to Yonatan, and said simply, “Tigrinya?” Yonatan nodded. That was the whole conversation: one word. But it represented one of the early attempts by a student (other than Lisbeth) to interact socially with somebody from a different country. They were trying, and the attempts began in earnest only after Lisbeth entered the room.

  If she wasn’t whispering to Methusella, or walking over to interrupt Stephanie, Lisbeth slid her smartphone out of her backpack and pretended to use it for translation purposes, which Mr. Williams allowed, but instead pulled up Facebook, where she had 4,990 friends, most of whom she had never met. Of all the newcomers in Room 142, Lisbeth was the queen of selfies. Throughout the school day, she took dozens of photographs of herself—alone, with another newcomer, or with one of the other Spanish-speaking students scattered throughout the building—which she posted to Facebook relentlessly. Lisbeth thought it was important to alert adults in the room about any content on social media that struck her as risqué. “Miss! Miss!” Lisbeth called out to me one day. “Mira!” She held up her phone to show me a Facebook post of a young woman wearing extremely short shorts and bending over to find something in a school locker. Lisbeth made a shocked expression, lifting her eyebrows skyward—she was aghast and bewitched and in love with the drama of it all. “Muy interesante,” I told her, and then asked about the assignment she was supposed to be doing.

  Mr. Williams vigilantly policed the use of electronic devices. After warning Lisbeth that she could use her phone only for translation, he confiscated the device for the rest of the day when he caught her using it for other purposes. She was not the only offender—Jakleen and Mariam also had a hard time putting down their phones, which they used frequently as a form of escape from the English-speaking environment. Jakleen surreptitiously texted friends in the Middle East using WhatsApp, while Mariam spent large portions of the school day whispering in Arabic to her boyfriend, using earbuds and a microphone hidden underneath her long hair. Abdullah was twenty-nine years old and lived in Iraq. They were engaged, she said. I expressed surprise that her fiancé was twice her age, but she said this was considered normal in Middle Eastern societies. When he caught the Iraqi sisters socializing, Mr. Williams confiscated their phones, too—but Mariam got away with the whispered calls for ages, because few teachers realized what she was doing.

  While all this was going on around them, Solomon and Methusella invariably remained absorbed in their schoolwork. Solomon wrote while sitting bent over at the waist, with his nose four inches from his notebook. This doubled-over posture exemplified for me his desire to focus scrupulously on his studies. If he was copying something that Mr. Williams had written on the whiteboard, then he rocked back and forth, bending over his table to write, and then leaning way back to look at the whiteboard with his forehead wrinkled in absorption. Methusella was just as diligent but twice as fast as his older brother at completing his lessons. The interruption of schooling was another major factor that interfered with the ability to acquire English, and Mr. Williams believed the reason that Solomon lagged behind his younger brother was largely related to this issue. From speaking with the boys, he had learned that Solomon had been taken out of school for several years, whereas Methusella had remained in school almost continuously.

  After I had been coming to the room every day for a while, Methusella began getting up out of his chair when he finished his work, coming over, and wordlessly putting his notebook down in front of me. He had figured out that I would happily correct his work if he did this. Other students soon began to follow his lead, but Methusella was the first to realize that I was an underutilized resource in Room 142. I admired his initiative, and once he began walking over to show me his work, I could see that his writing was more advanced than that of any other student in the room.

  * * *

  The bigger the class grew, the harder it was for Mr. Williams to control the increasingly complex behavioral dynamics while at the same time juggling his academic goals for the newcomers, all of whom were learning at varying rates. Some teachers are extroverted and shine at the front of a classroom with many eyes upon them. They are entertainers, essentially. Mr. Williams, on the other hand, was best at one-on-one interactions. As much as possible, he structured the school day so that he could work individually with students, pushing each of them along as he carefully monitored their progress. In this way, he came to know his students better than some teachers ever did, and under his thoughtful attention, they blossomed.

  On Yonatan’s f
irst day at South, I watched Mr. Williams work with him for about half an hour, as was his habit with each new arrival, so that he could assess the student’s reading and writing abilities. Yonatan had shown up wearing jeans, a charcoal-gray dress shirt, a large crucifix, and a stony expression. Mr. Williams broke the class up into small groups—Jakleen and Mariam were absent that day, but everybody else had turned up—and the Goodwill volunteers dispersed themselves around the classroom, sitting down at various tables. This freed Mr. Williams to focus on Yonatan, whom he asked to sit down beside him.

  They were reading a book called Using Rocks, which Mr. Williams had chosen deliberately because the subject matter allowed him to illustrate the meaning of unfamiliar words through pictures. Mr. Williams began by leafing through the book, pointing to the photographs, and saying the names of various structures made of rocks. The teacher wore a white dress shirt that day, with black trousers, and looked especially fastidious.

  “We have mountains,” said Mr. Williams. He turned a page. “What do you see in these pictures?”

  Silence.

  “This is a wall,” said Mr. Williams, answering his own question. “It is made from rocks. Look at that giant wall. This is wall, yes. W-A-L-L. But also rocks.”

  He turned to Yonatan. “Do you know what this is called?”