The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  “Mr. Speicher!” called out his classmates.

  “Who is the nurse?” asked Yonatan.

  “Ms. Kelly!”

  “Who is the janitor of South High School?” asked Saúl.

  Nobody knew.

  Saúl’s hair was going in nine different directions. He did not have a mother in this country to help him to find a comb, and he’d spent his break shoveling snow. I thought he was deliberately pointing out that there were people in the building we could not name.

  One table away, Mr. DeRose crouched down beside Jakleen.

  “Who is Mrs. Small?” he asked.

  Jakleen chose each word with exquisite caution, as if she were picking up glassware and did not want to drop anything.

  “Mrs. Small. Is the teacher. For. Dance class,” answered Jakleen.

  “Yes!” said Mr. DeRose.

  On the far side of the room, Mr. Williams was leaning on a purple plastic chair, balanced on two legs, as he asked questions of Dilli. She wore a yellow T-shirt, purple jeans, and pink-and-black-checked sneakers, her loud clothing at odds with her quiet demeanor. Then Mr. Williams put his head down to catch Dilli’s exceedingly soft answer—inaudible to me, on my side of the room. Nadia and her sister Grace watched their exchange with broad smiles, as if they were proud of Dilli for producing actual sound.

  Following the lesson about the interrogative words, Mr. Williams introduced a new book called Alexei’s Week. It told the story of a Russian student named Alexei who moved to the United States. On the night before his first day of school, Alexei couldn’t sleep, because he was worried about how things would go. At school, Alexei felt confused and lonely, and could not find his way around the new building. At lunch, he sat by himself, friendless. Things improved later, when he met another student from Russia.

  After they read the book out loud together, Mr. Williams asked the class if they knew the meaning of the word “worried,” and everybody competed to see who could make the best worried face. Mr. DeRose won by doing Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, hands slapped against his cheeks, mouth in a big O.

  We broke up into small groups to talk about when each of us had felt worried. Methusella said he had felt worried while watching a scary movie. Yonatan announced that, like Alexei, he had not been able to sleep the night before, but in his case that was because he had been on Facebook. A general conversation ensued about Facebook, which led us far afield from worriedness. I was worried about Jakleen and Mariam, who had made it to school every day this week but had just run into difficulty again. It was their father’s birthday, and halfway through the school day, the girls wound up crying in the school social worker’s office.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Williams was worried about navigating a fundamental shift in his lessons. At this point in the year, the teacher was pivoting from conversational English to more academic skills. Summarizing was an essential skill that the students had yet to master—they could repeat things by rote, but they ran into difficulty if he asked them to recount a story in their own words. It was hard for them to come up with original phrasing. This ability grew with speech emergence, the third phase of language acquisition, after preproduction and early production.

  That afternoon, Mr. Williams asked if I would help him. Mr. DeRose was going to coach the students as they acted out passages from Alexei’s Week. Would I sit at a table and ask questions that would prompt a series of students into retelling the story? I got nothing from the students when I said, “What is the main idea of this book?” Or when I asked, “What happened to Alexei in this story?” But the students started talking when I asked, “Why was Alexei sitting alone at lunch?” Alexei’s solitary status was something they all wanted to explain. One student said, “He’s new!” Another said sadly, “He doesn’t have friends.”

  * * *

  This was the condition of the three new students who arrived in Room 142 on a single day the following week, in the middle of January. All three looked completely bewildered, as Mr. Williams went around smiling and shaking hands. He had the most luck connecting with Abigail, a girl with deep dimples in her cheeks and straight black hair plaited into two braids. She was from Mexico and spoke Spanish. Mr. Williams made certain to introduce her to Lisbeth, who became instantly maternal. “Do you have free and reduced lunch?” I heard Lisbeth asking Abigail in Spanish later that day, as she escorted her new friend upstairs to the cafeteria.

  Mr. Williams also shook hands with a tall boy named Plamedi, who wore a polo shirt buttoned all the way up, a brown sweater, and a gray parka that he kept on all day, even though the school building was exceedingly well heated. Plamedi was from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Williams tried introducing him to Solomon, but the two boys could not speak to each other. Plamedi was from the capital city of Kinshasa, and he spoke only French, the dominant language on the western side of the DRC, which Solomon didn’t know. Solomon wore a grave expression as he greeted Plamedi formally in English, holding Plamedi’s hand for the entirety of the exchange, in the traditional African manner. Because Nicole spoke French, she helped the new student from her home country get settled.

  Nobody could talk to Bachan. During a period of ethnic cleansing, many Nepali-speaking people were forced out of their homeland of Bhutan, located in the Himalayas. Later that year I would learn that Bachan’s family was among the dispossessed. On his first day at South, Bachan wore a flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, and an I’m-stuck-in-another-world expression. Finding himself marooned in a place where nobody shared his language, Bachan’s response was to tune out everything that happened. He stayed in a dreamy place of his own, not paying attention to anything Mr. Williams said. He drew pictures in his notebook or put his head down and slumbered. From time to time, Mr. Williams tried to bring him back to Room 142 by calling out his name—usually in a singsong, “Bacha-a-a-an, Bacha-a-a-an”—which invariably caused the Bhutanese boy to jerk in surprise. He looked around perplexedly, as if he had no idea what to make of all this tomfoolery.

  Mr. Williams now had seventeen students. (He would have had nineteen, but Uyen and Stephanie had advanced upstairs.) Nadia and Grace immediately started coaching the latest arrivals. The two sisters from Mozambique opened up the other students’ textbooks to the right pages and showed them where Mr. Williams kept the extra pencils. Other students soon followed their lead and displayed an extraordinary level of kindness to the new kids. Mr. Williams jumped right back into a lesson on relative pronouns—they were now using who, what, where, when, and how in the middle of sentences—trusting that the most recent arrivals would eventually make sense of what he was saying. “Room 142 is where we have newcomer class,” Mr. Williams said. “The fourth floor is where we eat lunch.” The teacher wrote these sentences on the whiteboard. He was supplying examples of how to use relative pronouns, and also providing guideposts to orient the new students. He asked everyone to complete an exercise in their textbook involving relative pronouns.

  Saúl—wearing a gray T-shirt that said PARIS, with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on it—got up and walked over to Abigail.

  “Quieres ayuda?” he asked the new girl from Mexico.

  She did want help. Saúl proceeded to dictate all of the correct answers to her. I did not think it was the best teaching technique, but I liked his impulse to be generous.

  * * *

  A few days after the new students arrived, Room 142 filled with hubbub as Mr. Williams drew a picture of a hedgehog on the whiteboard. The students who had been with him for several months were opening up and talking more freely, mostly in English.

  “Mister! Is it like a big rat?” asked Grace.

  “It’s cute,” said Saúl.

  “Short,” said Grace. “Fat.”

  “Small nose,” said Yonatan.

  “Qué bonita!” sang Lisbeth.

  Both Jakleen and Mariam were present, even though it was snowing. Meanwhile, Dilli had acquired magenta extensions and looked like an entirely different person. Mr. Williams told the
class to open their notebooks to a fresh piece of paper.

  “A new page?” asked Grace, seeking to clarify.

  “Yeah.”

  Mr. Williams showed the class an animated video of a hedgehog enjoying various winter sports. The animal had a series of misadventures while snowboarding, ice-skating, and sledding.

  “How many people have been sledding?” Mr. Williams asked.

  Nobody in the room had gone sledding.

  Mr. Williams asked the students to come up with a group summary of the video as he pantomimed whatever the students said, to their delight. The teacher was using the video as a segue to get the students to produce more original language. The ability to retell a story—summarizing—remained the key skill that he wanted them to practice. Today he was employing a video that made the kids laugh, but in the weeks to come, he would coach them to retell stories they had read as well. He and Mr. DeRose also took turns pausing to integrate the newest students into the room. Plamedi’s family had arrived in the United States after winning a green card lottery, and he had never lived in a refugee camp. Because he spoke French, a Romance language, he found English relatively easy to absorb. Abigail spoke another Romance language, but she was much more introverted, and her inhibitions slowed her down. At first she was too shy to say a single word in English, but soon she began to discover all the vocabulary it had in common with her native Spanish. Bachan remained in his own dreamland, stubbornly out of reach. When Mr. Williams tried summoning him with another lullaby—“Bacha-a-a-an, Bacha-a-a-an!”—the student glared at the teacher, with a haughty expression on his face, as if to say, You call that blather a language? Accepting a second language involved letting go of the idea that meaning could be found unswervingly in one place, and apparently Bachan was having none of it. I was impressed by his dreamy refusal, his I’m-elsewhere resistance, even though it meant he didn’t get very far academically.

  * * *

  As the students who had been present for many months grew linguistically, they branched out socially, too. At lunch, half the room brought trays of food back down to Room 142. Ksanet talked to a friend in Tigrinya on her cell phone, as Dilli sat quietly beside her, gaudy magenta ringlets at odds with her reticence. Kaee Reh began singing to himself in Karenni again, as Grace and Nadia chatted in Portuguese. Then Jakleen arrived holding a Starbucks Frappuccino, sat down at the same table as Ksanet and Dilli, and slid a stick of gum across to each of those girls. The kids were beginning to interact.

  After lunch, the newcomers resumed writing the narration about the hedgehog. Mr. Williams walked around the room, checking to see how each student was faring.

  “Skates?” Ksanet said to him. A one-word question.

  Mr. Williams drew a picture of ice skates, then pantomimed putting those objects onto his feet and skating across the room’s navy carpet. Ksanet nodded in recognition: Oh, that’s what skates are.

  On to the next student.

  “Mariam, do you have any questions?” he asked.

  Mariam looked at him blankly.

  “Ella no entiende,” Lisbeth told Mr. Williams in Spanish.

  “Okay, Abigail, hay palabras que no conoces ?”

  “Todos!” said Saúl, joking.

  Were there any words that Abigail did not know? All of them!

  Saúl may have been right. Mr. Williams asked the room to tell him, on a scale of one to five, how hard they found the material. Abigail said one, very hard. Yonatan, same. However, Jakleen, Grace, Methusella, Solomon, Hsar Htoo, and Plamedi all said five, very easy. The other nine students in the room fell somewhere in the middle. At the midway point in the school year, this had become Mr. Williams’s central challenge: teaching English to one classroom filled with seventeen students who spoke ten different home languages and exhibited vastly differing abilities to comprehend his lessons.

  Mr. Williams took out a green dry-erase marker and underlined every verb in the narration. He showed the students how to pantomime each verb, illustrating their meaning with body language, and then he persuaded the entire class to act out the story. Jakleen acted woodenly; Lisbeth, dramatically. When it was her turn, Abigail’s dimples reached new levels of deepness, she was so embarrassed at being asked to perform in front of the class. I noticed Hsar Htoo take out a yellow highlighter and Solomon a blue one. Both of them mimicked Mr. Williams, diligently highlighting all of the verbs themselves. Bachan stared out the window, courting oblivion. How could one instructor push a prodigy like Methusella, salvage a child as lost as Bachan, and keep up with his other students, all at the same time?

  * * *

  Plus another: At the end of January, one more new student walked through Mr. Williams’s door. She would be one of the last pupils to arrive, meaning that the formation of his class was almost complete. Her name was Shahnozakhon, which was virtually unpronounceable, so everybody called her Shani. Shani was from Tajikistan, and nobody in the school knew how to speak Tajik. Mr. Williams had absolutely no means of communicating with Shani. She had coal-black hair and pale white skin and she wore tiny gold earrings with ruby stones. Despite being impossible to communicate with verbally, she had an affectionate, puppy-like personality. Also, she had the endearing habit of winding up by accident in remote parts of the building. A few days after she arrived, one of the school’s uniformed security guards walked into Room 142, five minutes after the bell, with a dazed-looking Shani. “Shani got lost,” the guard announced. “So . . .” He shrugged, as if to say, I had to rescue her.

  After a few days, Mr. Williams wondered if Shani might speak other languages. He mentioned various countries close to Tajikistan. “Iran!” Shani exclaimed excitedly at one point. “Farsi?” asked Mr. Williams. Shani nodded happily. “Farsi!” she repeated. Mr. Williams dispatched someone to summon Rahim, one of the young men from Afghanistan who had reported to Room 142 at the beginning of the year. Tall and elegant, Rahim towered over Shani. He said something in Farsi.

  “No Farsi!” Shani cried in English, objecting to this. “No Farsi! Tajik!”

  At least the girl was communicative, even if she did not know Farsi. Mr. Williams would try Russian, next—but not today. He had other students to worry about.

  * * *

  By this point, many of the newcomers had picked up enough English to have genuine interchanges during their lessons, the kind that carried some sort of emotional charge. One of those took place a few days later, as Mr. Williams coached the students on making sentences that began with “I am” and “You are.” This was a review for his longtime pupils, and new material for the rest. He wrote on the whiteboard:

  I am in math class.

  Are you in my gym class?

  Then he asked the students to pose questions of their own.

  Saúl announced that he had a question for me.

  “Are you married?” he asked.

  “No, I am divorced,” I replied.

  Nobody in the room seemed to understand my state, so I pantomimed wearing a wedding ring and taking it off. Oh, yes—they’d heard about that American custom. Where they came from, for the most part, ending a marriage was frowned upon.

  “Are you married?” Nadia asked Mr. Williams.

  “No.”

  “Are you divorced?” she pressed.

  “No.”

  The students were riveted—and confused. They knew that Mr. Williams had a son, Owen, because he often spoke of his child. How could this be, if the teacher was neither married nor divorced? In many of their home cultures, a single parent would be shunned.

  “Don’t you have a baby?” asked Nadia, suddenly speaking in a higher register.

  “Yes, I have a son,” said Mr. Williams. “But I was never married.”

  “Does he have a mother?” Nadia asked, trying to figure this out.

  “Everybody has a mother!” said Mr. Williams.

  Enough about his personal life. Mr. Williams swiftly changed the subject, asking the students to stand in two lines, facing one another. He sa
id they should practice asking and answering questions using “Are you” and “I am.” I stood facing Yonatan.

  “Are you twenty-seven?” Yonatan asked me.

  “No, I am fifty-one,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he blurted, with obvious surprise.

  “I love that you just said that,” I told him. “But yes, I am positive. I had a birthday this week. I am definitely fifty-one.”

  “Happy birthday!” Yonatan said warmly.

  Only later did it occur to me that perhaps older women in Eritrea did not look as young as I did because of how hard life was in that country. Age turned out to be a sensitive subject for Yonatan’s sister, Ksanet, as I discovered later that month. At nineteen, she was the oldest student in the room. When Ksanet turned twenty-one, she would age out of a free public high school education, before she could graduate from South. To complete her degree, she would have to go to a local technical college. Ksanet had noticed that Stephanie and Uyen had moved up to a higher-level ELA class, and I heard her ask Mr. DeRose if she could do the same. She was hoping that if she could move through the ELA curriculum more quickly, it might allow her to complete her high school education at South. Mr. DeRose told her that she didn’t have enough English to move up. From the young woman’s stormy expression, I could tell it was not what she wanted to hear. Ksanet’s struggle was a common one—every year, Mr. Williams got one or two older students who shared her plight. It was hard for the teachers to deliver this sort of news and then maintain the student’s morale. In the months to come I would watch Ksanet battle with despair over this question of where she would be allowed to complete her education.

  * * *

  Even though the newcomers were starting to talk more—and were interacting with each other—they had not yet integrated themselves into the regular activities that constituted high school social life for most of South’s student body. I witnessed this during Spirit Week, which fell at the very end of January. It was basketball season and South had a tall, fast team, including three players born in Africa. Hand-lettered signs taped to the walls of the school described what the students were supposed to wear (Twin Day, Wacky Tacky, Crazy Purple and White) to support the winter sports teams. Nicole dyed her hair purple for the Friday pep rally, and Nadia and Grace wore South T-shirts. Nobody else in Room 142 appeared to be aware that it was Spirit Week.