Greenheart Staff in Action – Juliet Jones

When my husband and I relocated from Chicago to Northern California, I started looking around for volunteering opportunities to get out of the house and meet people in my new community. Through surfing around online, I found Project Read, a literacy organization run through library systems throughout the country that trains volunteer tutors to teach literacy skills to adult learners. I used to be an English teacher, and I’ve often missed teaching, so it felt like the perfect fit. I was assigned to teach a weekly ESL class to a small group of Spanish-speaking adults through an outreach program at a nonprofit social services organization that served low-income immigrant families, mainly from Mexico and Guatemala.

My new teaching assignment came with unique challenges. The students were all classified as “beginners,” but there was vast variation in their levels – some spoke almost no English, while others had taken English classes before and had a basic foundation. Some were already literate in their native Spanish, while others had only had a few years of formal education in their home countries.  I had to learn to adapt my lessons “on the fly” for multiple levels, sometimes dividing the class into two, reviewing vocabulary with the more advanced group while teaching the others how to form letters to write their names.

But I loved every minute. They were the nicest group of students I have ever taught, and so grateful for everything. When a lesson didn’t go as planned, they carried on gamely, smiling graciously and doing their best.  Even with very low English skills, they had a playful sense of humor, and we soon shared running jokes as a class. They loved games, so we played a lot of them to practice vocabulary – charades, Hangman, Pictionary, Go Fish. For some of them it may have been a rare opportunity to relax and play. They worked long hours at tough jobs all day, most of the men as landscapers, gardeners, or farm workers, while the women cleaned houses.  A lesson from the book titled “Free Time” was met with blank stares. One woman was working three jobs and raising three children while her husband worked the fields. I have no idea how that is humanly possible, but she did it, and managed to make it to English class every Wednesday evening. Some students told me they didn’t get to their homework until late at night after the children were in bed and they were exhausted, but they brought it back completed every week, eager for correction. It made me want to do the very best for them that I possibly could, though I knew that the 90 minutes we had together per week was nowhere near enough.

The teaching itself was very rewarding, but as the class went on, I found I was deeply affected by just getting to know my students as individuals.  I developed tremendous respect and admiration for them as I learned more about their incredible stories. While I had to stop teaching the class recently due to a schedule conflict, I still think about my students. The whole experience was very enriching as it opened my eyes to the dreams and struggles of a large group of people in my community I might otherwise never have had the opportunity to meet.