The young woman stood before me speaking English clearly with an accent that rounded out sounds. Her eyes lit with joy as her tight curls framed her face. She struggled with her writing, she said, and wondered if she could join our ESL classes. When she told me she spoke Arabic, I understood the trouble. Most of… Read more
culture
Before my students educated me, I had pictured the Soviet Union as one solid mass of land with only Russian speakers across the expanse. I also never heard of the tiny landlocked sliver of Moldova tucked between Romania and Ukraine until many of my students said they came from there. When I began to listen, I… Read more
The Seahawks and the words in a story. The two don’t seem to have much in common, but experiencing the buildup to the Superbowl within a few miles of Seattle’s epicenter has me thinking of crazy connections. Many years ago I took a fiction writing class through the University of Washington. The instructor and the… Read more
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan has everything I love in a novel. It has gorgeous imagery and historical interest that hooked me into what happened in the world we live in along with a plot that kept me turning pages. The vivid descriptions of both the ranch where Esperanza spent her early years and… Read more
About once a year, I do an activity with my students that I learned in my undergraduate days. It looks like this: I call two volunteers to the front of the class. One is male, the other is female. I ask them to walk toward me one at a time and put my hand up… Read more