New Job Finishes

So last night we finished up the community education program for migrant workers. And if it seems like I just got done blogging about the start of this program............... well, it seems that way to me too.

Because of too few students and other funding issues, the program finished a couple weeks early this year. But it was only supposed to be a two-month program to begin with, and I knew that when I was hired. It was never supposed to be a career builder.

It did perhaps give me a taste of what English as a Second Language education is like in the U.S., which is something I’ve been interested in ever since I did my student aiding at Pathfinder’s school for Immigrants and Refugees.

Granted I spent the past five years teaching ESL in Japan, but it wasn’t the same. I spent many days teaching to a class of junior high school students who didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to learn, didn’t have any immediate use for English, and many of them didn’t plan on ever leaving Japan.

By contrast, teaching at Pathfinders I felt that the people I was teaching really needed my help. And that I was teaching them something useful, and that they wanted to learn. Which is why I later volunteered to tutor English on Saturdays at Eastern Church, and continued to tutor some of the Pathfinders students on my own time after the student aiding was finished.

So I was really looking forward to this migrant education program. And it was a really great experience for me. I had no idea what life was like for migrant workers, or what conditions were like at their camps, or any of that stuff. And I felt like I was doing a lot of good.

But with any job to a large extent once you actually get into it you get bogged down in the day to day kind of stuff and the ideals take a back seat. I spent a lot of time worrying about if we had all the paper work filled out and if the students were registered correctly. Or worrying about what I was going to teach that night, and feeling that I had used up all my good ideas last week. Or angry at myself because the previous night’s lesson hadn’t gone well.

(I always think I want a job I believe in, but there’s something to be said for working a job you don’t care about. It makes you feel less guilty when you screw up. I would really feel awful when a lesson didn’t go well, because I figured the migrants had been working hard all day, and I had wasted their time with a bad class).

The other thing about teaching is you always have something hanging over your head. Even when you’re not working and trying to relax, in the back of your mind something is telling you that you should be preparing for the next class. (But maybe that’s just a feature of any sort of real job. No matter what you do, You always end up taking your work home with you.)

On the other hand, when things went good it was beautiful. In that respect it was just like teaching in Japan. When a class went bad, it makes you feel terrible, but when everything is going good, it’s the greatest feeling in the world. The nature of education I guess.

The paper work was a bit overwhelming, especially since it was the first year for both me and my partner. We were never sure we were doing it quite right. And the last two nights of this program were dedicated solely to filling out paper work. (Making sure all the students were registered, all the attendance hours were added up, all the test scores were recorded, etc). Which is probably another fact of any sort of career in education. Or probably any sort of government job. Or perhaps any sort of real job. It makes me discouraged about my future career path. Often it seemed that most of our energy was going into the paperwork and not into the teaching.

But here I am focusing on the negatives, when I should be saying how much I learned and how great the students were, and what a real privilege it was to be part of this program. I would easily have done it for free. (Well, not the paper work part).

Useless Wikipedia Fact
The history of food items which may have served as the roots of modern pizza can be traced to the ancient Greek colony of Naples in Magna Graecia (southern Italy). Such products arguably have their first written mention in Book VII of Virgil’s Aeneid:
Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”

Link of the Day
The U.S. Coast Guard has proposed turning the Great Lakes into the world's largest freshwater live-fire shooting range. Citizens For Lake Safety was formed to oppose that plan, and it has established this website as a clearinghouse for groups and individuals who want to help. On this site you will find information about the Coast Guard's plans and information about what you can do to help stop this terrible attack on the lakes.

And an online petition can be found here:
We the undersigned object to the United States Coast Guard or any other entity conducting live-fire target practice on the Great Lakes, and to the designation of "safety zones" where the shooting would take place.