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0 This First Person column is the experience of Aldona Dziedziejko, who lives in Rocky Mountain House, Alta. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
When I think of the first year I moved to Canada from Poland, I recall sitting in a quiet corner of a school portable in a stuffed chair feeding flashcards through a gadget called a speech player. The cards had magnetic strips like a credit card and I imagined I was buying language word by word.
Some words came fast and loud on the recording and startled me.
Mrs. Brown, my English as a second language teacher, was eating lunch at the other end of the classroom and smiled knowingly. She must have been amused by my tenacity.
The portable was a beige box surrounded by giant Douglas firs at the base of Burnaby Mountain in B.C. To me, it was a cozy second home, complete with a living area furnished with a couch on a rug, string lights and a reading corner.
I spent many hours in that portable in Grade 6 and 7.
Mrs. Brown’s classroom was lined with shelves that bloomed with colourful book sets from Scholastic by popular authors like Judy Blume and Ann Martin.
Other kids in my language group from Korea, Spain, China and Romania played computer games like Cross Country Canada with me. But I am most thankful for the omnipresence of Mrs. Brown herself.
She tirelessly answered my questions about Christmas carols and the rules of softball. She sat with me during recess and helped me draft haikus.
Mrs. Brown threw potluck parties that were really fun versions of show and tell. My fellow ESL friend Yeung tasted perogies sprinkled with bacon and capped with sour cream for the first time, and I got to slurp salty broth full of chive dumplings that warmed my insides on those damp West Coast mornings.
She had us make pumpkin pie in the school kitchen to celebrate Thanksgiving North American style. I loved every minute of breaking those eggs into a metal bowl to stir into the orange pumpkin flesh.
She had us involved in fundraisers and the care of a school rabbit for the holidays. She checked in with my parents constantly, and was a big champion of respecting my family’s decision to decline my homeroom teacher’s offer to skip Grade 7 and push me ahead to junior high the next fall.
Almost fell through the cracks
When I went to secondary school, I spent an additional year in an ESL classroom during my Grade 8 English periods. My new ESL teacher wasn’t as nurturing as Mrs. Brown and seemed frustrated with such a large number of us in her class.
We tried to elude boredom by bickering among ourselves in our neat rows of desks in a stark grey carpeted room with beige walls.
Once I was phased out of ESL classes in Grade 9, I felt rootless. I skipped classes, lied to my family, brought alcohol to school and hid in the library to read books.
I entered into the hazardous territory of being an at-risk teen along with some of my ESL friends, and we almost fell through the cracks. But luckily, I soon fell in love with novels such as The Great Gatsby and poems we read in senior classes.
My love of the English language took root from the seeds that Mrs. Brown had planted. Art teachers encouraged my passion for design with projects that combined words, illustrations and collages.
My confidence grew and so did my grades.
I graduated from high school, went to night school and eventually entered university.
I was lucky to have experienced first-hand the tail end of federally funded ESL programs that spanned the late 1990s. These programs took seed in post-war Canada to promote national unity.
However, in the provinces where I’ve taught, including Alberta, we saw drastic cuts in the early 2000s that ignored the reality of English language learning, which is an intricate process that takes several years.
ESL classes are now sometimes called English as an additional language programs because most immigrant kids are multilingual.
I’m now a teacher myself and see that the hefty responsibility of caring for multilingual immigrant kids in public schools falls mostly on the classroom teachers, who are already overburdened with increasing class sizes and the multitude of disparate learner needs.
Dedicated resources sadly missing
Sometimes, a teacher librarian, who might be caring but harried, will organize impromptu remedial grammar classes in the school library.
Sometimes the special education teacher or a teaching assistant will take a small group aside. There is usually so much catching up to do. Not just on the 12 English tenses or subject-verb-agreement but the emotional care of kids who have lost so much crossing borders.
Souvankham Thammavongsa, Giller Prize winner for her short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, talks about growing up and learning English in ESL classes — where there was no prize for mispronouncing the word ‘knife.’
Dedicated ESL specialists and designated spaces where students can hone their language, social and cultural skills as well as resilience are sadly missing from many schools I’ve seen first hand while teaching in Alberta and B.C.
I think about Mrs. Brown
I think of Mrs. Brown often. I thought of her when I idled for a few years after graduation and when I published my first article in a local teen magazine. I thought of her when I started publishing poetry regularly and I thought of her when I decided to study art history and then education in university, but not writing. What would she think?
When I think of my tangled journey of becoming an educator and writer I feel gratitude for an excellent program that instilled in me a passion for my new language back in Grade 6.
My ESL classes with Mrs. Brown were my refuge and my safe space from the exhausting demands of school in a language that was not my own. I carry that cozy portable and Mrs. Brown’s graceful pragmatism in a corner of my mind.
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