A community college education

So. Last time I wrote, it was about being unemployed. No longer. In fact, since then, I have gotten not one job, but two. I actually had to give my two weeks' notice before I was even officially hired. Why do these things all happen at once?

My first job (apart from some Spanish tutoring a few hours a week) has been as a part-time tutor at the Community College of Denver's ESL writing lab. I've been working there for two weeks now, and I'm loving it. The students I work with are mostly immigrants and refugees, rather than international students who would go back to their countries after graduating. I started keeping a list of the countries my students were from: Eritrea, Mali, Ethiopia, Morocco, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, China, Mexico, and the list goes on. I've read their essays on fatherhood, politics, education, religion, poverty. On their lives in their homelands, their families they've left behind, their first days in America. Their frustration, their pain, their incredibly tenacious hope. I often just want to sit and digest these pieces for awhile, to ask questions, to listen to their remarkable stories, but they want me to "fix" it, correct the grammar, take away the errors, and please hurry and sign it, class starts in five minutes...sigh. It seems so trivial, scratching away at the mechanics of a paper when there's so much emotion just under the surface. They've been learning about outlines, commas, thesis sentences, and verb tense consistency, but I hope they're also learning that they have valuable stories to share. I'll have a hard time leaving this job at the end of next week.

There won't be much time to ponder that, though, because there's more adventure to come: on the 27th, I'll start a full-time job as an ELA (English Language Acquisition) paraprofessional at a public middle school a couple blocks from my house. 97% Latino, 90% free and reduced lunch, 70% ESL, 17% proficient in reading by standardized test scores. A different kind of challege than my college students, but one I'm still pretty excited about. I'll keep you posted on that one. Until then, happy Friday, and happy fall.