Yanneth

An immense joy so far - in the afternoons, I have been informally tutoring a ninth grade student, Yanneth (pronounced 'Janet') with her math homework. Yanneth speaks and reads very little English, so the majority of my time with her has been spent simply explaining the problems to her. Many of them are word problems, such as figuring out how many persons will be needed at the community garden to collect 30 bags of weeds if 1 person collects 2 bags, 2 people collect 5, etc. As I see it, math is hard enough without not understanding the language in which it's written! I think back to my time in Costa Rica, struggling to understand what people were saying to me and feeling very displaced because of it. Can you imagine experiencing such a discomfort every single day at school? The exertion needed to understand the foreign words spinning out of your teachers' mouths?

And yet despite it all, Yanneth is a joy to work with. We laugh at the mysterious nuances of math lingo, and wrinkle our foreheads trying to figure out hard problems. And when finally the light bulb flickers on, and she grasps the purpose and solution of a problem, the relief and satisfaction reflects from her forehead to her shoulders, and her hands spring into motion, scurrying to transform the concepts she understands in her mind in Spanish into fluent English sentences to put on the paper. I am honored to experience such moments with Yanneth, and I find myself experiencing awe as I witness the expansion of her mind and her grasp of knowledge. Teaching reverberates with me.