New Teacher Diaries
Reaching Jigme
May 10, 2007 11:59 AM
I had been told that I would be given “an easy class” for my first year to ease my transition into teaching. A child brand new to the school, country and language — this didn’t fit my definition of easy.
On Aug. 27, while I was endlessly cleaning and arranging my new 1st/2nd-grade classroom, 6-year-old Jigme from Tibet walked through the door. The most I could get from him was his name and a smile. I attributed his quietness to shyness.
On the first day of school, it became clear that Jigme spoke very little English and by the second day it seemed that he was coping by acting out. He was aggressive with other students and defiant toward me. My feelings of frustration and bewilderment, I’m sure, came through and, coupling this with their own confusion and frustration, the other children quickly began to ostracize Jigme. I was horrified but in the dark about how to change this dynamic.
Our progressive classroom, with its focus on ideas and learning through games, was incredibly confusing to Jigme. Discerning the difference between free time and serious work (like doing a math “game”) was initially impossible. During writing workshop, instead of constructing his own stories, Jigme copied words from the board and from books. At recess, he picked up on kids’ friendly teasing of each other but they were less welcoming to such poking and joking coming from him. The principal told me, “The poor child is terrified.” I agreed, but didn’t have a clue how to ease this.
And yet, slowly, we made progress. By Friday of the first week, Jigme showed me on a map which country he was from. The next Monday, he and I built a block structure together. We started communicating in writing, mostly in basic phrases he had seemingly memorized. After I sent him out of the classroom in the third week for being wild and disruptive, his behavior became not easy, but work-with-able. In November, after reading another student’s writing, he started writing his own story, which he wrote again and again for about a month. By the time of teacher conferences, his mother said to me, through a friend-translator, “He now likes school. He wrote and put up on his wall: I love my teacher.” Other kids began to voluntarily include him in activities.
In February, Jigme began to tell me about Tibet and his journey, he told me that his brother was coming, he told me about his old school. He began to really participate in class discussion as well. In March, I finally and belatedly bought a book on Tibet with lovely pictures and brought it to class. He spoke to me about it excitedly for the entire 40 minutes of reading workshop. Other children pored over the book, though the text was too difficult for most to read. Jigme shared pages with the class. The tension had broken.
Despite the huge breakthrough that we had, a multicultural book is not a multicultural education. No one thing that I did is. Instead, any success with Jigme came through my own year-long and massive attitude shift. A change from asking, “What are you doing in my dream?” to finally welcoming him as an integral part of and participant in this dream.
When I got another new student from Tibet at the beginning of March, I was ready to welcome her. In April, Jigme’s brother also joined the class. Although he speaks less English than Jigme did when he began, although his name is also Jigme, which makes things confusing, and although he too can be silly in school, I’m not as worried. I am not an expert, but I can now picture his learning trajectory better.
Jigme D. (as we now call the first Jigme) tells me, “My father say someday I will not remember Tibetan, only English because I speak so much English. Already it gets hard to speak Tibetan.” And he is perhaps right.
I wonder whether this transitional year will fade in his memory along with the Tibetan and I wonder, with time, how much he will remember of his journey to this country and of the world he left behind as his life becomes filled with a different reality. I wonder how much room there will be to integrate both.
I hope that I have finally been able to convey to him that I value the complexity of what he brings, that he always had a right to this class. As a teacher, my strength lies in being a storyteller and a questioner. And so, after telling this story, I will end with this question: Who enters your dreams, who is welcomed, who seeps in, and is anyone kept out?
Progressiveteacher81 is a pseudonym for a first-year elementary school teacher. A version of this post first appeared on the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature.
