A Decade Examined - Part Four
Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash
December 19, 2024
Two weeks ago I wrote Part 3 of my series looking back over each of my past ten years, as I look forward to my 70th birthday in a few months. Part 3 covered a very big year, my Urban Teachers year. Even now, seven years later, I think of it every day.
My year of student teaching began in June 2016 and ended at the end of August 2017, which was halfway through my 63rd year. After an unsuccessful search for a teaching job, I found myself at the end of the Urban Teachers road. The rest of the year, from fall 2017 to spring 2018, was a transitional interlude.
I returned to my previous volunteer work, teaching parenting classes for the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP) and English classes at a community center serving Central American immigrants. My weekly classes were in the evening, so most of my students were young men and women who worked in construction, landscaping, and cleaning.
Most of these students knew little English and were eager to learn. We worked on basic grammar and conversation, using a provided curriculum that I supplemented with music, games, and any creative ideas I could find through the library or the internet. I forced myself to speak in my very limited Spanish because it provided comic relief and my students loved to correct me. It’s doubtful that they actually learned much English from me; the ones who made noticeable progress were studying through other venues as well, and my classes gave them extra practice.
Eventually I came to understand that my more fruitful offering was hospitality. These young people, most in their twenties, a few teenagers, were finding their way in a new and strange place, many had suffered mightily to get here, and my job was to show up and love them for two hours each week, and to let them laugh at me. Because their laughter was love, and they needed to love and be loved.
I entered the classroom each week with a serious case of imposter syndrome, doubting my ability teach anything. By the end of each class I was filled with love and gratitude for getting to spend time with these beautiful people who expected so little from me and appreciated me so much.
That fall I also returned to work for pay at PEP, where, before the Urban Teachers year, I had been the class marketing person. Now I was asked to coordinate two projects still in their start-up phase. One was developing video-recorded workshops and webinars that parents would view online, with email access to the instructors for homework and Q&A. We had no idea then how useful this project would become in 2020. When the pandemic shut down all our in-person classes, we were ready to move them online.
The other project was to expand a new program of parenting classes taught in Spanish by native speakers. These classes were held at public schools during the school day, through PEP’s partnership with a county program providing health and wellness services for immigrant families at the schools.
Part of my job was to do all the administrative tasks of preparing and presenting the classes. The more interesting and challenging work was to recruit potential teachers—who were parents as well as native Spanish speakers—and get them interested in the program.
In the most amazing instance of synchronicity I’ve ever experienced, I found my first recruits that fall among my small church congregation. I had noticed this couple, new to the church, on the rare occasions I had time to attend a service during the previous year. Now that I was there every Sunday, I got to know them and quickly realized that they had all the qualifications for teaching our classes in Spanish, and as a bonus they had two teenagers and were eager to get PEP’s parenting education for themselves and to share it with immigrant families.
Those were some of the most enjoyable days of my working life, assisting in the classes, practicing my very limited Spanish on the teachers, hearing the parents’ reports of improving relationships with their kids.
My first two teacher recruits also introduced me to a friend of theirs, a mom of young children, who soon completed PEP’s training and became an enthusiastic and skilled teacher. A few years later, as I was getting ready to retire, PEP hired her to manage the Latino program.
At that time, fall 2019 to early 2020, we were able to offer six-week classes in two schools per semester. Since then, the Latino program has grown into PEP’s award-winning Family Resiliency Program (PEP-FRP), which this year received major state grant funding and has expanded into three additional counties, offering free education and support in English, Spanish, and Amharic, for parents and caregivers in under-resourced communities. According to PEP’s Annual Report, PEP-FRP is expected to reach nearly 2,500 families throughout the state by the end of the 2024-25 school year.
PEP’s parenting programs provide a space where parents and caregivers can come together, gain tools, share experiences, and support one another. … Our programs not only help parents raise more capable and resilient children, but they also significantly reduce parental stress. — PEP Annual Report, July 2023-June 2024
I found a good summary of my interlude year in a recent email from Monk Manual, a site offering courses and tools for productivity with spiritual growth.
To transcend means to climb beyond or across. The path of growth is a path of transcending, because every time we grow, we transcend one version of ourselves and move beyond our current limits and narratives about ourself. Notice that right now there are areas of your life where you are currently moving from one version to the next. There is always something new taking place within. — Monk Manual
