Today you, tomorrow me.

I'm a big fan of the New York Times' Sunday Magazine's "Lives" section found on its backpage. I can honestly say I've never read an essay there that I not only liked, but held to my bosom when finished. This one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06lives-t.html takes the prize.

Today, I printed it and showed it to my ESL group. I read it to them. I read slowly so that they might snatch a word here or there and maybe gain clues to what the heck was being read.

Then, I asked them to write a few sentences about what they thought this essay was saying? I gave them  20 minutes and then went around the room. Two people out of ten had written a paragraph. The others looked at me and willed me to evaporate. I sat down. "Have you ever been helped by someone or helped somebody else?" I asked. They looked at me. "Oh yes," they said, and out poured the stories from their mouths, my hand scribbling down their words as fast as I could go. And when we had concluded, I looked at them all and said, "Look at what you have written." And they looked at me and then at the papers. They nodded in approval. They had written and spoken in English.

It is in those moments of connection that I find being a teacher is worth it. It is when eye contact and electricity fires into the brain of both student and teacher as student becomes master and master becomes  student.

We took the essays to the computer room and they typed them and with their approval, after they left for the day, I stapled each essay to the board outside our  room. I stood there holding the stapler as if it were gold, standing there, as the custodian swept around me.