A note from the teacher

My name is Rosa Esposito, and two evenings a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays from six-thirty to nine, I teach intermediate English as a Second Language at an adult learning center on the Northwest Side of Chicago. My students come straight from work, most of them. They come from restaurant kitchens and hotel laundries and hospital wards and the backs of taxicabs, and they sit down at the end of a long day in desks built for teenagers and work harder for two and a half hours than I ever worked in school.

My own parents came from a village in Calabria in 1964. My mother learned her English at a night class very much like this one, in a church basement on Grand Avenue, with my brother asleep in a stroller beside her desk. I didn't know until I was grown how much it cost her to walk into that room. I think about her every time somebody new walks into mine.

This spring we had twelve students from eight countries: Mexico, Poland, Bosnia, Vietnam, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Guatemala and the Philippines. Our writing unit had two assignments. The first was "My First Day in America." The second was "A Food from My Home." We talked about each topic in class first, then everyone wrote a first draft at home, then we read them aloud to each other in small groups and asked questions, and then everyone wrote a final copy.

When I put these stories here, I made a promise to the class: I would not correct their English. These are their words, in their own English, the way they wrote them. I fixed spelling only where a student asked me to, and a few students asked me not to touch anything at all. You will see some verbs in the wrong tense and some missing words. Please read past them. What these writers have to say is worth the effort, and every one of them is a better writer now than in January.

Every student whose work is here gave me written permission. I use first names and home countries only. A few students didn't want their stories on the Internet, and that is their right, so not every student appears on both pages.

After each story I've added a line of my own. Reading these out loud in class was one of the best evenings I've had as a teacher. I hope you'll read them slowly.

If you would like to send a note to one of the writers, e-mail me and I will print it out and bring it to class. They would love that. Several of them come back for the fall session in October.

Rosa Esposito
[email protected]