For the last nine years, I taught English as a Second Language at a tiny adult education program housed in rotting, aged portables behind a local school. Since 2017, every year I have welcomed a new group of nervous Level 2 students. Most of my students were Spanish-speaking stay-at-home moms but I always had a few outliers. My oldest student was a Vietnamese man in his seventies. My youngest was just twenty.

My first assignment was for them to answer the question, “Why do you want to learn English?” Their goals ranged from “I want to help my children at school” to “I want to communicate with my boss” to “I want to learn how to order a drink at Starbucks.”  They created colorful posters with their pictures and goals that I posted in the classroom as a reminder to all of us why we were there. At the end of the year, I’d collect them and place them in a binder to help me remember everyone that ever graced the door of my classroom.

Typical of adult ed programs, we were expected to do a lot with very little, but the students didn’t mind. My students sat at mismatched tables, avoiding the cracked, molded-plastic chair that we dubbed “the butt pincher.” We had a constant tug-of-war over the sputtering air conditioner. I was always hot; they were always cold. “Bring a jacket!” I’d bark at them while they cackled at the sweat dripping down my middle-aged brow. A squirrel moved into my portable in February, scurrying over our heads during class and chewing holes in the asbestos ceiling tiles to peek at us. We grew accustomed to his skittering, and considered him our unofficial mascot.

Over the years, I’ve probably taught close to 200 students, shepherding them through the treacherous landmines of the English language. I am a bit of a linguist and I love the structure of language, but even I had to admit sometimes that English is a very stupid language with too many rules and too many exceptions to those rules.

“To talk about when something happens, we say ‘in the morning’, ‘in the afternoon’, ‘in the evening’. What would you say if something happens at 1:00am?” I would ask, a smirk on my face.

“In the night!” they would scream together, patting themselves on the back for seeing the pattern.

“No!” I told them. “We don’t say ‘in the night’. We say ‘at night’.” While I cackled, they would groan and mime throwing their books on the floor.

A common liturgy in our classroom was:

“Teacher, whyyyy?”

“Because English is stupid. That’s why.”

I loved watching my low-beginning students realize that they could actually communicate in English. Being a witness to their burgeoning confidence made the job worth it. I’d take them on field trips to Kroger and Starbucks where they would interact with English-speakers. One year, a woman came up to me after talking to the Deli counterperson as a scavenger hunt action item, her eyes wide with amazement. “Teacher, he understand me!”

“I’m so happy for you! See! I know you can communicate in English! You just have to try.” I said as I hugged her.

Magic.

Earlier this month, I taught my last class.

The dummies in Austin and D.C. have decided that education doesn’t really need all that money so our program finally landed on the chopping block and will close at the end of the semester. Fuck adults who want to learn, I guess. Just teach yourself English, immigrant. I am sad about the closure, mostly for the families that we served.

I was trying to think of what I wanted to write about this transition, how to properly express how I’ve felt about working in immigrant communities for the last fifteen years, and I finally came up with the perfect anecdote: Maria and Binh.

Maria is a mouthy, hilarious dishwasher from Honduras. She caught on pretty quick that I appreciated any attempt at humor or sarcasm, even if it was unintelligible. On test days, when Maria had forgotten that we even had a test, she would yell at me, “TEST TODAY?” like I had personally wounded her. She was always quick to try to communicate in English, but she had developed some very persistent, bad habits that made it hard to understand her sometimes.

Once, she came to class and said, “Teacher, what is ‘whadafack’?”

“What?” I said, trying to parse out what she was asking.

“Whadafack? All the time, people say ‘Whadafack'” she repeated it over and over.

It finally dawned on me that she was saying a slurred version of, “What the fuck?” I wrote it on the board and we had a little lesson on how and when to use ‘fuck’ in American culture. It’s a surprisingly versatile word- a verb, noun, adjective, and adverb.

Maria ended up sitting next to Binh, a 60-something Vietnamese woman who started mid-year. She wore her custodian uniform to class and pulled her gray, bone-straight hair back with a plastic, foam roller. Binh was a serious student, one who beat herself up when she got something wrong. When I pointed out an error, which was very common in a beginning English class, she would click her tongue and shake her head, a disappointed mother hen.

I always worried a little about my non-Spanish speaking students, fretting that they’d be lonely or feel left out, but it always worked out. My Spanish-speakers would find ways to bring the non-Spanish speakers in to the group.

Maria and Binh’s joking back and forth started around the first test that Binh took. After I passed the graded tests back out, Maria leaned over to look at Binh’s test and made a shocked noise at the point difference. She looked at Binh and said, “Next time, Binh, You copy me.” They both giggled. As their friendship developed, I’d catch them helping each other on an assignment or trying to discuss some topic that neither of them had the vocabulary for.

A few weeks ago, we were practicing past tense verbs and Maria revealed that she sang in the car that morning.

“What song?” Binh asked.

“I no know da name. The singer is Miley Cyrus,” Maria thought for a moment. She sang a few bars of the chorus and I recognized it as Miley Cyrus’s ‘Flowers’.

“Miss Beth. You play for Binh!” Maria bossed me around.

On my smartboard, I navigated to youtube, turned on the captions, and hit play.

Miley Cyrus thrashed around on the screen wearing barely anything while the class read the English captions scrolling along the bottom. I’d yell out verbs that we’d been practicing. As Miley writhed on the dirty floor of the pool deck, I jokingly told Maria to come and show us the dance in the middle of the u-shaped desk arrangement. Aida, a student from Colombia, told us she could twerk, so I told her to come too.

Everyone was laughing, including Binh, who, before this, had not even known who Miley Cyrus was. Maria had found a way to bring Thi in on the joke.

I found out recently that Maria invited Binh over to her apartment for lunch. Binh was going to bring a badminton set so she could teach Maria how to play.

Our last day of class consisted of multiple long, tearful, speeches, to different people on staff. While the speeches were beautiful and heartfelt, they were mostly in Spanish, which meant Binh spent most of the morning holding someone’s baby and smiling when we looked at her. Near the end of class, Binh wanted to share. She used Google translate to help her say what she wanted to say. I typed what she was saying as she read it in English so everyone could read her words and understand.

“I started class late but you are my friends. I very very thank my teacher. To my class, I miss you. I have you in my heart.”

I swallowed a sob.

Binh has been in the US for six years. She lives with her son and her husband. Her sister is nearby, but I got the sense that she was very lonely–a new country, a new stupid language to learn, starting completely over. She wasn’t just learning English in my class; she was finding community.

Watching people build bridges, despite the chasm of differences between them, feels like magic.

It just feels so distinctly human.

When bridges are built, when people find a way to reach out across the aisle and find a way to connect, it’s as if a burst of hope and light is released into the ether, benefitting all of us. (Note to the dummies in Austin and DC: we need more of this, not less.)

I have spent fifteen years watching newly-arrived immigrants find their footing in a new land. They left everything behind- their families, their culture, their language, their foods- to start a new life here. I got to witness people get new jobs, get raises, vote for the first time, learn to drive, get into college, get their GED, become US citizens, bring their families here, make friends who were completely different from them.

I cannot think of anything more terrifying than completely uprooting everything that feels familiar to start completely fresh, but, over and over, I witnessed them take on the challenge with courage and strength.

What a goddamn honor it has been to have a front row seat to all of that.

Adios, FLC.