Teaching Underground

Teaching underground? Maybe I’ve been watching too many detective shows—that sounds like a covert operation. Ah, but it is.

To begin, I recently spent a month in the U.S. teaching underground, literally, in a basement apartment. My husband Mark and I rented it from our friends Susan and Lou, who live near High Point, North Carolina. Mark worked in a local pediatric office while I took an intensive online class to earn a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification.

I set up a subterranean classroom with my laptop on a folding table. For four weeks I sat cemented in the $10 office chair I found at Good Will. Never before had I taken an online Zoom class nor had I taught in one. Welcome, Mona, to the Covid 21st century!

I began my teaching career when I was in the first grade. My parents bought me a small standing chalkboard, which is what educators used before whiteboards and smart boards, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The first pupil I enrolled was my 81-year-old grandmother. She was confined to a hospital bed in our family room, but bless her long-suffering heart, she would sit up on the side of the bed while I taught her the alphabet. Granny said that when she was a child, she always confused her little c’s and little e’s. Well, it was high time to get that straightened out!

Ah, but I digress. Perhaps something I learned as a six-year-old would serve me in my new hi-tech learning environment. I was one of twelve online students—scattered across the United States—who met daily with our theory teacher Nicole, a fellow American living in Brazil. Then once a week we met individually with our practicum teacher, Juliana—originally from Bulgaria, but living in Chicago—to review the lesson plans we had prepared for our adult learners. Immigrants from Mexico, France, Russia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and elsewhere volunteered to be our guinea pigs. May I please sing the refrain from Disney’s “It’s A Small World After All”?

I had the opportunity to teach classes for beginner, intermediate, and advanced students. For the advanced class, I presented a lesson on reading comprehension using my very own Just About Anything article from July, entitled “Underground Gardens.” I thought my students could connect with the story of Baldassare Forestiere, an Italian who immigrated to America in 1901. We worked our way—paragraph by paragraph—through the story of this ambitious citrus farmer who overcame many obstacles to finally dig a labyrinth of gardens under the nearly concrete hardpan soil of his Fresno, California property. Through hard work and perseverance, Forestiere turned his proverbial lemon into lemonade. It was a fun lesson. A couple of students wrote me afterwards to tell me what they had learned from Forestiere’s example.

I applaud anyone who tries to learn English as a foreign language. For 29+ years (wink, wink) I have navigated nearly effortlessly in this language. Its underlying grammatical structures have come to me intuitively as a native speaker. Little did I realize that English is so dang complicated! Like driving a car, I had traveled thousands of miles without peeking under the hood.

Well, let’s take a look at the engine. I was amazed, for example, when I taught adjectives to another class. I wore a beautiful red cotton dress. Why don’t I say, I wore a cotton beautiful red dress? Hmm…I guess because it doesn’t sound right? No, actually, there are precise rules for the ordering of adjectives: determiner, opinion, size, shape, age, color, origin, material, and purpose. Who knew? (To learn more, check out this link: www.youtube.com/watchapp=desktop&v=6vscGeUSfrw&feature=youtu.be) My poor students must learn this stuff deliberately—it doesn’t come naturally to their ears.

I began to realize that much of what a native speaker understands lies buried beneath his or her consciousness. Taking this TEFL course, I had some personal excavating to do. I needed to teach what—for me—was underground.

No doubt every language can tell a twisty, turny tale of its own development. But the story of English is Shakespearean in its breadth. All the world’s a stage for our language’s history of intrigue, invasion, conquest, and acquisition. (Check out this link for a brief history of English: www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=eU9pshEkwVE&feature=youtu.be).

There’s a reason why American school children have weekly spelling tests. It’s more than mixing up little c’s and little e’s. English is inconsistent, messy, a hodgepodge of words gleaned from different peoples, places, and times. Why, for example, do farmers raise cows, but eat beef? Ask the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. Dig beneath simple words, and you will find a labyrinth of history. Clues abound below the surface. Every conquest left its fingerprints. What fun for the linguistic office-chair detective!

That is why I love teaching underground.

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