flaca

It's the first day of classes after a two-week Christmas vacation, and I've prepared a review for 11-year-old Marta, hoping to jar her memory on what we learned last semester. I've cut out dozens of little cards, a word on each one: verbs on the triangles, nouns on the squares, prepositions on the circles, etc. It's taken me a while to complete, but she's a hands-on learner and I figure that physically constructing the sentences will be good for her.

(This little girl is the eldest of three siblings, the youngest of whom is an autistic 8-year-old boy. On our first day of class, Marta's brothers are in the next room, deeply entrenched in a Playstation battle, and our lesson is frequently interrupted by a wail of frustration or the rattle of a hurled controller. Most of my students have a noisy sibling or two, and the reaction to such disturbances is usually an eye roll or a retaliatory scream. But skinny little Marta, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, peeks into the game room and gently instructs the boys to quiet down. We don't hear a peep for the rest of the hour.

During a later class, Marta explains her youngest brother's condition in the straightforward terms and positive tone of a professional. "He can't learn the same as other children, so in his class he learns things differently," she summarizes.

Marta tells witty, compassionate stories about her little brother. She tells me about the time her pet bird was discovered missing from his cage. After a long search, the boy said to his father, waving his arms toward the window, "he flew away." She smiles, more charmed by her brother's good-natured error than hurt by the loss of her pet. She says he didn't realize the cage needed to be shut, that he thought the bird just wanted some fresh air.

When he bursts in on our class one day, Marta laughs and calmly explains that she's busy right now and he needs to play elsewhere until she's finished. Once when I arrive, her room is pitch black. Her brother likes the movie theater atmosphere when he watches his cartoons, so she lets him sit in her purple, Justin Bieber-themed room with the blinds closed and the volume up.

She's curious about where I came from and where I'm going. There's a globe on her desk and she asks me to point out Springfield, Indiana, Buenos Aires, Thailand. She's shocked at the distance between my hometown and my Asian destination, and asks me, her Mediterranean eyes filled with concern, if I'm very homesick.)

As I arrange the cards before her and explain the activity, Marta examines the more intricate shapes, the bowties and amoebas to which I've resorted when the simplest forms had been used up. Lesson planning takes little efforts like this--I've found that a highly-structured activity helps me make the most of the hour-- but not even my adult students have ever mentioned it. Marta, turning a gerund star over in her hand, looks at me and says, "This must have really been a lot of work."