Angle

Sometime a couple of the older children ask me to help them with their English homework.  At times some of the lessons seem too advanced for their current level of comprehension.  There was a child who did not know the words “his,” “why,” or “what,” who had a passage to read about a historic Haitian figure and the reading included the words “guerrilla warfare” and “fervently,” which I struggled to explain the meanings for in Haitian Creole even though I know the Creole words for “his, why and what.”   Another time I assisted a child with a passage that explained how the rain creates streams and rivers that flow into the ocean; I ended up explaining the passage to her in Creole and it seemed like a light bulb went off in her head, and she appeared excited and I don’t think it was so much because she had learned the English but because she had learned a concept that perhaps had never before been explained to her in her first language.  It does seem that many of the passages were written about subjects that are somehow connected to Haitian culture and life, and that may be interesting to many children.  I did find it puzzling that on an exercise designed to help students practice placing either “a” or “an” before a noun, that the any English teacher would include the technical word for a female dog.

Some of the children have expressed an interest in learning English.  On occasion, I have offered very informal classes for whoever wants to come from the house of the older children.  I decided to try to make it fun.  We've done things like introduce ourselves, sang and did the motions for “head shoulders, knees and toes,” walked while saying things like “I am walking, we are walking” took turns jumping while saying “you are jumping” “she is jumping“ “he jumped.” etc.  (I have read that exercise and movement have been proven to help with the learning process; I include this just in case my readers think that I don’t like to sit still.)   Sometimes the children just want to ask me “how do you say….(whatever?)”  Kids seem to really enjoy looking at the bi-lingual picture dictionary I have, which was a text we used when I studied in Creole in Miami, although it was written with English learners in mind. 

On occasion children ask me to translate something.  Most of the time I am glad to do this for them and typically it is easy to do, with occasional exceptions.  There was a little plastic bag of drinking water, which is commonly sold in this country, (although I personally avoid drinking from them,) and on the bag in English it said “feel the ozone” in blue letters.  A child asked for an explanation.  While I know that ozone is a gas and am aware that depletion of the ozone layer is problematic environmentally, I felt clueless and unable to understand, never mind articulate in Haitian Creole the meaning of the phrase and thought to myself maybe it simply sounded good to someone who has studied English and needed a slogan.  If you have a better explanation, please make use of the comments section of this post; I am curious.  Sometimes the older children will ask me to translate the words on a t-shirt they noticed a stranger wearing while they were on the way home from school.  (T-shirts that Americans discard often end up here; the people wearing them frequently do not know what they say.)  On one occasion I’d felt that I could only try to explain the meaning, if I also explained that it was inappropriate and why; it was either that or pretend that the t-shirt actually referred to a (not an) female dog.