a million dollar day

Remember "million dollar words" from your third grade writer's workshop? Well, I do, and I choose that phrase to describe two experiences I had today.

The first one is from my family group. Family group meets once a week with students, faculty, and staff of STS. I chose to join a Malay family group, just so I could get in that conversation time each week (that I wouldn't necessarily have otherwise). Sometimes, I feel that this was a great decision, and other days I am lost in the dark and frustrated, paging through my dictionary. Either way, I always feel that it gives me a good perspective on how my students may be feeling at any given point in my own English class.

Today for family group, it was my turn to lead (this means providing food, drink, Bible study, and sharing for an hour). I chose to lead one of my favorite camp devos-- you create a representation of your faith from tin foil, and then explain it to the group. Though I had a bit of tweaking to do; my audience was now a group of seminarians, instead of ten thirteen-year-old girls. I chose a verse from 1 Corinthians to share. I wrote out word for word my greeting, my directions, and my explanation in Malay. Even with everything ready, I was nervous. Really nervous. Do I have enough chairs? I have coffee and milo, will one pot of water be enough? I wanted to speak Malay, but if it's half in English, is that okay? Should I try to read the Bible verse in Malay, even though I know it will be slow and full of mistakes? Are the snacks okay?

Eleven people entered my house, and we began. It was an interesting feeling, to be leading this Bible study and, at the same time, have no idea how it was going. I saw people's tin foil figures, picked up the few words I recognized, but for the most part had no idea what they were sharing with each other. The only thing I could do was put it in motion, and let it be. As I was sitting there I was overwhelmed with a sense of relief and calm. What had I been so worried about? It reminded me, so often we try to control things in life, when no matter how hard we try, we can never fully understand or control them. It wasn't my hour to be worried about.

The second story comes from one of my tutorials. I have been teaching one of my students from China since September. When I met her, she couldn't even speak enough English to introduce herself. She is an avid studier, and motivated in general to learn English. Lately, we've been diving into nouns, since the structure of the language makes sense to her, all she is lacking is the vocabulary. A family friend from home sent me a Chinese-English picture dictionary, and at first, I was unsure of how to use it; I couldn't read the Chinese characters. But of course, I'm not the one that needs to read it. So, to jump start our noun learning these next couple weeks, I copied the most important pages for my student. We'll be learning fruits, vegetables, body parts, animals, and shapes, and at the end of short dictionary I included a page of musical terms. One of the main things I learned from Wartburg was if you want to have a good lesson, have it meet the interests of the students. I find this to be no different with my adult students, so of course I included the music for Zhang Yi. We have often spent our time together singing-- practicing words to English songs, sharing songs from musicals to see if we know the same ones, singing hymns and carols. She often will play the piano, and I sing along.

In our lesson today, we start flipping through the pages, pronouncing some words, talking about where we will start learning. We get to the last page, and after going through a few music terms, she turns to me. She thinks for a moment, gathering the words she wants to use. After one try, I'm still confused. She looks up a word in her dictionary-- the definition, to touch, affect. Together we put together a question, "why did you teach me this?" For me the answer was easy, of course I knew she liked music, so I thought she would want to learn it. But it obviously meant so much more.
She felt touched by my gesture. But I'm the one that is really touched.