Lessons for and from My Students at CCSF

I've just written two wonderful retired teachers, and it occurs to me that I should share here what I was telling them. 
          First, the traffic report:    It took me less than 45 minutes to get to my sister’s house in Oakland and 1 hour and 35 minutes to get back.  I saw the sign indicating a game in Candlestick Park.
          Now, the lessons I've prepared.

  In ESL 132, as I mentioned yesterday, I got types of music including classical, rock, jazz, and country, with the country being “Lyin, Cheatin’, Woman-Chasing, Honky Tonkin Whiskey Drinking You.”  In my ESL 140 High Intermediate Academic ESL class we’re doing a unit on sensationalism in the news, and of course on the topic, I’ve brought up CCSF in the news, but today on my way to my sister’s in Oakland, I stopped by Safeway to buy her some sunflowers and pick up an issue of The Enquirer.  Since I was feeling a bit embarrassed, I told the cashier, “I’m doing a unit on sensationalism in the news with my students.  Is this the worst you’ve got?”

She pointed to the picture of Faith Hill and her lyin, cheatin, woman-chasing husband on the front and said, “She had an affair with him when he was married to another woman, and now she’s complaining because another woman’s having an affair with him now that he’s married to her.” 

                In my ESL 142 Speaking and Listening class the students have given their Miss America type 30-second self-introduction (“Colorado means red, but I’m tickled pink to be here.  I’m Miss Colorado!”), only in addition to telling where they were from, they told us something unique about themselves.  They sometimes pronounced unique eunuch in spite of our practices, but that can be unique, too.  They also named their favorite fable, which is the focus of the first unit in our College Oral Communication book.

I've also gotten lessons, instruction, and inspiration from them.  

                I’m eventually going to respond to my ESL 140 students’ very warm and charming letters. On the topic of keeping a diary, I told them about a friend's annual gift of a year-end letter to her children.   One of the students wrote that people in his family put things into writing, too, and he loved his grandmother so much that after her death—when he was so far away from China in San Francisco—he wrote a letter to his grandmother so his dad could put it on her grave.  I hadn’t heard of that literary substitute for (or addition to) floral arrangements, but I think it’s wonderful, and now the letters can be California grown (not from Colombia)!

 I may have mentioned earlier that I unintentionally left out  my childhood, and instead I mentioned the death of Javier’s son-in-law, my ex-husband, Jonathan’s father, my father and my mother, so  I got a lot of comments on death.  “As we know that human just have only one way to go to the end of our lives that is death, sooner or later, all of us will face to face with it.  So, please don’t more worry and sad any more, please let them go!  For us who are still here on earth to pray for souls of them being in heaven.” 

There was one comment on CCSF:  “I watched TV news about CCSF will lost the accredited.  I worry about school will close.”

Then too they made me fully aware of the age difference.  (There are now workshops on “generational awareness” because people aren’t retiring as new workers young enough to be their grandchildren are coming in.)  One student wrote, “I was born that year when you have been teaching at City College.  How coincidence!”

               As I was telling Karen,  May all your coincidences be good ones!