GOOD INTENTIONS ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE
After several weeks, I fazed myself out of posting union notices and became a revolving substitute teacher for basic English, practical math, typing, construction work skills, elementary short-order cooking, auto mechanics and tailoring. I spoke good English, I had learned to type in high school. Although I had a tough time with algebra, I could teach practical math.
However, I knew little about auto mechanics, construction work, cooking, and nothing whatsoever about tailoring. As far as substituting for those classes, I took the attendance, answered the questions that I could, and made an effort to keep a measure of discipline. The youngsters I was teaching had volunteered for the classes; and, for the most part, they were attentive and polite even though I had no information to impart for three of the classes that I occasionally taught.
On a brighter side, my English as a Second Language had become increasingly popular; the class sizes had gone from three or four students to fifteen to twenty. According to my students, I found out that the popularity was based on practicality: in other words, how to pronounce English correctly without a Spanish accent. We concentrated on the English sounds that are difficult for Spanish speakers. The exploding English TH was the most difficult and was often replaced by the English D that some natives of New York and New Jersey used such as dem dese and dose for them, these and those. W was not in the Spanish alphabet; W and WH were often avoided or mumbled. The QU, although somewhat rare in English, was far different than the Spanish pronunciation. On the other hand, there were some tradeoffs, such as the Spanish V that is pronounced like the English B.
The TH and WH drills were tense but exciting — waiting for someone to get tongue tied or start speaking Spanish in frustration. I went to the main New York City Public Library and found a book about how the mouth and tongue move to make English’s various sounds. For example, the photographs and drawings were detailed step by step in the pronunciation of the word that. That was just what I needed rather than trying to explain how the tongue moves when pronouncing that. The book followed the English alphabet letter by letter. I bought a copy of the book and expensed it; the drills became better and better.
Several times a month I would give short talks on the history of English. The students were surprised that English was classified as a Western Germanic language even though it does not sound like German. And the structures of English and German are quite different in that German often puts the important verb toward the end of a sentence while English puts the verb toward the front. English speakers tend to interrupt one another while Germans tend not to and wait for the important verb. They were more surprised to learn the important part that William the Conqueror and the French language had played in the development of modern English.
I was surprised how much they did not know about the Spanish language. That Spanish, a romance language, that was modernized Latin that descended from the Roman Empire that included Spain. The major romance languages are: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and the numerous dialects of those languages. An example of the romance relationships, a Spanish speaker can understand a great deal of an Italian newspaper; vice versa for an Italian reading a Spanish newspaper.
I asked the class why is your first language Spanish and mine is English?
They knew that Spain had colonized a great deal of Latin American. They intermarried with the locals and created a new race (mestizo) that was a hybrid of Spanish and Indian blood. The British had colonized most of North America but did not intermarry that much. Many of the students decided that I was lucky.
Asking why I was lucky, most responded that I was white and they were brown.
I replied that there were white decedents of Spaniards living in Latin America and they seem to be getting along well enough.
Their reply was that since the whites run everything, they get along very well. I tiptoed out of that conversation.
The program I had started for obtaining a New York driver’s permit was running out of gas. There were no cars available for teaching, and no one was brave enough to teach youngsters how to drive in the city’s aggressive traffic. I contacted several driving schools, but none were interested in pro bono work. With that the program withered and was cancelled.
To keep busy, I volunteered for jobs that no one wanted, such as cataloguing keeping track of the work boots and work clothes for young men entering the construction program. Once accepted into the program, the youngsters were sent to me for fitting and signing an agreement to care for the clothes. A tedious job with frightening aspects that will be described later.
