Miss Mary, Teacher Mary, Gloria and Otis

On my first day at Catholic Charities Immigration and Refugee Assistance (from here on referred to as Refugee Resettlement), I got a tour of both the office and the ESL (English as a Second Language) school that’s in a different building than the one I work in. I’m very excited to be working at Refugee Resettlement and, overall, I had a good first day. I truly believe that Refugee Resettlement does a good job with the limited resources it has and that the employees really care about the clients and about what they’re doing. However, there were a few things that stuck out to me and bothered me on the first day.

Here is a reflection I wrote on my first day:

Today I was introduced to a couple of ESL classes. Two of the classes were the lower-level classes in the main office and one of them was at the Herkimer school where the mid and upper level classes are held.

I was introduced to the first two classes as “Miss Mary.” This made me uncomfortable for a couple of reasons. For one, I think it sounds funny: I’m all about alliteration, but Miss Mary doesn’t sound good to me. Also, I don’t really like “Miss” for myself in general—I prefer Ms. However, the biggest reason it made me uncomfortable was that I was introduced to them and told to call them by their first names while they were using “Miss” for me as a sign of respect. In my opinion, there is no need for the higher level I’m put on simply by the title I’m given. I have great respect for our clients as people and for all they’ve seen, experienced, and gone through (and are still going through), so why should they call me “Miss” while I call them by their first names?

At the Herkimer school I was introduced as “Teacher Mary,” which makes no sense at all because I’m not a teacher. At least “Miss Mary” is accurate.

The actual teacher of the ESL class asked me to photocopy some pages out of a workbook, which I was happy to do. While waiting for the pages to be copied, I flipped through the workbook and looked at the illustrations that went along with the exercises. I wasn’t particularly surprised by what I found in the book, but that didn’t make it any less disturbing.

There were about a dozen characters that were used consistently throughout the book. All but two of these characters were white. The exceptions to the white rule were Gloria and her boyfriend, Otis. There wasn’t even the infamous “Juan” who shows up so often in the word problem sections of math books. Now, I know that there are no doubt white people somewhere in an ESL class, but not in this particular class and I’m guessing that white people are a tiny minority of the students who use this book. The people in this ESL class are from Sudan, Burma/Myanmar, Bhutan, Somalia, Iraq, and the Congo—no one in the text books looks like the students in the class (not even Gloria and Otis).

There was another problem with the workbook: the main activities that women were depicted doing were cooking, shopping, talking on the phone, and serving men while the main things the men did were working, playing various sports, eating the food the women prepared for them, and fixing things around the house. In one, Otis drops by Gloria’s house and valiantly saves her from having to paint her living room and THEN he even takes her out on a date. What a guy.

This book’s copyright is either 2007 or 2008, I can’t remember.

I would think that an ESL book would have characters that looked like the students who were using the books. I also think it would be more helpful for the pictures to depict people applying for jobs, taking their children to school, going the post office, using public transportation, and other things new immigrants and refugees are likely to do.