Interview with an Adult School Teacher
By Emily XuIn the middle of our interview, Helen Choy states that she’s not a traditional or strict teacher; she believes that teaching and learning will be much more interesting and memorable if she teaches not just the worksheets but lets students bring their personal life experiences to learning. As she proceeded with the topic with an enthusi-
“We’re going to have to do the samba. Okay? Today it’s samba. Okay? You’re going to teach a samba!”
astic voice and body language, one of her students entered the room. She casually turned to that student and greeted him. At this moment, a new idea just came to her mind. I could tell her energy level was going up, vibrant emotions came to her face, and she said to her student without hesitation,
Helen Choy was printing worksheets for her class when I entered the room. It was about 8 in the morning, the sharp daylight permeating the window and making the room look holy and pondering. It was reality quiet—the only sound I could hear was the whirring noises of the printers. Choy has her back toward me, and she did not notice that I came in. So I broke the silence nervously, and Choy responded loudly like she was making those noises from her belly instead of her throat. She wore a highly saturated yellow-orange beanie, a dark blue sweater with colorful flowers, and large grey earrings. I noticed her voice echo in the small room and fill it with energy. Her attire matched up with her personality well, I thought. I asked her if she had time for an interview, and she immediately agreed with a passionate voice without even asking what my purpose was and how much time I would take. While waiting for her to finish printing, she asked me about the school I attend, the grade I’m in, the details of this interview project, and what I want to major in in college. She listened patiently when I talked and followed up with positive comments and a relative topic when I finished. She guided me upstairs to her classroom, gave me some time to set up my recorder, and started the interview by introducing herself. My first impression of her is an outgoing person with a decent amount of humor and full of energy. We started the interview. Choy is an enthusiastic, outgoing, warm-hearted ESL teacher at MVLA adult school who is very passionate about teaching and making people’s lives better. She believes that all people are unique and have their own interesting personal experiences, and she can learn a lot from them. It is very easy for Choy to construct a long sentence, and she has the confidence to say what-
ever comes to her mind and make it attractive and charming. Choy has a wide range of hobbies; specifically, she is interested in birding and hiking.
Sur- prisingly, Choy isn’t a professional teacher with many years of teaching experience. In fact, she has only taught for three years! She used to have a job that had no relation to teaching: “I was a software engineer originally.” Nodding her head, she continues, “my degree was in math, so I did many years as a software engineer, but it wasn’t my calling. But I did it, you know, I could do it” (Choy). But luckily, she was able to find out what she’s passionate about during the pandemic.
When we shift our topic to teaching methods, Choy shows another side of her personality. She’s not just a good group organizer and entertainer, she’s also a great supporter and listener. !
In Choy’s view, teaching is more like collaborating. She believes that every individual is special and valuable, they learned English from Choy, and Choy learned from their experience. She also has the ability to find possibilities in any situation: “I had taught a student from Greece. She was a professional actor, so she gave some compelling performances. Yes. So, you know, in what was the pandemic? Mm-hmm. You know, people can do things at home, too. I could play piano for people. And then another one could do their piano and another one could do, you know, whatever is in their repertoire” (Choy). This more student-centered collaborating style is actually “helpful for the increase in comprehension, speaking and listening skills (of the students)” (Barile).
However, whether traditional teaching methods are better is always a controversial issue. On the one hand, some educators argue that traditional teaching can provide students with more knowledge that will benefit them in the future; on the other hand, other educators argue that teaching with more methods allows students to seek out their own way of learning and leads to a better memorization of contents and higher motivation of learning in the future. Greg Ashman, in his article “8 Reasons to ditch traditional teaching methods”, argues that a certain amount of knowledge is required for students to do critical thinking and any other creative works. His article points out 8 common statements educators use to support new ways of teaching and states that they are all too “idealistic” and lack “scientific evidence”. Choy responded to this side of the argument with a relatively neutral idea. She agreed with most of the benefits of traditional teaching methods, and she admitted that she’s still trying different methods because there are too many. Although she concedes that she’s still exploring a variety of teaching methods, she still maintains that free and unlimited style toward teaching, as she believes that
“Variety is the spice of life!”
“ I’m willing to experiment and be spontaneous based on my gut feeling at that moment in time. The art of teaching is why I love my job. It’s full of depth, feeling, spirit, and community”, she said.
Information about adult education is poorly advertised online, which is surprising because they serve more than 4,500 students each year (“About Adult School”). So I asked Choy if she thinks MVLA Adult School should advertise
more. “I don’t,” said Choy, “there’s enough of the community who knows about the adult school for the ESL classes. I do know that. So in terms of now other offer- ings, because they are fee-based now ESL classes, I don’t know if you know, but they’re free. But they are fee-based, like ikeba- na flower arrangement, foreign languages, German, French, and Spanish. So those are fee-based.” Government funding for CAEP program areas are about 530 million dollars every year in the state of California. (California Department of education), and it doesn’t seem to be enough money. According to Julie, the Administer at MVLA adult school, my second interviewee, MVLA adult school is facing the problem of lack of government funding to hire more teachers, and the result of that is an unexpectedly long waiting list of people. She also thinks MVLA adult school should advertise more, since “ They put a lot of the money into elementary and high school. So a lot of people don’t know about adult schools. Can you believe that they get a fraction of what community colleges receive? So like I used to work at Evergreen Valley College, our budget was like 130 million, right? The budget for adult school is closer to 4 million to run an entire school.”(Julie) This conflicts with Choy’s idea of less advertising, but they both have the same view on government funding, that it is not enough to help all the adults who want to learn.
Toward the end of the interview, we talked about Choy’s future goals. Choy still thinks she needs to learn more about adult education because she didn’t study this in the first place. Some obstacle she’s facing is that she needs to break down things into easier forms so that
students can better understand them. She’s also, as mentioned before, exploring various ways of making teaching more interesting “outside of the worksheets,” she said. She is looking forward to teaching more because she really finds this job to be valuable and meaningful. The phrase “everyone is talented” is too common in
ments adults experience may lead them to believe less and judge more. But Choy doesn’t feel that way and doesn’t think that way. You can say she is a bit childish and naive, but you can’t deny all her effort to make things go the ideal way. When I stay in her classroom, I am supported and
her
into the classroom for morning class. Her
who were
earrings swayed while she turned around, and her eyes glowed. “ I don’t care. They say I can’t do it. Oh, yes, you can. You know it. Maybe it’s not singing or dancing because not everybody’s a singer, and not everyone’s a dancer. But you have personal stories that are so meaningful that we can learn from
school. But it doesn’t seem to be an everyday thing among adults. I guess the accumulating disappoint-
safe, feeling the warmth of the culture she built.
“That’s wonderful, and everyone is talented!” Choy said to me and to all
adult students
walking
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