Finally! A ShowFinally! A Show About a Former Missionary Turned Middle School Teacher
Stephanie Anderson teaches English as a New Language in Indiana.
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Good morning.
It's Friday, and there's six more days of school. I'm up. It's about five forty five, and I really don't want to wake up because I didn't really sleep.
Really great last night and probably didn't.
Go to bed until one.
I was in bed by like ten, but just couldn't sleep. And if I don't work out before work, it's just probably not going to happen. Yeah. If I don't do it now, I won't do it.
This is finally a show about a former missionary who became a special type of middle school English teacher.
My name is Stephanie Anderson, and I currently live in Indianapolis, So I'm an E and L teacher, which is English as a New Language. The school that I work at is about twelve hundred kids. The majority of students are African American. Most of my students are Hispanic, but then I also have a growing population of students coming from Haiti.
I'll right a couple of announcements this morning. First, this is we are May eighteenth, or we are celebrating Haitian Flag Day today even though it falls on tomorrow. So at this time, all our Haitian Creole students are welcome to come down to the Commons to get a picture this morning and celebration of Haitian Flag Day tomorrow, So teachers you may release are Haitian creole students to the Commons at this time.
ASL is kind of an outdated term. It's not something that's not used anymore, but it's something that is really kind of pigeonholes because it's English as a second language when it's ESL, and a lot of our students that are coming English is not their second language. For some of them, it is their second language. But for some of them, even if they're Hispanic, some of them are coming from places in Guatemala or Nicaragua or Honduras, and they have different languages, like more native languages, and for Haitian kids, English sometimes is their fifth language. So that's why the term has changed from ESL to English as a new Language. There's a lot of acronyms that do very similar things but have different purposes. Essentially, let's go, ladies, let's go, let's go, let's go.
If you want a flag, I have some extra flags here.
I was born in Indianapolis, and I was actually born during a tornado. I just had my birthday, not too long ago, and my mom reminded me that I was born during a tornado, and I haven't stopped since.
I've never known a strange.
When I was a child, my mom said that I would just talk to anybody and everyone, and I also got lost a lot. As a child, we went to Disney World. I don't know how old I was, maybe seven, and I remember looking down and they have all these bricks of people who who have donated money, and I'm looking and reading these names, and then all of a sudden, like at the entrance, and then I look up and no one around me is someone I know. And then I think I just cried and found some kind of an adult, and then I found my parents. When we went to King's Island and in Ohio, I got lost there with my cousins. I got lost out a seers once, and my family members all had to block off the seers because they thought maybe I'd gotten kidnapped. But I was just hiding in a rack of clothes.
I wander off.
And I look at something, and then all of a sudden, I look around and I'm not with my people.
So I'm not.
Always very observant of staying with the people I'm supposed to stay with. I stayed in Indianapolis for my whole childhood and high school career. Moved to Munts, Indiana to winter Baal State did not do education. I actually did religious studies, and that was more of a I procrastinated picking a major for so long that once I got finished and I looked, you know, I was getting closer to graduating, I had to look back and be like, well, what have I taken a lot of courses in?
And I had taken a lot of history, a lot of geography.
And then a lot of religion classes, and because it was interesting to me, well, religion in general. Like at that time, at late high school early college, was just trying to figure out who I was as a person and trying to figure out, like how do I fit in this whole world. I wasn't a Christian. We didn't go to church. That was something that I did on my own. And I had a cousin that an older cousin that asked me to go to church, and I was.
Like, yeah, yeah, I'll go. You're cool.
I was a freshman in high school when nine to eleven happened, and I remember just being baffled by, you know, that happening, not knowing anything about Islam, not knowing anything about that part of the world, but being very intrigued by what had happened, and thinking, I think I'm also very an optimistic person, and thinking, there's no way that there's a group of people like that, there's a giant group of people in the world to just like hate Americans so much that they would do something like this. And at the time, I was a very strong Christian and so I was just trying to think, how, like, what did they believe? Well, how is it so different than the way that I believe? And so I think that's what kind of drew me to religion to begin with. And Islam always was a focal point when I was studying. I always was intrigued by Islam over everything else. When I had to do I took a religious studies clash that studied it was like an anthropological study of a group in Muncie, and you've got to choose any religious group you wanted, and I chose our local mosque and I loved going. I went every Friday. I met these amazing women. Because I stayed on the women's side, I met these amazing women from Itran in Afghanistan and got to know them. They invited me over to their house. I never felt like they were pushing me to try to believe in Hamm it is their profit. Like they never tried to convert me, and they made me feel I mean, they knew that I was doing this for school. They knew that it wasn't now I think would they have been happy to share with me if I would have asked in an interest that I wanted to become Muslim, Yeah, of course.
But they were really respect that.
Boundary, which I appreciated as if do you want to read it with me?
That's okay.
So this blue box at sixty two, Okay, more good news was brought. More good news news was brought by young Jock. By Young j There was a time in my life that I wanted to be a missionary, and I think that was the other interest that came into trying to understand about other people. I wanted to see what do other people do and how do they live? And I fully and wholeheartedly believed that it was my job as a Christian at that time to proselytize and to convert people to Christianity, because I felt it was partly my duty because it was asked of me of the Bible, and I believed at that point that the Bible was the true and accurate word. I think that was kind of the like there was little sparks here and there of just peaking interest of just something different, something new than what I had known in Indiana. I never thought that.
I would stay in Indiana forever.
I guess I never really saw that as a long term plan. I always saw that there was other places out in the world and thought, man, it would be really cool to see what it's like to be there. My mom had a friend that she hooked me up with their church was going to Honduras for a week, and so I went with them. I didn't know anybody really in this group. I mean, they were really friendly, and we went to compound that had a school, and they had like a communal area for all the families to cook, and then all of the families had individual houses, but all of the parents were like foster parents or like adoptive parents, they were not the parents of the children, and so they all lived there and then they went to school there, and then while we were there, they were also working on a college, like a small university up on the mountain. I ended up helping this guy do pipework every day. I didn't know what I was doing, but I hung out with the kids and kept them occupied while other people were doing real work. So that was my first time leaving the country really feeling like I was leaving the country by myself. And then when I was in college, I got connected with a Christian organization and I did mission work in the summers. I went to India first summer and that was my first like really really big trip. The next summer I went to Thailand. And then I graduated college and somehow got connected with a friend of a friend who ran a Christian school in Nigeria and they said, hey, we have this library that the school that needs someone to run it for three months. Would you be interested? I said, yeah, I could go. I'll go to Nigeria for three months. I don't have anything to do. And so I talked to the principal and she's like, actually, we would want you for a year, a whole school year.
And that was a huge culture shock.
That was that was probably the best thing to do first, like a first big experience living abroad because it just taught me so much. It taught me how to live on less than I've ever been used to. I don't want to say a little, because we were very blessed compared to a lot of people that lived there. I mean, we had a generator in our property so at night, like we would have a generator for our air conditioning.
But the electricity was very unstable.
It was never you know, it was always on and off, and you just got used to it. Our water would be the well liked would run dry and we just wouldn't have water to wash dishes and things. Yeah, when you don't have water, you don't electricity, You've got to figure out how to make all of your food. There's definitely perspective in that. When I was working with people and trying to proselytize them and get to them to to, you know, believe in Jesus and become saved. I think at that time I really felt like I was doing something that was going to make a.
Forever impact on their life.
And I was sad for people, I think, thinking that they didn't they didn't have Jesus the same way that I had them, and they didn't have that same security, because that's what you're taught, and that's what you know, preachers say every Sunday, and that's what you read about in the Bible, is that you don't have that they don't have that security, and that they are going to live forever in you know, in hell or just in you know, in this discomfort, and you don't want that for anybody. And so I think I felt secure for a while, but I think still deep down I had this feeling of do I actually believe enough?
Am I doing this right? Is it enough?
And I think that in Christianity, I think everyone, I think in any faith, people are going to doubt their faith, and everyone's going to.
Go back and forth.
And I doubt there's anybody in their life that's ever said, oh, I believed in this once and I believed it forever and I never doubted. But I think traveling and seeing more people and different people and meeting again people that were some of the nicest people, like, the longer that I saw this, the more that I saw this, the more that I lived, I just thought, I just can't imagine that they are living their life and they just happened to be born somewhere that Christianity is not prevalent, and I just can't imagine that that's going to be the end of them because they don't believe because of this, because they're just not born in the right place. And so you know, quickly when you start to meet more people of different religions and different faiths and see how they express their faiths, and you just it becomes harder to believe that there's only one way. It's harder to believe that there's only one route. I don't know, even after all of this, after studying many religions and seeing many religions in practice, I don't really know if I believe really anything anymore. After I'd worked in Nigeria and worked at a school, I realized, Okay, if I'm going to go back overseas and work overseas again, teaching English is probably my best bet.
Like I'm not.
Nobody needs a religious studies major there in their workforce. I could have went anywhere, but I was very drawn to going back to Africa and to an Arab you know, an Arab country there where.
They spoke Arabic.
I decided Egypt because one I found a job and two I was like, well, this fits both criterias. It's in Africa and it's an Arabic speaking country and their Muslim like let's go. Because I had read stories about women being in Saudi Arabia and I had, you know, heard all of these things, and I'm thinking it, can't you hear about these stereotypes about women being oppressed And I'm like, it can't be as bad as you're hearing, And so I wanted to see for myself and it wasn't what you know, we and the West had kind of exacerbated. So then I found I found a job online for a school in Egypt. I didn't know much about Egypt, I'll be really honest, and the website, like even every part of it seemed a little sketchy. My mom doesn't know a lot of this that it was the sketchy. I did communicate with people that had worked at the school, other English teachers, but I still was like there was just weird things where they were like telling me about like how you should get your alcohol from duty free because it's way more expensive, you know, when you buy it outside of duty free. And I start like thinking and I'm like, am I getting kidnapped, but then I'm also bringing the alcohol for everyone, like, what's what's happening? So it ended up being fine, and I ended up, you know, meeting and working with people that I from all over the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and people that I would have never met or you know, probably been friends with it and became really good friends with them.
So and then I got in a.
Relationship with a guy and we had talked about getting married, but he was Muslim, and I think it was I think I knew deep down it was never really going to happen because his family was never going to agree. They never were going to be okay with it was too different than what they had ever experienced. That I was one American that I was. I too didn't speak Arabic and you know, I was working on it, but I wasn't anywhere close to fluent and I wasn't Muslim.
But I think we both hoped.
So that was that was at That was a hard blow when that ended, when he and I broke up.
We ended in twenty seventeen.
It feels it feels really close sometimes, but then it feels really far when I when I say the date out loud and I think about the time that has passed, and I think about the things I've done since, then I think, oh, no, that's that's actually kind of not that close, but it still feels fresh sometimes. Yeah, I my mental health went downhill, well partially because of that. Partially I rushed into another relationship with someone who was wrong for me. But you know, you tried to fill I tried to fill avoid quickly and that was wrong for me. And then when that didn't pan out, I just was crushed. I came back to the United States essentially because my mental health was trash and needed to be around my family.
And then when I.
Was looking for a job, I had found this job for E and L, but I didn't really know what EnL was and didn't even realize that I had to do a whole nother certification for it, so I kind of fell into the job. But when I looked at the description and you're teaching students English, and I'm like, well, I've been teaching kids English forever, like for seven years, and all my kids that I taught abroad didn't know English as their first language.
I was like, I can do that, and when I.
Got interviewed here in Indiana, I think my principal had reservations, but I told them, and this was kind of my motto through and through is that like kids are kids are kids. At the end of the day, I don't care what kid in the world you're talking to, Like they like candy. Any kid in the world likes candy. Any kid in the world wants to play and do silly things and have fun. Like at the end of the day, kids are kids are kids, and they have basic needs, which are they want to have fun, they want to feel safe, they want candy, and they grow fast. I mean, those are those are kind of the universal truths for children. So during my day, I have a little period in the beginning of the class, like at the beginning of the day that I don't have students, So that's the first period, and then I have the second period. I have my Reading Intervention class, which is seven to eighth graders that are proficient in English but just need some help with some reading. And then I have my eighth grade New Learner class, and then I have a seventh grade new learner class. Then I have lunch, and then after that I work with a student that is new to the United States who is not literate at all, and she's a fifth grader. So we work on a lot of basic skills, and then I work with my sixth grade new learners then and they've all just gotten here this year. Those students that I work with from Haiti that I support in that class Wahn. I use Google Translate a lot, especially with my Haitian students. Spanish I can kind of fumble through here and there, but with my Haitian students, I'm also trying to learn Haitian creole on Duelingo and it's not I started French and then I started Haitian Creole, and there was weird overlaps that didn't make sense because like God song was like boy in French, but then it was Man and Haitian creole on due Lingo at least, and so then I was like, I don't know which is which. Now you have to understand the crossover. I think that's the biggest thing in linguistics and in the job that I have, the crossover meaning one language to another. So how does English compare to this other language? So like Hungarian, for example, is very different than English, and a lot of other languages because the structure is not a subject verb pattern, it's actually a verb subject. So like Yoda actually speaks more like he's Hungarian. They actually copied the Hungarian structure, like sentence structure, and so that's why he talks the way he does. Talented him I And so you have to understand that crossover so that you can understand what are they going to make mistakes in Spanish and englisher are nice? Are nice like accompaniment because we have so many similarities. But like they have to understand, phonics is different, so like the J is going to be different. Arabic is like that Arabic there's no P sound, so pepsi is bibsi. They don't have a V sound, so everything goes to like a puugh. They have the i'm sound that we don't have. They have the so like uh like DJ Colled like DJ Colled. I don't know why this drives me crazy, Maybe just because you get used to it after a while. Like I had a friend, I have a friend named Khalid in Quit and then I asked him one day, I said, why does DJ Colled go by DJ Collid and not DJ Khalid?
Because it should be like A like.
A and and and I think realistically it's just because English speakers are never going to say it correctly, so I think at some point he's just like, forget it. I'm DJ Colled, DJ Chali. So the highs of being an an L teacher is just watching them develop and you see them and this was the same even when I taught abroad and watching them just grow. And the funniest thing is you start to realize that you've really taught them and that they're really paying attention and they're learning something when they start picking up your mannerisms and the way that you talk or the things that you say, and then you go, oh, you have been listening to me. This is from me, Like I call them honey a lot, and then I have to quickly tell them once like what this means, and they just look at me funny, and then I have to be like, yeah, it's just like a like it's like a more, it's like a sweet thing. It's endearment. But then they'll start saying it back to me sometimes and sometimes it's sarcastic. It's like okay, honey, and then you're like, oh, okay, yeah, you guys are are actually learning things. The lows are the stories. I don't hear a ton of them one because of a language barrier too.
I try not to.
Put my kids in positions where they talk about things they don't want to talk about.
Or also a lot of our kids that.
Come with some crazy stories don't even know that it's trauma or that it's a crazy story.
You know.
One of my teachers I teach with was talking to a girl a couple of years ago, and the girl says something like, well, you guys were all kidnapped too, weren't you. And they're like and they all kind of look at her, like what, And you know, when she was she came from Guatemala originally, when they got to the US border, her mom was here in the United States but had had, you know, paid people to bring the daughters here, and then once they got to the border, then these people asked for more money. And you just hope and pray that it was just that they were kept there. You just you just you just hope. And that's something I've tried to advocate a lot, and I'm we're starting to see change in that. But I want to see when my kids come. I want to see them, you know, start talking to an adult that they can talk to in their language. That's a counselor. And I'm not saying draw things out, but just check in with our kids and see like, are you okay? Because they don't even realize sometimes. So it's things like that. Those are the lows. Those are definitely the lows. It's the stories they come with. Those are the lows.
But it makes them.
Who they are, and it's their story, and you know, you don't want to take it from them, and you're not gonna try to demean it or and you don't want to. I'm not trying to use their stories of like, oh woe is me and my poor kids, like that's not it at all. I know that my kids' parents are coming here because they they want more for their kids.
At this time, please release call writers and anyone staying for an after school activity. A bus riders remain in the classroom until four o'clock.
The I don't have great feelings about people that are very negative about immigrants, especially knowing how hard my kids' parents work. I don't ask about their status. I don't want to know their status. I don't want to get involved in. Now, if a kid told me and wanted helped with something like they need a lawyer or something, now, of course I would do whatever I could to connect them. But I know how difficult potentially their lives were, just hearing little bits and pieces of their stories, and you know, I have students that were on the brink of getting involved in gangs or were involved in gangs in other countries in Central or South America, and their parents, you know, are trying to get them out of it.
I know that.
And I just think I think even just looking back on the history of our country and that we were all immigrants at some point. I mean, we were all we didn't all start here, and I think America has a lot of we have a lot of dark history for sure, And I don't know, it just makes me sad sometimes when I see people, you know, being like this is I think, at the end of the day, it all roots to the unknown, and you know, propaganda starts and you hear this negative thing and that negative thing. It's the fear of the unknown, for sure, and I think a lot of Americans struggle with the fear of the unknown, which is why when people talk to me and find out I've lived abroad or I've done this, they think some people think I'm crazy. They're like, how could you ever leave the United States and not only leave, but how could you live there? But again, it all goes back to kids or kids or kids, people or people or people. I can meet somebody that's in rural Indiana, and I can meet somebody that's a Beduin in the Sinai Peninsul of Egypt, and I can be like, you guys would be best friends if you were born in the same place, because you guys do the same things. You're all just doing hillbilly stuff and riding around, getting into trouble, shooting, you know, playing with fire. You're all doing the same things. Like you're just so I don't know. I see a lot of parallels between people when I travel, and I think, I think the running towards the scary thing has just been my typical life cycle. It's a I don't know if it's a dumb that I just run into fear. I don't know if it's just that that's just been my nature that I I don't I think it was the especially I think as a younger person, I think you have a lot of these feelings of I'm never gonna die, I'm going to live forever, and I think I ran with that for so long, and so I lived in, you know, probably a dreamland a little bit here and there. And when you're in a dreamland, like you can do whatever you want, you can fly.
Well, it's about almost eleven o'clock at night.
I just got home about thirty minutes or so. Ago went and hung out with some teacher friends in one of their houses and had some drinks and pizza and just kind of hung out. Sometimes we talk about school, and a lot of times we just kind of like hang out and do other things and talk about other things.
And I'm getting ready to wash my face and brush my teeth and go to bed and hopefully wake up and do CrossFit in the morning if I can wake up. Yeah, and then next week will be our last week, and then I have like nine weeks off, which is well, no, not nine weeks. I don't know how many weeks we have off.
I don't remember.
I think we have about like June part of July, so about two months, and then we'll start back up and do it all again.
