Episode 6: Cultivating Empathy, Language, and an Organic Garden

The podcast episode features Allon, a senior in high school who co-teaches English as a second language and shares her experiences as a language learner. She discusses her interest in gardening, her love for languages, and how her own struggles with speech in elementary school have made her more patient with EL students. Allon also explains how her interest in Spanish led her to realize the importance of teaching English and helping others. Her maturity and dedication to her projects make her a valuable asset to her class. We have no weapons. We only have pots and pans. We have no power. We only have pots and pans. Beat the pots. Bang the pans. This is our revolution. Welcome to the Pots, Pans, and Gritos podcast, a voice for the English learner. I'm your host, Nolan Shigley. In today's episode, I sit with Alan Boettcher, a senior at Salem High School, who has co-taught my Level 1 EL English class as part of her Senior Pathway Project. Now, it's not every day I chat with a 17-year-old who has the maturity, vocabulary, and wisdom of a highly educated adult. In fact, Alan's teachers have been known to describe her as an old soul. Today, she shares her experiences as an instructor of EL and as a serious student of world languages. Along with Alan's insight, you will discover the sounds of the masterful Chao Tian, a brilliant Chinese dulcimer who defines artistry in every way. I'm excited to share her Chinese Appalachian tunes, created by the accompaniment of banjo and mandolin. She performs with traditional old-time musicians, and the diffusion that results is absolutely stunning, as it highlights both her East Asian culture and our home of Appalachia. As always, our mission is to create an archive of meaningful accounts while sharing artists with similar experiences and cultural backgrounds. And now, here are their stories. Hello, fellow vegetarian. Now that there is no threat of frost, we can dig into our gardens. You, like me, you are an organic gardener. What is going to be in your garden this year? So this year, like most years, I'm growing a huge array of things. I have different types of tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, peas, corn, carrots, lettuce, kale, spinach, really a wide array of things. I have a lot of herbs, too. Basically, anything that I can eat, I want to grow. I also have a lot of flowers. So I have sunflowers, marigolds, nasturtiums, things along that line. So you're intelligent enough to also think of the pollinators that will feed your garden. And for that reason, I also don't plant anything invasive. So like snapdragons in certain areas can become invasive, so I avoid planting them. It's scary how our brains match up sometimes like this. How did you get into gardening? My father, when I was younger, always had a garden in the backyard, which I think was mostly because of the finances of it. You can get a pack of seeds for a dollar, and that can grow you thousands of cucumbers, or you can buy a single cucumber. He moved out a few years ago, and when he moved out, I started gardening on my own. So I used just the seeds that he had left. And I had always helped with the garden. I had helped to weed and pick the vegetables and compost and all of that. But I was never as involved as I am now. And it's just a tradition that I've kept up, partly because there's so much more nutritional value, there's so much more flavor, and it's just so incredibly gratifying. The financial aspect is definitely still something beneficial. I like to grow sunflowers, for example, to feed to my hens, because that can be such a good money-saving tactic. Chicken feed prices are insane. What do your friends think about this? Some of my friends have a joke that I'm Amish, which I always laugh at, and I make the jokes too. Don't worry, they're not bullying me. But I kind of am, minus the religion bit. It's just the growing my own food. It's very homeopathic. It's very naturalistic, and it does take a lot of time and physical labor. But I think that's part of what makes it so gratifying, just that you have to spend so much time physically tending to something, and then once the produce is ready, you still have to cook with it. It's a lot of work, but I think that's the reason why gardening is enjoyable. Your beautiful response just explained everything that our listeners need to know about your personality and why you are so vital to our class that meets every day, that we'll get more into. Alan, introduce yourself. Hi, my name's Alan. I am 17. I'll be 18 in like two weeks. I enjoy gardening. I love languages, and I am a senior pathway student, which basically means that I have the opportunity of being almost a student teacher for both Ms. Fulcher for Spanish too, and you, Mr. Shigley, for newcomer EL. What else is there to say? Well, that's our segue into our next part. So that was perfect. So you just explained what a senior pathway project is, and man, I and my students have benefited greatly from your project. How did you become interested in EL? Because there are so many other pathway projects that you could have chosen. I don't know if there's one in gardening. I'm glad there's not because I know that's what you'd be doing instead of being with us every day. So how did you get interested in English learning as a teacher? My English learning, my interest in EL definitely sprouted from my interest in Spanish. In eighth grade, my last year of middle school, I was forced, and I say forced, but really there was no external force. It was just in order to get an advanced diploma, you have to take at least three years of a language course. So I didn't really have a choice. I had to take a language course if I wanted to get an advanced diploma, and that wasn't something that I viewed as an option. So I took Spanish 1 because I thought it was the easiest language. I really had no interest in it. I just thought that it would be something that would look good on my diploma. And then COVID hit. So for the end of Spanish 1 and all of Spanish 2, I didn't really learn anything. I know my teacher for Spanish 1 did not really provide any listening or speaking opportunities. So all of the vocabulary I knew, I just could read and recognize. I couldn't, I didn't know what they sounded like or how to pronounce them. And then Spanish 2 was a similar story. I didn't learn any Spanish in either of those courses because of COVID and the way that online school impacted learning in general. But then I took Spanish 3. And that was my first Spanish course that was more than like, ¿Cómo estás? And also wasn't for COVID. And that really just opened my eyes to how vital it is to learn languages. And you catapulted levels because you are completely, maybe not native fluent, but oh my gosh, when I listen to you speak with our students, it's like you're on another level. Yeah, I started taking Spanish seriously around the end of Spanish 3. My teacher sent out a poll and basically it was just asking which of the students planned to continue on to Spanish 4 the following year. And I said yes. But that got me thinking about how much I had enjoyed Spanish 3. Partly because I loved the teacher so much. Partly because it's such a cool thing to be able to open yourself to new cultures and words and meanings and just so much more than I could have experienced if I were still monolingual. So at that point, I knew I wanted to do something to do with languages. And I wasn't interested in becoming an interpreter because long-term travel is stressful. I would like to have stable housing. You have a garden. You cannot travel. And I considered a few pathways in my life. I thought about being an immigrant caseworker, which I still think would be a really... Very much a viable option for you. Absolutely. A really gratifying option too. And eventually, I had an economics class with two Spanish-speaking girls. Am I allowed to say their names? Yes. Two of our students who are now taking college classes. Who are they? So, Cynthia and Maria. Maria Rondon and Cynthia Mencia Cruz. I had an econ class with both of them. And in that class, I... When I took that class, I was in Spanish 4. And I got to practice my Spanish more extensively than I was able to in the actual Spanish course. Because I was able to see how natives speak. And I think that that really opened my eyes to how important EL is to teach. Because I saw their side of it. When they had a question on something in econ, they asked me. When they had, like, an email that they didn't understand, or if there was a problem on the quiz, they would ask me. And I think I realized how gratifying it is to help people. Because I do enjoy helping people. But if I'm able to help people and use language skills, I think that's a really fun combination that very much suits my lifestyle. So, that was one example of how your empathy grew for EL students. But something early in your life occurred that allows you to relate much more, especially with our newcomers. Yeah. When I was in elementary school, I had to take speech classes. I don't remember for how many years, but it was several years. Because I couldn't say so many vital sounds to the English language. Like, T-H, S-H, R was a big struggle. Really, there were at least five or six sounds that I was completely incapable of forming. And I feel like that has cemented in me to have more patience with these students who are unable to make certain sounds. Because sometimes it feels like they should be able to make the sound. Sometimes it feels like it's so easy for me. How could it be difficult for them? But that doesn't really transfer. For example, the T-H sound is so difficult for several of our students. But I remember the way that my teacher explained tongue placement within my mouth to say T-H in elementary speech classes. And when I have explained that to some of the students, they've been able to more easily replicate it. They might need that little kick every time they're trying to do the T-H sound, but they get it. Yeah. And that's not a sound that's common or really even exists in Spanish. Yeah. Was there another phonetic sound? A sound that's a challenge for me is rolling my R's. I had to study for years to say my R normally. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to roll my R's. Both of the Marias have tried with the pencil trick. She gave me to put a pencil in my mouth and help that make my tongue placement appropriate to roll my R's. I've never gotten close. I can do the French R. Spanish R? No. And there are certain words because of that that I struggle to say. Like the difference between cargo and cargo. I can't pronounce the difference between expensive and car. So I say cold chain instead for car. See, you're adapting. Yeah. You're adapting and advancing in your vocabulary. So culturally responsive teaching, which as an EL teacher and as a mainstream teacher, you should be practicing. So can you give an example of how we embrace diversity within our lessons? Yeah, so I think a great example of embracing diversity within lessons is a particular lesson that we did a few weeks ago in which we allowed each student to talk about their favorite place, food, or music. Some of the students talked about their country or food from their country or music from their country, but everything ended up being personalized and tied back to their culture. And I feel like that's a really skilled way to introduce something like a little touch of your own culture, a little touch of personality to each assignment, rather than just having each student have the same assignment. So building off of that, Allen, you and I recently had this great opportunity to co-teach a professional development for teachers. We basically put in practice what we do in class into this professional development. And that was one of the biggest points we tried driving home to these teachers, is that if you're not making a cultural connection with the students, you might not have the success that you're wishing. So how do we make lessons comprehensible for all levels of learners? I want to gear you toward scaffolding, steer you toward scaffolding. How do we, I guess, make the lessons understandable, comprehensible for our students? Yeah, so I think that every manner in which you can make a lesson comprehensible for all the students is some sub-genre of scaffolding to some degree. That can be either teaching the main lesson in English and then going back to a student who struggled in answering their questions in Spanish. That can be including pictures or gesturing with your hands to help explain something. Basically, anything that allows students of different levels to still be encompassed by the lesson. Absolutely. And some things that are very easy that we don't think of as skills or techniques utilized by teachers. Like you said, visuals and hand gestures, graphic organizers, and if you are able, utilizing Spanish. And using cognates can be such a great help. If there's a word that's the same or almost the same between two languages, the students will hear that. It'll click in their brains. They're going to understand you so much better than if you're using some big, fancy word that has nothing to do with their language. The difficulty with that is getting to know those cognates and getting in the practice of using those cognates. What are some examples of cognates? Examples of cognates. Just look around the room. Computadora. Computadora, or computadora if you're in Colombia, means computer. And that is almost the same exact word, diccionario, dictionary. Papel, paper. Electricidad, electricity. All we're doing is looking around the room in case you're wondering. So how do we give appropriate feedback? So that's a really big, important part as an EL teacher. How are we doing that on a regular basis? And you do a phenomenal job of this. Yeah, so I feel that something important when giving feedback is to have different expectations for different students. And this definitely doesn't apply in a mainstream classroom where they're all coming from the same backgrounds, the same level. But in an EL classroom where some of the students have been in the course for under a year, and some have been in it for three years, there are such, there's such a variety of levels at which the students can speak. So one of our newcomers, I'm not going to expect them to speak perfectly or swiftly. If they mess up a sentence, I might not take off something. I might not take off as many points as I would if one of our students who has been here for three years might, just because I know their different levels of ability. I feel like grades should less so reflect ability in a class like this and more so effort. I think as long as they're trying, that they should be able to be successful in this class because we can't provide the same expectations for all of them when they're at such different levels. Yeah, and we have a mindset here at Salem High School also that your grade should reflect the progress you're making, right? So at the end of the year, maybe my Spanish is not as strong as yours, but mine grew a ton and I put in so much effort and so my grade should reflect that effort and that progress versus some standardized test, right? So let's touch upon just a little bit about this idea of collectivism and individualism. In some nations, the team is more valued than the individual. Well, it's no surprise that we live in an individualistic society, right, where it's the me first. How do you see that in the classroom? Because all of our students are from very highly ranked collectivism. I say ranked. I say ranked. It's based off of a chart I have studied before, but can you give examples of seeing that in the classroom? Yeah. So I think, first of all, all of our students are from very collectivism-focused countries and I think the way in which that filaments in this class is that the students always want to work together. If there's any assignment, they don't want to be individually working on it. They want to be in groups. The other day when you were gone, I played a game where they have to run in the hallways. They have to read the words on the wall and then come back in, dictate them, have another student write them down, and then they trade spots. The other goes into the hallway and I asked them how big they wanted their groups to be and they were all fighting for groups of five. Like, they wanted to be in the biggest group possible. They wanted to have the most people and the most friends possible in really any aspect of life. They don't want to be individuals. They want to work together, which I think is beautiful because the value of cooperation is grand. You can get so much more completed if you are working with other people compared to entirely alone. And we see that in their work as well. Whenever they're doing a presentation, that theme of family and friends always dominates the presentation and that's part of a collectivist society. So, let's talk about our class that you're in every day. Every day you walk in and we have, well, I'll let you describe the demographics of our class, but every day we kind of co-teach a class. Yeah, you're not considered necessarily a co-teacher, but in my 21st year of teaching, I would have to argue that you are the greatest co-teacher I've ever had, I've ever worked with. Describe the demographics of our class. Who do we work with? Yeah, so the newcomer class that we work with together only has students from Latin America at this time. So, we have students from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, La Republica Dominicana, so many different Latin American countries. There's really a great variety of culture in there. And even though they are all connected by language and culture, there's such a divide in the words they use and the ways in which their cultures have cemented in them. We also have a large variety of ages. We have, I think the youngest is 15, and then we have legal adults, the variety of ages, and therefore maturity is great. That's the beauty and art of teaching EL, because you have so many different levels, so many different places, so many different ages. Yeah, I think we also have a great variety of newcomers to some students who can with ease hold a conversation in English. So, that's a demographic that we have to particularly pay attention to when leading a lesson or giving one-on-one advice. Obviously, we know all the levels of each of our students and how to best accommodate them because of that. So, in your experiences in this EL classroom, what has opened your eyes, or I guess maybe what will you take away from this, what has it been, eight-month experience? I think the overarching theme is collectivism versus individuality, because in so many of the Hispanic countries, I mean, they've immigrated here for a reason, either lack of food, lack of housing, lack of medical care. There's something, there's a challenge in each of the countries they're coming from. But what they still have is this sense of interconnectedness, this love for their families, and they, I feel like people from Hispanic countries just generally are so connected to one another and so intertwined almost, which I feel like is something that is lost in the United States culture where we have a lot of individualism and we think about money and success a lot more than togetherness. What advice would you give mainstream teachers? Because you, at this point, you have much more experience than a mainstream teacher does with EL students. Some of our mainstream teachers traditionally have more EL students than others, but what would you give that young teacher that walks into a classroom and has several students from Honduras, several students from Venezuela? What would you recommend? I think the number one thing, as silly as it might sound, is just to make them put in the effort. These students often have a propensity to sit in the class and not do anything, especially when they're newcomers. They don't have, a lot of the time, the motivation, which I think is entirely natural if you're going into a place where you don't even speak the language. How are you going to learn biology or geology or any sort of class with advanced topics in a language that you can't even understand in more basic contexts? At times, translation is beneficial. I think, at times, translation can be vital for these students, but overall, the most important thing for mainstream teachers is just to not let them blend into the class, to let them, I think, I think mainstream teachers need to put more emphasis on EL students to make sure that they succeed because they do have so many challenges on the daily that they do need an extra push sometimes to maintain their success. And what would be an easy way for a teacher to make a connection with that student? Because, you know, when I first started off as a student teacher and as a young teacher, it can be quite intimidating when you have a student from a vastly different culture. What might be the first step to making a connection? I think that it's really just vital to speak to your students. I know that I've had several classes, and every year I have a few where the teachers at the end of the year don't know a single thing about me. They don't know any of my hobbies. They don't know what other classes I'm taking. They don't know my personality or really anything about me. And that can be... Which is very sad because you're one of the most interesting people I know. It makes the class feel more isolating and like there's not really as much of a point to studying in the class. I think when a student has a connection with their teacher, not only are they trying to impress them, so they're going to put in more effort, but they're going to pay better attention in lessons and they're just going to feel more supportive. And honestly, feeling safe and feeling supportive is probably the most important factor with success in the classroom. Absolutely. How old are you? 17. I'll be 18 in May. And you have this much insight. I've already told Dr. Lincoln-Hoker, our boss, that we need to hire you. Go ahead. I mean, baseball players and professional athletes go from high school to the professional leagues immediately. And I think this is one of those rare cases where I could argue that one of our students could make that four-year leap into the educational field. So, we already talked about when and why you began studying Spanish intensely. You recently had this incredible experience in Mexico last summer. Can you describe that? Yes. So, I had really two experiences last summer. Before I went to Mexico, I had a Governor's Academy World Language Academy, in which basically I wasn't permitted to have a phone or really any sort of technology or speak English for three weeks straight. And I was there with 59 other students from all parts of Virginia. And we had classes of Arabe, Italiano, Literatura, Derecho, Musica, y Gramatica. So, every day we had three classes, and we would just study random things. But they were all fascinating. And I think that was probably one of the things that has furthered my Spanish more than anything else, because it was pure immersion for three weeks with other students who were all similarly motivated. Because they only accept 60 students from all parts of Virginia each year, and they have over 700 applicants. They choose the most passionate students. So, I think that the community built by the World Language Governors Academy uniquely fosters such a good community for language learning. That also helped me further my French, because the French Academy was right next door, and I kept speaking French to them, and I kept getting told off. After my GovSchool experience, I had a short-term exchange program in Mexico, which was a really unique experience, because that also fosters language learning in such a unique way, but also in an entirely different way from the Governors Academy. The program that I did was through Rotary. It was their STEP, which is short-term youth exchange program. And for that program, I had a girl from Mexico come to live with me for three weeks, and then I came to live with her for three weeks. So basically, every moment of our lives, we were together for six weeks straight. And I was scared that I was going to grow to hate her by the end of the six weeks. I did not. We are still friends today. We still talk all the time. But that experience taught me so much about the way that people in Mexico treat each other. One thing that stands out to me is, as they're leaving a restaurant, they always say, Buen Provecho to everybody as they're leaving. I learned that last summer as well. You tell everybody, literally, good appetite as you're exiting the restaurant, just because there's such a sense of community. They want everybody to feel safe and happy and included. Could you imagine doing that in a restaurant here? It would not go over well. So that was not just immersion, but what an authentic experience for you. A cultural experience. So why would you encourage American students, your peers here at Salem High School and your peers really across the United States, why would you encourage them to study a foreign language and become bilingual? Biliteracy is such a vital skill in today's world, not only because it can connect you to new people and cultures, but it also helps to literally keep your brain in health. It allows you to be open to new information that you would have no way of learning in English. It can just open you up to so many new experiences, like my Gov School and my short-term exchange program in Mexico. These are experiences that I never could have had, had I been monolingual. About a week or two ago in my AP government class, the entire class took a state of the world quiz, which basically just monitored how we thought things were going in the world versus how we really thought they were. And the overarching theme is that things are generally more positive than people think they are. We have more laws set in place for climate change. We have more equity and equality around the globe, and basically things are better than people think they are. But I got the highest score out of all three periods, and I honestly attribute that wholly to so many of my closest friends being immigrants, not speaking English as their first language, and having had so much experience in Mexico, getting to know the people and the way in which the people carry themselves and act. I think that those experiences have opened me to kind of the whole world instead of just being in this little corner of Virginia. What will you do in the future with this education and these rich cultural experiences and this biliteracy and all of these abilities that you have? College is definitely the next step. I feel like that's obvious enough at this point because I just love education so much. I plan on majoring in linguistics. Not sure where I'll go yet. I'm definitely going to do some long-term foreign exchange in college, hopefully a year or maybe two in a Hispanic-speaking country or two, and then probably some time in a Francophone country just to further my French. And after that, applying to be an EL teacher and just come back to the EL community and helping them somewhere within the United States. And how will you teach that class? What is it going to feel like that first day when you walk in as a professional EL teacher and the classroom is yours? It'll be scary because I will know that the past year all of these students had a different teacher. They all have certain expectations of me and certain desires in that class, and all of their expectations and desires from student to student are different. And it'll be scary that they probably won't all speak Spanish, so I won't have that direct connection with them. It'll even be scary with the newcomers because they'll all have expectations. They'll all have ways in which they want the class to go. And I will probably break so many of their desires and expectations, but hopefully only to build them up with new ones. I think that I have learned a lot of incredible methods to teach, but also to get through to the students. And I think really just making that connection is going to be my main goal starting off as an EL teacher in four or five years. That was Alan Boettcher, an insightful young woman who became the greatest resource in my level one English learners class this school year. I'm forever grateful for the care, guidance, and mentorship she provided for our students. I cannot wait to call her a colleague one day and observe the continuous impact she will have on English learners in her own classroom. I can only imagine this classroom will have as many plants as pupils. Thank you, Alan, for sharing your experiences from this school year and from your youth. Thank you, Chao Tian, for providing the beautiful soundtrack to this week's episode. And thank you, listeners, for joining us on another episode of Pots, Pans, and Gritos. And, of course, thank you for being an ally to English learners everywhere.