Restaurants are overrated

My class at Rosario (A school where I teach English to immigrants)  is ending in a few weeks and we are in cram mode to get ready for our final project and exam.  The final project I’ve decided to go with this year is ambitious. I’m having each of the students give speeches; the catch is they will not know what their topic is until they are standing in front of the class. To get the them ready, I’ve dedicated the last 15-30 minutes of class to practice time where I give them a few topics to talk about with a partner who corrects them on grammatical mistakes. So far, this exercise has been working with few snags, but last night the students gave some major resistance to the assignment.

One of the practice topics was, “describe your favorite restaurant when you were a child.” In spite of how simple I thought this question was, I received the scariest answer a teacher can get: silence. After pushing and pulling at them to tell me why they were having such a hard time with the question, they began to open up. Around 20 out of 26 students said they had never been to a restaurant until they came to America. Many said they remembered wanting to go to the McDonalds in their home city, but since it was the “expensive restaurant” they could only imagine what it was like. And those who had gone to a restaurant said it was something so rare that they could actually count how many times they went on their fingers.

The class began discussing the poverty from which they had escaped. They talked about having to cheat and steal for basic things. They talked about how they were willing to kill or be killed to escape their situation. And they talked of how all they wanted to do was work. What I remember the most about this conversation however, is how they talked about this desperation with the same composure that one uses when talking about going to the grocery store.       

I won’t deny it; I have a few people in my class who came to America under questionable circumstances (who have become legal before joining our school). I also have people who work 80 hours a week on top of school. I have people who have developed a work ethic that can only be forged in the fires of poverty hell.

After leaving class, I couldn't help but ask myself: What would America be like if we had more people like this?