Text size:

Farmingville: Where controversy lives

January 29, 2006

From Rock Songs to Philosophy
It is a Monday night, just after 8 p.m. and a Hispanic twenty-something named Danny fidgets and shuffles from one foot to the other as he stands in front of a class of 24 fellow students talking about a South Asian earthquake. After he is done leading the class in a discussion, he returns to his desk and Carol Doukakis, associate professor for Suffolk Community College's ESL program on the Selden campus, compliments him on his choice for a current event topic.

"Where did you read about this?" she asks him. He is vague in his answer at first, saying only "newspaper" but when pressed by Doukakis, admits it was a Spanish-language paper.

"What?!" Doukakis says in mock horror as the students laugh. "You know you're not allowed to do that Danny."

"But we don't understand English 100% so why am I going to read newspapers in English?" he protests.

"Because that was the assignment," she answers without missing a beat. "The idea is reading and listening to news in English."

And the idea is to understand. This is a Level 5 ESL class, the highest level before students are eligible to enroll in English-language college courses. So Doukakis does more than make sure her students use proper grammar and pronunciation. There are essays and outlines to write, poetry and short-stories to comprehend.

Their assignment for tonight's class is to have read Langston Hughes' short story "Thank You, Ma'm" and answer questions. The story, about an elderly woman's run-in with a young purse-snatcher, is filled with 1950s references and African-American slang, making it a difficult read for the group, which is comprised of Mexican, Brazilian and Polish students, among others.

When she asks them what blue suede shoes represent, the students, sitting in a semi-circle facing her, return only blank stares or bury their heads in their workbooks. But when she asks to describe the life of the woman, who in the story says she works nights in a hotel beauty shop, the students are quick to offer up words such as lonely and hard-worker.

"I think you guys empathize with her," she says. "Do you guys know what 'empathize' is? It's when you understand what someone is going through."

She gets more blank stares when she segues into topics of symbolism and theme but expresses happiness that the students are reading into the story. She tells them to think about how the story fits in with the theme of Hughes' poem "A Dream Deferred" for the next class.

The students meet twice a week for two and a half hours each time, plus perform lab work during the week. Only a small percentage will move onto college courses, Doukakis says later, though that remains the goal of the class, even as many juggle full-time work schedules.

"They come into class, hungry, tired," she says. "I give them a lot of credit. They complain [about the homework] but they still do it. It's just amazing."

For student Martin Rivera, the quest to learn English began when he heard his first American rock song. As a teenager growing up in Mexico City, he would translate lyrics so he could understand the songs. At 19, he had taken a year of college and was working as a manager at a Burger King when a friend who had been living in the U.S. invited him to come visit.

"I wanted to know the world," Rivera, 30, said. "And the best part was in New York. I was told I could get here and work at anything."

And work he did. Masonry, paving, carpet installation - whatever was available. "I was working all the time," he said. "I put my hands in anything."

Rivera settled in Farmingville, but worked for several years for a company in Manhattan. His boss would drive him into the city every day and during the trip, he would ask Rivera to read him the newspaper while he drove, helping him learn how to pronounce words in English. But Rivera found others in Farmingville already had a profile in their minds of who he was as a young Mexican.

"They see you as a day laborer, speaking Spanish and the profile is no education and you do certain bad things," Rivera said.

As a result, Rivera has worked to improve his English, he said, to better communicate and educate people about Mexican culture. "Whether it's myself or someone else, we're representing our whole country," he said.

But Rivera said he can relate to some of the complaints he's heard about his fellow immigrants. "I understand it," he said. "If someone comes around my neighborhood, a house packed with people, the landlords don't care about the maintenance, of course I'm going to be complaining. I completely understand that."