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Tutoring the Next Generation

January 29, 2006

Taking a seat at a beat-up wooden table, Julissa, 5, opens up her workbook and stares intensely at the words before her, her long black pigtails dusting her face.

The instructions tell her to color every letter "I" with a yellow crayon. Sitting next to her, tutor Harriet Ha-Sidi reads the words to the girl and soon Julissa's tiny hand begins rapidly working the crayon over half the page as father Ramiro stands behind her.

"No," he says, pointing to the page. "That's not an 'I' that's a 'T.' You have to color only the 'I's,'" he tells her in Spanish.

The little girl's face contorts into a frown of confusion and disappointment. He tells her he has to leave for a little while and as he walks away, she slides her overall-covered legs off the chair and runs after him, reaching up to grab his neck as he stoops and planting a wet sloppy kiss on his cheek.

"Bye Daddy," she shouts in English.

Ramiro speaks some English but his daughter, after only five months in the United States, is almost bilingual.

"She comes home and with her I learn some new words," he says with a laugh. "She teaches me."

Ramiro, 23, first came to this country in 1999, but traveled back and forth from his native Puebla, Mexico, to be with his family. Five months ago, he brought his pregnant wife and daughter.

His dream is to get his green card and to own a home here. He said he thinks bilingual programs can help his family put down roots.

"Sometimes I don't understand her homework," he says. "They help her here."

The tutoring session is held for an hour and a half, twice a week, in a nondescript commercial strip mall space rented by the Workplace Project, an immigrant advocacy group.

Sometimes the children are just dropped off. Other times, the mothers stay and sit together, talking or playing with the younger siblings not in school. The dads arrive near the end of the session, standing in a cluster and talking to each other, their clothes still dusty from the day's work.

Ha-Sidi moves on to Franklin, a sixth-grader who was born in the United States after his family emigrated from El Salvador.

"Oh Franklin, that's wonderful!" Ha-Sidi's face beams as Franklin proudly shows her his schoolwork. "Look at this! You used a lot of good words in here."

Ha-Sidi, 60, has no formal training as a teacher. She's spent most of her life working in retail. When she began managing a RadioShack in North Patchogue 10 years ago, she dusted off the Spanish she had earlier learned while studying in Madrid to better communicate with customers. A year ago, she retired and began volunteering here.

She makes sure parents understand their child's homework and any fliers or permission slips that are sent home. She does not ask the parents if they are in this country legally.

"It just doesn't matter if you have documentation if you need to learn English," she says.

The students' mothers sometimes take taxis to bring them here. While the students, who range from kindergarten to sixth grade, gather around the rickety table, their younger siblings play on the floor with toys taken from a haphazard pile of puzzles, board games and crayons in a corner of the cramped room.

Five-year-old Graciela hands Ha-Sidi a stack of papers her teacher gave her to bring home. Ha-Sidi pulls some aside and walks over to Graciela's mom. In Spanish she explains the holiday of Halloween and tells her that Graciela is supposed to bring leaves to class for a project.

Jenry, 8, has only spoken English since June. His assignment, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," is taken out of a Spider-Man folder. There is a list of key words he must comprehend, including the word "cowboy."

Another volunteer, Deborah Little, looks at the boy and asks him if he understands. "Vaquero?" she asks. Jenry's face lights up and he begins rattling off words in Spanish that Little then translates into English with him, each one trying to understand the other. He struggles to find the words in both languages to describe fringe and chaps.

Jenry's mother, Mayra, 26, brings him and his 3-year-old brother Luis Ángel, from Mount Sinai to be tutored. Her day laborer husband had been traveling back and forth to Mexico for years, but the family decided to come together to the United States in February.

"Jenry was devastated every time his father left," Mayra says in Spanish. "We wanted to live as a family."

When language and other obstacles arose and it looked as though Jenry might not be able to enroll in school this fall, she said, the family made a choice: Get an education and put down roots, or pack up and move back to Mexico.

And Jenry is already showing great potential, Ha-Sidi says as she watches him gather his work to go home.

"These kids," she says. "They're so eager to learn. They soak up English like sponges."