Emily Hays Photo
Luis Rivera: I remember being these kids.
Four months after New Haven Academy Spanish teacher Luis Rivera came down with Covid-19, he feels lingering fatigue from the illness.
Rivera still manages to spend hours after school making sure that his students who speak limited English can finish their homework during the pandemic’s remote learning. He was once an English learner too.
“I’m doing it because I empathize with them. Back in the day, we had supports but not like we have today,” Rivera said.
Those challenges are magnified by New Haven’s decision to conduct pretty much all learning remotely during the pandemic, a decision that this week was extended indefinitely.
Rivera caught Covid-19 in June without leaving his home in Bridgeport. Someone visited his home who had the illness but no symptoms. Rivera got sick, as did his mother. His mother had to stay in the hospital for three months before she was well enough to come home.
While Rivera got a milder version of the disease, he rated it a seven on a one-to-10 scale of severity. He had the usual range of symptoms. Most have gone away, except the constant feeling of tiredness.
“People say it’s like the flu, but it is ten times worse than the flu,” he said. “You have fatigue all day — no matter how much you sleep. I hope it will get better.”
The Student Becomes The Master
Roughly one in six New Haven Public Schools students are English language learners (ELL). The group has faced layers of housing, food, health and technology challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic. These struggles have contributed to a higher percentage of English learners going missing from their virtual classes than their peers.
New Haven Academy is a small high school without enough English learners to qualify for a teacher focused full-time on those students, according to the school’s program director, Meredith Gavrin.
So one ELL teacher splits time between New Haven Academy and other schools. Other teachers support that effort. (Read about parent, student and teacher calls to hire more bilingual teachers here.)
Despite his fatigue, Rivera volunteered to help out when he saw a couple of the students he advises struggling with basic English proficiency. He remembered being in their shoes as a student who had just arrived in Bridgeport from Costa Rica without any background in English. He would pore over his homework, looking up each word in the dictionary.
“Just biology would take me four hours. To do one assignment,” Rivera said.
College was similar, particularly when the readings were dense and unintuitive. He had to read his philosophy texts three times to understand them.
Rivera made it through and graduated from Boston College with a degree in Economics, Psychology and Latin American Studies. He is now a veteran teacher at New Haven Academy, with 13 years of teaching at the school under his belt.
He has just started the process of becoming certified to teach English learners officially. He hasn’t decided yet whether to switch completely from teaching Spanish to teaching English or continue both roles. It does mean that his 3 – 6 hours of after-school tutoring each week will start to count towards something; he needs them to become certified.
The Power Of Google Translate
NHA ninth grader Ricardo David Mejía González.
One of Rivera’s goals has been to teach his two ninth-grade tutees the tools he did not have in high school. He had to flip through a dictionary; they can copy their entire assignment into Google Translate.
On the day the Independent sat in on his tutoring session, Rivera started his meeting with one student, Ricardo David Mejía González, at 6 p.m. and worked straight through to 9:30 p.m.
Rivera pulled up Ricardo’s homework assignment, a YouTube clip on World War I. He clicked through the settings with Ricardo to turn on closed captioning in Spanish and then started the clip (pictured below).
YouTube
Every now and then, Rivera would pause the video and ask, “¿Entiendes?” Ricardo would respond with what he understood so far. A war had broken out. Yes, an assassination was one of the causes. Yes, it was a global war, because it included Japan.
Overall, the 13-year-old reported, he understood only a little bit of the video. The Spanish subtitles moved too fast to understand fully.
Ricardo’s other assignment required more translation help from Rivera. Ricardo had texted Rivera pictures of a reading about the differences between patriotism and nationalism, and Rivera translated each sentence out loud for the 13-year-old. At the end of the session, Rivera told his student that his responses were correct. Ricardo could write them down in Spanish and then copy the English version from Google Translate into his assignment.
Ricardo signed off at 7:30 p.m. Fellow ninth grader, Axel Alessandro Perez Garcia, signed on.
Google Meets
Axel already had a reading translated entirely into Spanish, and he had answered a few comprehension questions about the reading. The 14-year-old was stuck on the questions (pictured above) about how the author used dialogue, action and description in the passage.
Rivera translated a question orally. Did Axel understand the question now?
No, Axel said.
Rivera offered an example of how action described a character in Gabriel García Márquez’s book, One Hundred Years Of Solitude. The book never says that particular characters have a mental illness, but their actions indicate that they probably do.
To explain what it meant for the author to describe her thoughts, Rivera described how his sister tends to say her thoughts out loud to herself.
“I always find out all her secrets, because she says them out loud,” Rivera said.
As the minutes ticked towards 9 p.m, Rivera painstakingly explained and re-explained each question. Axel copied quotes from the passage and analyzed them in Spanish. Between Rivera’s explanations, the only sounds were the click-clacking of Axel’s keyboard and his occasional yawns.
With the last question answered, Axel and Rivera realized that a setting in the Google Doc software can translate the entire document into Spanish.
“We learned something new today, Axel,” Rivera said.
Pandemic School, In English
Both Ricardo and Axel are in their first year at New Haven Academy after living in the New Haven area for two years. Ricardo lived in Mexico before then; Axel lived in Guatemala.
Both spent their first two years in New Haven in bilingual programs. They have found the switch to classes taught entirely in English challenging.
Axel doesn’t have time for the distractions during remote learning that other students have reported. All of his attention is focused on trying to understand the teacher and the other students. And because his teachers usually don’t speak Spanish, it is difficult to communicate with them or ask questions about the assignments.
It is easier to learn in person, Axel said. He is not quite sure why.
“On the one side, he wants to go back. At the same time, he doesn’t want to go back because of the pandemic,” Rivera translated.
Ricardo agreed. The hardest part about remote school has been doing everything in English. His proudest accomplishment from the quarter so far is learning some of the language.
I can imagine how hard it must be to struggle pre pandemic with learning a new language in a new country and having to translate everything into your native language so you can understand it, and then having to translate it back to the new language to do your schoolwork. Now add on top of that unfamiliar technology and teachers who are teaching remote for the first time and who often have trouble with you understanding them and them understanding you, and it must be simply exhausting. Mr Rivera has had to handle all of this on top of having post-COVID syndrome, and is doing his best to help students who are English As A Second Language learners not fall through the cracks. He is a hero to these students, and I applaud his dedication and persistence in triumphing over all the odds to help ESL students succeed.