When I agreed to volunteer at Guadalupe Schools, I had no idea that teaching English as a foreign language would eventually turn out to be one of my future career considerations. It was through this period of time that I developed a sense of why some people need to learn English, as a matter of their livelihood. Moreover, I discovered a few things about myself that would eventually lead me to make the decision that I want to teach English for a living.

Guadalupe Schools was (and perhaps, still is) an institution in Salt Lake City, Utah that contracted volunteers to teach survival English to Spanish speaking immigrants from Mexico, Middle America and South America. I found out about this program through the university I was attending at the time, and decided to volunteer there because I really had nothing better to do with my time (other than study and go out with my friends). I didn’t very much feel the need to help people, or to make a difference in someone’s life, or to serve the greater good—I simply needed a change from my routine and figured, being the idealist student that I was, that I might as well make some good use out of my time.

The program went like this: I was required to come into the school, two nights per week, two hours a session. There I was paired with one student per session. Usually it was the same student, every session. Upon receiving this information, the coordinator of the volunteer program simply gave me a packet, pointed at all the people standing around, waiting for a tutor, and said “Pick one and start with your lesson.” I was a bit nervous.

I paired with a middle-aged Mexican woman. We sat down, I looked at her, she stared at me. We both looked at our packets in front of us. It was awkward for a bit. As we got into the flow of things, I realized that she had absolutely no experience learning English at all. I came to find out that she was enrolled in the program because she needed to pass the U.S. citizenship exam required of all immigrants to get a work visa, so she could stay in the States and be with her husband and two children.

At first, things were a bit difficult. Trying to explain to someone who has no experience with English contractions, punctuation, grammar etc. wasn’t the easiest task. What drove me through all of this was a growing sense of care for this woman and the state of her life. After about four sessions we really began to like each other. I came to know not only a lot about her but a lot about the plight of Latin immigrants in America. What these people had to go through, and the way they carried themselves through it all really affected me. And to realize that I was basically the only person helping this woman learn English made the volunteer experience much deeper for me. I was her in. I was basically her key to get into the country.

We worked and worked, and in the process I gained a lot of practical experience teaching language to a non-native speaker. I intuitively used techniques such as repetition, exaggerated mouthing of words, visual aids, texts, and quizzes, before I had ever learned of ITTT. Pretty soon she was constructing basic sentences and correctly recalling a sizeable vocabulary. After awhile, she’d bring in magazine articles and ask me to explain certain passages; turn in her homework with extra questions for me; bring in mail she’d received for me to help her translate; etc.

Unfortunately, I stopped tutoring at Guadalupe Schools before I could see my student take the citizenship exam. I’d like to think she passed.

Brandon Gorrell