About half my
students had come to the U.S. as refugees or immigrants from Somalia, Sudan,
Cambodia, Vietnam, Eritrea, El Salvador, Bosnia, Russia, and Afghanistan. The
rest were Mainers, born and bred. Our common ground? Everyone struggled to
write with coherence, confidence, and fluidity. Some had practiced writing in
English only a little. The children of war or poverty or repression, some
lacked formal schooling in any language. The Maine-born kids had failed to hop
aboard the writing train for varied (and often overlapping) reasons themselves:
a learning disability or illness or truancy or behavior troubles or trauma. Two
academically focused Bosnians simply needed to burnish their verbs.
In class, a
number of girls wore head-scarves; others wore tight, low-cut tee-shirts. A boy
from Vietnam used one hand to type because of a stroke; a Somali boy suffered
from what I think might now be diagnosed as P.T.S.D. Two sixteen year-old
girls, one Afghani, one Cambodian, were already married.
***
Since 2006, Kate Kennedy has been the director of
the Southern Maine Writing Project at the University of Southern Maine. She
taught writing at Portland High School in Portland, Maine, for twenty years and
has also taught basic literacy, sudden fiction, and E.S.L. to adults.
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