Un trajet au lycée pour mi 1ª clase de English (1)

I take exit 18 to Thurbers ave on Route 95 South. As I get off the exit I merge onto the crowed South Providence street that will eventually lead into a Latino neighborhood filled with walk-in cafeterías, small markets, and busy streets. I pass the Burger King and end up in front of my high school. It is a large tan building, three stories high, that looks fairly new. There is a sign on the top floor with a Spanish sounding name and another one boasting itself as an international school facing the street. I pull into the teacher’s parking lot, since there is no student parking lot near the school, and walk up to the front doors. At the end of the teacher’s parking lot is an empty police car and further up is the locked door to the school. I press the call button and get bussed in and by the time I write out my visitor’s pass and sign in, a loud noise sounds over the speakers signifying a change in class (not at all like the one in my own high school back home). Suddenly, as if I am being transported into one of the wrongfully deemed “diversified” schools that Kozl describes in his article, I find myself in a sea of latin@s loudly speaking either Spanish or English walking in groups down the hallway. I make my way up to the third floor and enter my fairly large, bright and clean ESL room to be greeted by the teacher. He is a tall white and most likely Italian male with slicked back hair and a dark pair of jeans that tastefully blend into his black Adidas sneakers. He takes me aside while the class does their work and goes over what needs to be done that day in his basically group and individual reading exercised based class. At the front of the room sits (and often stands) a very extroverted Dominican student who I will name Pepe who speaks English fairly well, but ends up speaking Spanish for the majority of the class. To the right and back a seat sits a girl who, slightly less talkative, I find myself oddly gravitating to. She acknowledged me the moment I walked in firing off questions to me in Spanish since she only speaks English when forced. In the beginning I talk to her in Spanish, but as the class goes on, I notice she can understand a lot in English so I answer anything she asks me in English. I will call her Yaneli. Most of the class is made up of Dominicans, but there are also a few Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans (who speak Spanish) and Africans (who all speak French). Even though I am fluent in Spanish, the teacher placed me with two brothers from Central Africa who barely speak a word of English, or even anything for that matter. They are silent in a room of loud and excited Spanish voices. I tell them about the deep contrast in their two cultures and they laugh about it and get right back to work in this very relaxed learning environment that the teacher kind of prides himself on. There is a constant flow of work involving reading and comprehending that gets mixed with the somewhat loud and playful atmosphere in the class. All of the students joke around with each other in a very familiar way and most of what they talk about is the readings that they are working on. If I didn’t understand Spanish, though, I would feel totally lost and alienated in this class, which is probably why the French speaking African students are so quiet.