Booktv, television for serious readers. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming. Were going to get started. I just want to thank everyone for being here for our last event of the year. We are completely honored to have helen thorpe. Thank you all for coming so much. So this evening we all welcome come happy to welcome the bestselling author helen thorpe. If you havent read her works of art you in for a treat on the first book victory. Her other books are soldier girls just like us and the newcomers is what we are celebrating this evening. Helen is able to bring to get audiences overcook defense to make global citizens out of all of her readers. Tonight are story is one of the world issue that takes place in a backyard in denver. The newcomers follows 20 refugees to the United States speaking 14 languages, all in the same classroom in denver. It is a story, a gripping heartfelt and powerful story. Without further ado please join me in welcoming helen thorpe. [applause] thank you so much for being here. Its so nice to see everybody. I am delighted to be back at the bookworm, one of my favorite independent bookstores, and i love what nicole in the entire staff here does. My local independent bookstore in denver, home away from home, so im very attached to my neighborhood bookstore, and its just great to be here with you guys. I thought tonight that i would read a little bit, and then tried to explain the book as a whole to you, and then read a little bit more. So i wanted to start with opening of the book because i think it kind of sets things up. For you to understand what im trying to do and then i will describe it in greater detail, of course, too. But im just going to launch into day one at South High School for these students and their teacher. This chapter is called nice to meet you. On the first day of school it was going to be a 90degree scorcher. You could already feel the air starting to shimmer. Andy williams jogged up the four stone steps at the main entrance to South High School half an hour before the first bell rang, eager to meet his new students. The lives of men, the customs of peoples, and the pageantry of nations chart the course of tomorrow proclaimed a large mural by the front door. The teacher was a tall man, 64 sixfoot four inches in his socks with an athletic body, short black hair and cleanshaven, angular face. He was 38 but couldve passed for 28. Ernest, ardent, industrious, kind where words that came to mind. When i thought about the parts of himself this teacher brought into his classroom, week in, week out, all year long. He almost always dress conservatively in longsleeved dress shirts and his wardrobe often made me think of leaving through an l. L. Bean catalog but that he was wearing a short sleeved purple south high polo shirt. All the teachers and put on purple shirts, the school color, so that the students could easily see whom they should turn to if they had a question about how to find a particular classroom, or how to read the confusing schedules they were carrying, or where they could find the schools elusive cafeteria upon the fourth floor of the building. Mr. Williams usually avoided shortsleeved shirts, even in august, because they revealed the dark blue tattoo that circled one of his biceps, and he feared the students might misinterpret the ink designs as macabre, given her background. He worked diligently to communicate in all sorts of ways. He was a person they could trust. Mr. Williams had inherited his anglo fathers rangy height and propensity to freckle, along with his latina mothers dark eyes and hair. Fluent in both spanish and english, he was the sort of teacher devoted an enormous portion of his warmth and vitality and intellect to his students. The Neighborhood Public School was a popular choice even for families who possessed significant wealth and lived nearby. Most of the classrooms were crowded with noisy, chattering teenagers. That morning as he looked around his room, mr. Williams saw many empty chairs and only seven students. The teenagers assigned to him war shut door expressions. Nobody in the room was talking, not even to one another. The teacher had expected this, for his room always got off to a quiet start. Welcome to newcomer class, he said, in a deliberately warm tone of voice. My name is mr. Williams. What is your name . Where are you from . The teenagers made no reply. Just the actor showing up by 7 45 a. M. Had required enormous fortitude. It was august 24, 2015, and the students had spent on average more than an hour negotiating the local Public Transit system to get to the school. They lived crammed with other relatives into small houses or one or two bedroom apartments located in farflung neighborhoods nowhere near this upscale zip code. In parts of the city where a dollar could be stretched. Getting from school from the patchwork zones of cheap housing where you lived took dogged commitment but that was a quality mr. Williams students had in abundance. What they did not possess for the most part was the ability to understand what he was saying. Welcome to newcomer class, the teacher said again, taking care to enunciate each were deliberately. My name is mr. Williams. What is your name . Where are you from . Mr. Williams often said thinks twice. It gave his lessons a singsong quality. The students continued to stare back at their teacher without speaking. The technical term for what was happening is preproduction, which in the academic literature about language acquisition is also known as the silent. The vast majority of second language learners began in a quiet, receptive phase, able to produce hardly any english themselves, even as the brains furiously absorb everything being said by their teacher. So thats the opening of the book where you meet this amazing man who is a main character in the book. He goes on to acquire a total of 22 kids. By the end of the school year, he starts out with a small number because these families are arriving all throughout the year from other countries. South high school serves a very large number of Refugee Families and immigrant families as well as neighborhood kids. And the teacher is, because its a very beginner level english class, he has the highest concentration of refugee kids in his room of anybody in the building. The kids who arrived in his room arrive from all of the countries that are producing the greatest number of refugees from all around the world. Ultimately, his room actually comes to map the refugee crisis almost perfectly. So the top center of refugees to the United States is the democratic republic of congo, and he gets for students from that country by the years and. Another very large center of refugees to the u. S. Is burma, and he gets to students from burma. Many Refugee Families are coming to my rack because they aligned themselves with us during the iraq war, and hope is no longer safe for them. He gets a family from a rack, to sister so iraq, and so on until he has 22 students who speak 14 different languages and use five different alphabets. And its his job to teach all of them english by the end of the school year, as best he can. Hes an amazing guy. I was in awe of him. I think hes a hero, maybe an unsung hero, because i dont think we celebrate teachers enough, and english as a saying second language. They deserve even more praise and maybe they are even less celebrated than regular teachers. Their colleagues who are teaching in english testing to understand english. So eddie teaches in english and he would use spanish as well in his room when he needs to. He doesnt speak the other languages that the kids arrived knowing, and his job is to teach them english nonetheless. And he does best by immersing them in english environment using all kinds of ways to communicate to them the terms that they need and the language that they need. So right after he says nice to meet you, he starts at the mining with working in the room saying nice to meet you, these are greetings. He is pantomiming running, running and he is pantomiming throwing and he says throw pick the kids start knowing what running and throwing, those words are. He builds from there to the point where these kids by the end of this school year will know basic english in the present tense, and quite a bit of basic english in the past tense. And the fact that they can learn so much over the course of this school year is i think an extraordinary thing. I had the chance to spend a year inside this room with eddie and his students. Thats really unusual. You usually dont have journalists sitting in a classroom. It was unusual for me. It was unusual for the students, and it was unusual for the teacher. He was easy for me to explain to eddie what i hope to do in his room and why i was there, and the principal, everybody who invited me in. And it was really hard to explain to the students why i was there. I could not walk up to them at six hi, im a journalist, id like to write a book about kids learning english who had just arrived here. And it was important to me that the kids know that there is a journalist in the room, decide if you want to be in the book or not. I only wrote about the kids wanted to share their stories. Ultimately, i actually had to hire 14 different interpreters, one for every Home Language in the room, and meet with the kids individually at lunchtime to say hey, im a journalist. Ive been invited into your school, and im really honored to get the chance to write about the worker teacher is doing. And if you would like to share your story with me i i would le to hear it, and you dont have to, and its your choice and youre going to want to ask your parents and lets involve them in the conversation, and tell me if this is something you want to do. In 14 different languages with the amazing interpreters who helped me explain myself to the kids, and, as well as a journalist i am a mom. I have a 15yearold son, saint age really, really as these kids were in this room. I wanted to the best job i could ask a journalist, writing about this amazing year where there are going to learn so much english. But i have to say also just as a mom i felt maternal towards them and thought, how would i feel if there was a journalist in my sons classroom trying to interview him at lunchtime . So it was important to me that the kids decide if they wanted to be in the book and that i did the best job i could giving them the chance to make that decision. Ultimately, 21 of the 2222 kids in the room wanted to share their stories. I think they wanted to talk to me because they were well aware that theres a lot of conversation about refugees and Refugee Resettlement and immigration. And he felt like i wanted to be better understood, and they wanted people to know how grateful they were to get to live in a safe country and how much it meant to them to be invited here, and how different it was to live where they felt safe compared to some of the places where they had been living before. You know, that learning english was hard, but they knew its really important and they were doing the best they could and they were learning as fast as they could, they wanted people to know that they really wanted to become americans. And they were not quite sure exactly how to do that yet. They were still working on, like, what do you wear to school in america, because maybe in some of the countries where they were from, like burma, its really hot and you only wear flipflops. And there was this young woman who wore flipflops to school one day in a snowstorm because she had never worn any other kind of shoes before. They had a lot to get used to living here, from how to dress appropriately for cold weather, you know, what kind of food the cafeteria served, which maybe they were not used to. Getting used to this new school, big urban American High School environment. Their families, their parents working new jobs here. Sometimes kinds of work they had not been before. Some of the families had made their living subsistence farming, but when they came here they were finding jobs may be working as janitors, cleaning a hotel. They were working in our meatpacking plants, and they were working sometimes as maids. They were doing whatever work they could do, sometimes with limited english, to support their families so their kids could be in School Learning english and hopefully someday getting a High School Degree and hopefully someday getting a College Degree and assimilating fully into our society, and the parents knew maybe, maybe there were not going to learn as much english as the kids but they could work while the kids were doing this, hard work of learning english and creating a pathway for a full education here and a different kind of life here. So wanting to get to know these kids better, after i had the chance to introduce myself to them and say a little bit about this, i invited him to tell me whatever they wanted you about their journey here, and the kids, we typically spent just one lunch, maybe half an hour, and when they shared they had difficult experiences in their home country or their home country had been at war in some fashion, if there had been armed conflict, i said, you know, maybe i could meet your parents, if you want to talk to me. Id love to hear more, probably not during your school day, if you want to invite me home, feel free. And a couple families took me up on that, which was an amazing experience. I was invited into congolese families home, and that iraqis families home, and i got to know also a family from burma to little bit. I spent the most time with the congolese family and the iraqis family. So what i i write about in the book is, as you in this classroom and this amazing teacher teaching all these kids english, and also the journey that the congolese family had in the first year in america and the jury that the iraqi family had in the first year in america, which, you know, its an extraordinary thing trying to assimilate to our society, any new society. I would have the same experience if i were trying to assimilate in their society. Super challenging, and i was really, it was a gift to me that these families which share their first year in america with me, because it was not an easy time and i was watching them struggle, figure it all out. The congolese family, the parents and some older siblings found work really quickly. I mean, they were economically selfsufficient in three months time, and i just couldnt believe it. I thought that was the scene like nothing id ever seen really. I think we have this idea that refugees come here and take subsidies, and thats actually not how it works. You know, they get a onetime grant when they arrive. Its like a thousand dollars a person. That goes really quick. It usually pays the rent for maybe a month or two but theyre supposed to be economically selfsufficient within 90 days, three months. You know, its just, i dont even know how they do it. I mean, i got to watch, still saying i cant believe that was possible. With the iraqis family, again, just the strength of this family. Ill say a little bit about their journey here. This family, the girls names in the classroom, jacqueline and maryam, they arrived speaking arabic, language that is written from right to left, the opposite direction that we use with a different alphabet. A language that structured sentences differently. They put verbs at the beginning of their senses, subjects lat. We do the opposite. They arrived trying to figure out english and i could tell that they were grappling with a lot. I didnt know what it was, but they had trauma in the background and they of course not only lived through the iraq war where their dad tried to help the u. S. Military, and it was targeted for being our ally, and they had to flee from baghdad when they were very young. They went seeking a safe home in a country they thought would be a good place to live, and that was syria. And they moved to damascus, and within just a few years they lived through the civil war there. When the father was unable to find work in damascus, he thought he needed to go back to iraq, but when he did he vanished, and they dont know what happened to him. And theyre pretty sure he was maybe killed. Again, because he had cooperated with the u. S. Military, and they were still struggling to put behind them the loss of their father, but also everything they witnessed. While they were living in damascus. They lived a difficult things, and i knew not to ask the girls about this when they alluded to it. Their mom did tell me, you know, their story, and thankfully i i had the help of an interpreter fluent in arabic and kurdish, a kurdish woman who speaks both of those languages, and not only was i able to forge a really close bond with them and their mom, a single mom struggling to make it on her own here with limited english and this great transition, but i also got very close to the interpreter as well who helped me get to know this family, and taught me a lot about middle eastern culture that it didnt know. We generally connected over a a meal. They invited me over for many, many meals. They fed me so much food that ii started trying to bring them food, too. You didnt just want to be taking things from them all the time and not giving back. One of the things we did which i Love Learning how to do was, they like to eat sitting on the floor. So of course i like to eat sitting at a table. But this is like a traditional way to celebrate if somebody special is in your home and you want to offer them. You sit on the floor. We did that a lot. I thought that was hilarious and unusual. I really admired their moms a grit and determination, and the fact that she was able to get her kids here to a safe place when you lived in some really difficult places where hard things were happening. I identified with her as a single mom not that my situation is in any way like at the same level. Hers is so much more difficult than mine, but just having parented kids sell all of it, you know a little bit what thats like. I could relate to her struggle, which was enormous, but i just so emphasized with white she was going through, and just the monumental act of or trying to make it here with these two daughters trying to learn english. Today, jack lane, her daughter, can chatter away in english like you would not believe. I think its amazing to watch, especially teenagers, they absorb language so quickly. Its an amazing thing to see. I want to read you just a tiny bit more from a moment when the kids are not so silent, like they were at the beginning of the year when they have a lot more to say. Because the room really transformed from quiet at the outset to this like joy filled happy, public place with all these teenagers trying to get to know one another. It was hard for them to get to know each other of course because they didnt generally share a common language, so at first they were using Google Translate app on their cell phones. They would type in arabic and translate it into spanish and likes in a text message that way. Way. I didnt even know how to do it. They showed me how. It was amazing to watch them try to connect with one another and then of course like the next thing they are flirting and fighting and making friends and having sleepovers, all of which happened. But let me read to you from a part later in the book where theres a lot more interaction going on. What i liked about this part of the book and what i want to share it with you is that it has a lot to do with language, and as as a writer, a lover of words, learning more about some of the other languages represented in the room was super cool for me and a great joy. Ill just read this. Youll understand what im trying to say. With the advent of spring as more and more interactions took place i found myself able to appreciate an entirely new fashion how all the different languages represented in the room converge in ways i had not previously recognized. I glimpsed this convergence one afternoon in the middle of april while sitting with the students, one from the jews extent in which he showed up, they couldnt find anybody in the building who spoke thai chick and so she was often found lost walking always for the school, the city card would bring her back to mr. Wenstrup piccola, shes close to jack lane and marring. Her language and arabic are somewhat related and are able to figure that out. One afternoon in the middle of april while sitting with them, youre talking about the book that mr. Williams has started reading out loud with the class. The book was called caesar chavez, fighting for farmworkers and it was a nonfiction graphic novel. For mr. Williams, the story of cesar chavez held tremendous power. He got a little emotional trying to explain the significance of this guy to students who had never heard him before, trying to put into words why cesar chavez mattered. At one point as i was listening to them, discuss a poster they were making to illustrate the books contents, i found myself wondering how the three girls were managing to communicate. One spoke tajik, russian, a little farsi, and Jacqueline Anne murray what arabic speakers. Nor did they didnt share a common language to get this seemed to understand each one another perfectly and there were not using Google Translate, nor english. How are they interacting . I could hear all of them saying the word. What was that . Book, she told me. My leg which, book. Their language book, say. Their word for book was identical in each other Home Languages come in arabic, tajik. In farsi, just like arabic. Initially, i i thought this kid of convergence existed only in the middle east, but as i spent more time with the students from africa, i came to realize i was wrong. I was told in swahili the word for book was. [inaudible] and methuselah said it was. [inaudible] that was the moment when i finally grasped my own arrogance as an english speaker. I mean, the arrogance harbored by someone who knew only european languages which rendered the wellplaced interconnectedness of the rest of the world invisible to me. I i was starting to see it thou, the centuries old ties that bound africa and the middle east over hundreds of years of trade and travel and conquest and marriage. Once the students grasp that i would exclaim with delight if they found a word that had moved to many of their countries, they started flocking to me to share loanwords. More than onethird of swahili comes from arabic meaning the links between those two languages are as powerful as those between english and spanish, but it was also possible to chart the reach of arabic across the entire african continent into other languages. As the kids discovered these commonalities, i begin to feel as though i was watching Something Like the living embodiment of a linguistic tree. The classroom and the relationships forming inside it were almost a perfect map of language proximity around the globe. Generally, students chose to communicate first with others whose homeland which a shared large numbers of card names which meant the first french is often built along same lines of language groupings, the same branch of the linguistic tree. As this took place around me i could use my own position on the world tree a link which is more clearly. English speakers can easily grasp the vast code terminology of all the european languages, our own limb of the tree, but were generally deaf and dumb to the equally large influence of other languages like arabic or chinese or hindi that had spread across big parts of the globe where english doesnt dominate. We cant hear or see the tremendous code terminology that has resulted among various other language families pick a was to our detriment, not understanding how tightly interconnected other parts of the world were. When we make enemies in movies, for example, we alienate whole flocks of africa, too, often without even knowing this. Cobb was the word students want to teach me about the most. When the over lunch shane e shani Governor Cooper like as were sitting with others, my language. , arabic. Topic, farsi. Top, she said. I get it, i thought. They found another cognate but what was . It means heart. This word is the same in all our languages. I tried to get a better sense of this concept which the students and i discussed over the series of days. Could you say mr. Williams had a cop that pumps blood through his body . Yes, they said. Could you ask how much did it take for mr. Williams to do this year after year with such infinite patience or room after room of newcomers . Yes. The students agreed. When two people fell in love, was that . Yes. I let South High School thinking cobb and heart were one and the same. I use one word to refer to a muscle in my body and the concept of falling in love, an idea of what it takes to raise a family or teach an entire classroom full of teenagers from around the world pick and the students from the east which use one single word for all that, too. Cobb and heart seemed identical. Then i looked up, one weekend on Google Translate while the kids were missing me and i was missing the kids pick when asked google to change heart into arabic, it gave me cobb as expected, but when asked google to switch it into english, i got heart, center, middle, transformation, conscience, core, marrow, pulp, essence, quintessence, topol, alter, flip, tip, overturned, reversal, overthrow, capsize, whimsical, capricious, convert, change, counterfeit. Counterfeit . Thats what Google Translate said. In addition, the word meant substance, being, pluck. I am in love with this word, i thought. What is all this movement about. My concept of art didnt include slip, capsize, reverse, our two cultures didnt have the same idea of what was happening at the core of our beings. Theres something reified installer about my sense of heart present idea part these kids possess appear to have a lighter more nimble quality. Whatever it was, it seemed more fluid and less constrained to anything id ever imagined happening inside of me. Thanks. I wanted to leave a lot of time for q a, so im happy to answer any questions that you guys have about the book. I do a lot in the book and its actually a challenge we sometimes to summarize it well. So thats my attempt to give you both i feel for how it starts and the overarching concept of it, and kind of may be my favorite passage in the whole book. Yes. [inaudible] good question. Right. The ones who didnt give me permission i didnt write about in the book at all. I just, so there was one student who did that. And i would rather probably just not say much about that because i dont really have permission to tell their story, but thank you for being curious and asking. [inaudible] was that child undocumented . No, actually. There were two students who did not have legal status in the room. This is a great question, im glad youre asking this. Refugees arrive with legal status, of course because we officially inviting to our country and they go through the entire bidding process, which we can talk about. I mean, its like so detailed you cant believe it. Five federal agencies overseen by the department of Homeland Security who was never made a a mistake. Every refugee weve invited to this country has settled here safely and not, you know, committed some act of terror like we hear about happening in other places. We do a really good job with Refugee Resettlement in this country. [inaudible] i do. But what i want to get at is at this question of documents. The refugees of course arrive with all of the documents that they need, but there were two students in the room who actually had arrived in this country as asylumseekers. They were from el salvador and they did not have documents. They entered this country. They were both from el salvador. They both happen to be both 15 but they arrived without parents, without guardians on their own traveling here. This is another big story happening at the same time as the refugee crisis is we have young people sometimes in Central America arriving on their own. One of them, her mom was living in the u. S. In denver which is how she wound up your getting to reconnect with her mom. And one of them, he had a sister here in denver and he was able to reconnect with his sister. Both of those kids had been picked up on the border our immigration authorities, of course, who are there leasing our border, and they were then put into our court system. They were in federal detention, each of them. Because they arrived on their own illegally, they were treated as a different category than either refugees or undocumented immigrants or illegal immigrants, whatever terminology youre using for those who arrive without legal status. When they are kids and they come on their own, they are qualified to seek asylum in our court system. The question is, is it so dangerous where they came from that to send them back with me to send them may be to their death, or maybe just too, can we not send them home safely . Do they need to stay here, do they need a silent is a question the court considers. The whole distinction between refugees, immigrants, and asylumseekers is, these things get confused very easily. My book is largely about, my book is about the 22 students in the room who are largely refugee students. There are these two asylumseekers in the room. [inaudible] that is that they question hanging over their heads, the question whether they will be granted asylum or not. And you see the students struggle with that uncertainty throughout the course of this year. Is this typically a long process . Its typically a long process, yeah. I can say more about that but well talk about that subject all night long if we are not careful. Other questions . Yes, here. You said one was a girl [inaudible] or maybe a couple of years later. [inaudible] what was the timeframe when you started talking to these people in class to when you actually finish the book . So thanks. Thats a great question. I started working on the book in august 2015, and hot off the press. I feel like ive been working on it this whole time. I did the reporting of the 20152016 school year and then of course theres the writing of the book which we hustled. We thought it was important to get the story out in the world to be timely, topical. No sooner that i finished the editing that we begin getting out in the world and then i begin talking about it. The kids, i followed them through their First School Year and into their second year. And i wanted to do that because the president ial election that just happened was taking place all through their first year of school and into their second year of school, and a wanted to see both how are they doing in school and also how did our political backdrop affect them. One thing i wanted to mention in the congolese family, the two boys, brothers in the room, they learned so much english. They were the kids to learn the most english of all the kids in the room, the quickest. They learned so much english that their teacher, eddie williams, the teacher recommended a skip over a year and a half of additional english language instruction and move into a super advanced english class and enter mainstream classes in the second you. They did have a semester more and then they begin reading to kill a mockingbird in their second year in this country. The speed at which these kids learn english is unbelievable to me. I have struggled to learn spanish, and i couldnt do it with this kind of speed or fluency. I halfway know spanish. Anyway, the kids, i am in awe of what they did and i just wanted to be sure to say that. There were more questions. [inaudible] did most of these families connect with the local communities, like the Congolese Community or the Iraqi Community i was in denver . Thats a great question. Did they have a Spiritual Life . Did they take it to a mosque, for example . Did you go . Or temples or whatever they might have. I want to talk about the communities in denver, but to just answer this spiritual question, the congolese dad, he was, it was so important to him to be able to have time to go to church that he actually structured, he waited for a job. He ended up with a job washing dishes in a corporate cafeteria, but he wanted a a job where he would be free on the weekends to go to church because church was like his main way to connect to the rest of the Congolese Community in denver. With the iraqi family, the other family, i really got close to, their mom is muslim. Their dad was christian. The girls, their mom said, you are free to choose whichever religion, i respect them both, its your decision. Actually one of the girls showed up in class for part of the school youre wearing a headscarf, and her sister didnt. Didnt. And i was kind of like, i was a muslim are the christian, like what . I guess i look at headscarf and think thats an indicator of religion. One thing i learned spending as much time at the school with such a Large Population of refugee and immigrant students, kids all over the world wearing headscarves, some of them are christian and some of whom are muslim. I thought that means your muslim but thats actually just a cultural misreading. I just wasnt aware. I didnt know. It was actually a christian priest, window mom got married to their dad, she started attending christian services. Then it was a christian priest urged the sister to wear a headscarf. But then when they got here, Jack Jacqueline wanted to keep wearing it and her sister wasnt comfortable wearing one here in the United States where its question a lot. So the kind of had a divergence of behavior around that which i was wondering about, and ask them a little bit about when i got to know them well enough where they would feel comfortable with me asking then stuff like that. But religion was very important to these families. Their mom here i think honoring her husband even though he is not here with her. She chose to go to a christian church. The person who helped that family the most was another member of that church who, he is deeply religious, hes very conservative politically. Church is super important to him, and to him the act of welcoming a stranger is very, very important and you really wanted to do this. He also happened to be fluent in arabic because he had once lived in the middle east, and he was the single most generous volunteer i saw working with these families out of all the volunteers that i got to see. He really helped that family get used furniture and he helped fix the car when it broke down when they bought a a used car, they kept breaking down a lot. He really helped them out amazingly, and the Church Communities and what they do in terms of Refugee Resettlement and how they help us welcome people to this country is extraordinary. And i know, i know that the Church Volunteers find this like the most fulfilling kind of volunteer work that they can do, and that was true for him. Yes . [inaudible] what was the literacy level . When the kids arrived. Thats terrific. Its a great question because it will very and it will vary from year to year. This year everybody arrived, you know, not only of course conversant in their Home Language but also able to write in their Home Language. Sometimes kids show up not able to write, that this year they all were able to write. Many of them were able to write in multiple languages. There was a student who spoke seven languages when she arrived, english was her eighth language that she was acquiring. Sounds like a lot of languages, because she knew so many languages, for her acquiring a new language was something she does know how to do, and she was one of the quickest to learn english. Where was she from . She was from africa. Her family moved around Different Countries in africa, so they had quite a journey. Originally burundi but they left to mozambique. Im sorry, burundi and tanzania briefly and then mozambique and then here. Some of these kids had quite a journey getting here. All refugees, to be designated refugee, you have to be forced out of your original home to a different place. You can only apply for Refugee Status from the United Nations if youre already been forced out of your own home. So they are applying from always a second country, but sometimes like in the case of jacqueline and mary emma, they had to flee from iraq. They got to syria but that wasnt safe. They went to turkey. They had a stop in egypt. The journeys they had company been looking for a safe home for a decade before the reached this mans classroom. A decade of wandering. That is not untypical. Thats a hallmark story. Not everyone is chosen to resettle, and all these kids, one of the struggles they had, all of them are very well aware that they let people behind. The joy for them to be here and a sadness that they let people behind, but their capacity to acclimate, to learn english and to make it here, i was left in awe of these kids. And really in all of their teacher who pulled off this feat of teaching 22 kids basic english by the end of the year. Yes. I was wondering how he went about doing that. Was it all like conversation and maybe reading, or did he pull out the worksheets and the grammar . He did all of the things your mentioning. In addition, i think he use some concepts that are promoted to people and english language acquisition step but what did to me as as a journalist, watchine room and going how do you do this . One thing he did, its called total physical response, and hes teaching the kids english by getting them, like he will not only act something out every time he says a word but he will get them to do the same thing as well. If you can both act something out and say a new word at the same time, yes, youll learn a lot faster. Its something that is used in these classrooms a lot. He used all of those. He also had many volunteers in the classrooms, especially from goodwill industries, Jewish Family Service at someone in the room, too. But the goodwill volunteers would come and read with the kids. The volunteers in the room love getting a chance to meet all these different students to work with the kids, but the kids he English Speakers like that many at once to go around the room and work individually with them, it was really helpful. Is there one more question . We might have time for just one more. Yes. Is south the only school that has a this or are there other high schools that have the same program . Yes. South has a Newcomer Center and english language acquisition which is all over the country in every place where you have large immigrant populations and refugee populations, we have these same programs. Every major metropolitan area doing Refugee Resettlement is doing Something Like this. What you an unusual about south is the way that the refugee students and immigrant students are blended so well with the americanborn kids altogether. So theyre serving on the Student Senate together. They run on the track team together. They are in mainstream classes together after a very short time. The population is really well blended together and thats a little bit unique for south. Yes . There are other programs in denver like that . Yes, at many schools. Because i wondered how they picked the one students to be able to attend this pic because im sure there are more than 22 kids in denver that i really want to focus on one teacher and 22 kids to tell the story i kind of a human scale. So i just stuck with this room throughout the entirety of the year. But yes. I mean, hes an extraordinary teacher. To me he is a hero and there are many heroes like him in so many classrooms, absolutely. I dont know, are we out of time for questions or do we have time for one more text okay, one more question. I did knew you start out. What was your training, your expertise in handling this group of children . Sure. As a journalist, i bring storytelling expertise basically, and thats pretty much it in a nutshell. The expert in the room teaching wise is the teacher who is really imparting english to these kids. As a journalist i felt my job was to document the work they teacher was doing and the journeys of the kids, and to tell that story so more people can feel like they have the chance to spend a year in this classroom and see what can happen. Would you do this again . You bet. Cant wait to write another book. It will be a different kind of subject. Im not sure what it will be. A lot of authors like to lineup their stories and i dont do that. I generally wander in the wilderness for a little while before i forget what to write about. I have at the and my work i suppose, i think my first book was about undocumented students and the struggle to try to find legal status in this country. My second book was about military veterans coming home after being at war and the struggle to come back home. Thats not the same thing as immigration, but there are just some parallels the children hard to come back home. And then this book obviously related as well to those subjects. Probably a similar theme again. Who knows what it will be. [inaudible]. But it meant he was legally allowed to live on its own. He didnt in the classroom for a long time. He needed to go work and he went and did