[inaudible conversations] hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. We are going to get started. I want to thank everyone for being here at the last events of the year. We are honored. Thank you for coming. We are happy to welcome the bestselling author and if you havent read her works of art or others are soldier girls and just like us and the newcomers of what youre celebrating this evening. Shes able to bring together all the answers to make global citizens out of all of her readers. Tonight her story is one of a world issue that takes place in the backyard in denver. It follows 22 refugees in the United States speaking 14 languages all in the same classroom in denver. It is a gripping heartfelt powerful story so without further ado, please join me in welcoming helen thorpe. [applause] [applause] im thrilled to be back at one of my favorite bookstores. I love with nicole and the entire staff here have done. My local independent bookstore is like home away from home, so i am attached to my neighborhood bookstore and its just great to be here with you guys. So, i thought tonight i would read a little bit and try to explain the book as a whole and then read a little bit more. I wanted to start with the opening of the book because it sets things up. Then i will describe in greater detail of course. But going into day number one for the students and the teacher. This chapter is called nice to meet you. On the first day of school it was going to be a 90degree scorcher and you could already feel the air starting to shimmer. He jogged up the steps to the main entrance of the high school. Half an hour before the first bell rang e. Delights and customs of people and the pageantry of th the nations chat the course of tomorrow and claimed a large mural by the front door. The teacher was a tall man, 6 feet 4 inches with an athletic body, short black hair and an angular face. 38 but could have passed for 28. Ernest, industrious, kind were the words that came to mind. When i thought about the parts he got into his classroom the wk in and out all year long he almost always dressed conservatively in long dress shirts in his wardrobe made me think of leafing through an l. L. Bean catalog that day he was wearing a purple polo shirt. All the teachers had put on purple shirts come to school color, so that the students could easily see who 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 for where they could find the schools cafeteria upon the fourth floor of the buildi building. Mr. Williams usually avoid short sleeve shirts because they revealed a tatto tattoo that cid one of his biceps and he feared the students might misinterpret the designs. He worked diligently to communicate and was the person they could trust. Mr. Williams had inherited his fathers height and propensity along with his latino mothers dark eyes and hair, fluid in both spanish and english key 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 that possessed significant wealth and lives nearby. Most were crowded with teenagers and that morning, however, as he looked around his room, mr. Williams saw many empty chairs and only seven students. They were shot were expressions. Nobody in the room was talking, not even to one another. The teacher expected this for his room always got off to a quiet start. Welcome to newcomers class, he , he said in a deliberative warm tone of voice. My name is mr. Williams. What is your name and where are you from . The teenagers made no reply. Just the act of shutting up by 7 45 in the morning required enormous fortitude. This august, 2015 and the students spent on average more than an hour negotiating the local Public Transit system to get the school. They lived with other relatives in small houses or one or twobedroom apartments located in the neighborhoods nowhere near this upscale neighborhood. In parts of the city where a dollar could be stretched. Getting to school from the patchwork zones of housing where they lived to devoted commitment that was a quality that his students have an abundance. What they did not possess for the most part was the ability to understand what he was saying. Welcome to the newcomer class, he said again taking care to enunciate each word deliberately. My name is mr. Williams. What is your name and where are you from . He often said things twice. It gave them a quality they continued to stare back at their teacher without speaking. The technical term for what was happening is preproduction, which in academic literature about the language acquisition is also known as the silent period. The vast majority of the second language learners began in a quiet receptive phase able to produce hardly any english themselves. Even if their brains absorptive aching being said by their teacher. So, that is the opening of the book where you meet this amazing man who is an amazing 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 through 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 it is a beginner english class, he has the highest concentration of refugee kids in his room if anybody in the building. And the kids who arrived in his room arrived from all of the countries producing the greatest number of refugees from all around the world. Ultimately, his room actually comes out refugee crisis almost perfectly, so the top sender of refugees is the democratic of congo. He gets the students from that country by the years and it. Another large sender of refugees is burma and he gets the two students. Many are coming from iraq because they align themselves with us and its no longer safe. He gets a family from iraq 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 fiscal year as best he can. Hes an amazing guy. I was in awe of him. I think he is a hero, maybe an unsung hero because i dont think that we celebrate teachers enough or english language acquisition. So, he teaches them english and spanish as well in his room when he needs to. He doesnt speak the other languages and the job is to teach them english nonetheless and he doesnt fight immersing them in an environment using all kinds of ways to communicate the terms that the median of the language that they need, so after he says nice to meet you he starts with may i meet with another paraprofessional shaking hands, nice to meet you. Pretty soon hes teaching them english and hes pantomiming saving throw and they start to know what this means and he builds from there to the point that these kids by the end of the school year will no 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 the school year is i think an extraordinary thing. I had the chance to spend a year in sight of this room with eddie and the students. You dont usually have journalists sitting in a classroom. It was unusual for me and the students and it was unusual for the teacher. It was easy for me to explain what i hoped to do in his room and why i was there. Everybody invited me into was hard to explain to the students why i was there. I couldnt walk up to them and say im a journalist. I would like to write a book about kids learning english has just arrived here. It was important to me that the kids know that there is a journalist in their room and decided that they want to be in the book or not. Ultimately i had to hire 14 different interpreters one for every language in the room and beameet with the kids individua. Im a journalist invited into your school and im honored to get the chance to write about work your teacher is doing and if you would like to share your story with me, i would love to hear it. You dont have to edit your choice. Tell me if this is something that you want to do. In 14 different languages. With the amazing interpreters that helped me explain myself to the kid as well as a journalist i am a mother. I have a 15yearold son, same age as these kids in the room and i wanted to do the best job as i could where they were going to learn so much english. So, you know, it was important to me that the kids decide if they want to be in the book and i do the best job i can giving them the choice to make that decision. Ultimately, 21 of the 22 kids in the room wanted to share their stories. I think they wanted to talk to me because they were well aware that theres conversations about refugees and immigration and they felt like they wanted to be better understood and they wanted people to know how grateful they were to live in this country and to be invited here and how different it was to live where they felt safe compared to some of the places they had been living before the. Learning english is hard, but they knew that it was important and they were learning as fast as they could and they wanted people to know, they really wanted to become americans and they were not sure quite exactly how to do that yet. They were still working on what do you wear to school in america because maybe in other countries where they were from like burma its hot and you only wear flipflops and there was a young woman who wore flipflops to school one day in a snowstorm because she had never worn any other kind of shoes before. And they have a lot to get used to learning how to dress appropriately for cold weather, what kind of food cafeteria served, which maybe they were not used to getting used to this high school environment. Their families and parents working new jobs, sometimes work they havent done before. They made their living from farming that when they came here they were working as janitors, cleaning hotels, working in the meatpacking plants and working sometimes as maids doing whatever work they could do sometimes with limited english their kids could be in School Learning english. Assimilating into our society and the parents knew they were not going to learn as much english as their kids, but they could work while their kids were doing this hard work of learning english and creating the pathway privilege occasion here and a different kind of life here. So, wanting to get to know these kids better, i after i had the chance to introduce myself and say a little bit about this, he invited them to tell me whatever they want about their journey and we typically spend 11 [cheering] , maybe half an hour. When they shared a difficult experiences in their home country or they had been at war in some fashion i said maybe i could meet your parents if they want to talk to me. I would like to hear more probably not during the school day but if you want to invite me home, feel free. A couple families took me up on that which was an amazing experience. I was invited into the home and an iraqi familys home and i got to know also a family from burma a little bit. I spent most time with the congolese family and the iraqi family. What i write about in the book is after a year in the classroom and an amazing teacher teaching all these kids english and also the journey that the congolese family had been in the first journey to america and it is an extraordinary thing trying to assimilate in ou into our socied any new society. I would have the same experience if i were trying to assimilate in their society. Its super challenging. I was it was a gift to me that they shared their first year in america with me because it wasnt an easy time. The pairings and some older siblings found work really quickly. They were economically selfsufficient in three months time and i just couldnt believe it. I felt like it was nothing i have ever seen. I think we have this idea that they come here and take subsidies and thats actually not how it works. They get a grant when they arrived like a thousand dollars a person. It goes quick and pays the rentt maybe a month or two but they are supposed to the economically selfsufficient within 90 days, three months. I dont even know how they do it. I cant believe that it is possible. With the iraqi family i will say a little bit about the journey. The girls names arrived speaking arabic written from left to right with a different alphabet and a language that structures sentences differently. They put verbs at the beginning of th their sentences and subjes later. We do the opposite. They tried to figure out english and i could tell they were grappling with a lot of wha i dt know what it was. They had trauma in their background and not only lived in the iraq war were there to try to help the u. S. Military and then was targeted for being our ally and they had to flee when they were very young. They were 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. When their father was not able to find work in damascus he thought he needed to go back to iraq that when he did, he vanished, and if they dont know what happened to him and they are pretty sure he was maybe killed. Again, because he had cooperated with the military and they were still struggling to put behind them the loss of their father but also everything they witnessed. They were living in damascus and lived through difficult things. I knew not to ask the girls about this when they eluded to it. Their mom did tell me their story. I had the help of an interpreter fluent in arabic. I got close to the interpreter as well help me get to know the family and taught me a lot about the middle eastern culture that i didnt know. We generally connected over meals. They invited me over and sent me so much food i started trying to bring them food, to. I didnt want to just be taking things from them all the time and not giving back. They like to eat sitting on the floor and i like to eat sitting at a table. This is like a traditional way to celebrate if somebody special is in your home you honor them use it on the floor and we did that a lot and i thought it was hilarious and unusual. I really admired their moms grit and determination and the fact that she was able to get her kids here to a safe place when they lived in some really difficult places where hard things were happening. I identified with her as a single mom. Not that my situation i is any y at the same level as hers. The struggle was enormous. Today her daughter can chatter in english like you wouldnt believe and i think it is amazing to watch especially the teenagers, they absorb the language so quickly it is in amazing thing to see. I want to read a little bit more from the time the kids are not so silent like they were at the beginning of the year and they have a lot more to say because the room transformed from quiet at the outset to this happy bubbling place with all these teenagers trying to get to know one another. It was hard for them to get to know each other because they didnt generally share a common language so at first they were doing like a google translation application on their phones and they would translate it and send a text message that way. I didnt even know how, they showed me how. It was amazing to watch them try to connect with one another and then of course the next thing you know they are flirting and fighting and making friends and having sleepovers, all of which have been. But let me read to you from a part later in the book where theres a lot more interaction going on. What i like about this part of the book and why i want to share it with you is that it has a lot to do with language and as a writer and a lover of words, learning more about something other languagesod theother langn the room was super cool for me and a great joy. I will just read this and you will understand what i am trying to say. With the advent of spring as more and more interactions took place, i find myself able to appreciate an entirely new fashion how all the different languages represented in the room converged in ways i hadnt previously recognized. I glimpsed this one afternoon in the middle of april while sitting. From tajikistan when she showed up, they couldnt find anybody in the building so she was often found lost wandering the halls and a Security Guard would bring her back to the room. Anyway, she is close to the language and arabic are related and they were able to figure that out. One afternoon in the middle of april while sitting with them they were talking about a book that mr. Williams started reading out loud with the class. It was cold fighting for farmworkers and it was a nonfiction graphic novel. The story held tremendous power. He got a little emotional trying to explain the significance to his students whod never heard of him before. Trying to put in to words why cesar chavez mattered. At one point as i was listening to them discuss the poster they were making to illustrate the books content, i found myself wondering how the three girls were managing to communicate. Initially they thought this convergence existed only in the middle east but as i spent more time with the students from africa i was wrong they told me in swahili the word for book. And the centralist said its in swahilis about was the moment i finally cracked my own arrogance as an english speaker that was harbored by some the only to new european languages which rendered the interconnectedness to the rest of the world invisible to me i was starting to see it that centrist old ties and africa and the middle east with hundreds of years of travel and conquest once they grasped that they found a word that had moved through many of their countrys they would flock to me more than onethird of swahili comes from arabic so the links between those two languages are powerful like english and spanish but also it was possible to chart the reach of arabic across the entire african continent continent into other languages as well. As the kids discover the commonalities i began to feel i was watching Something Like a living embodiment of a linguistic treaty. The relationships forming were almost a Perfect Match of language proximity around the globe generally students chose to communicate first to others that meant the first friendship often developed along the same Language Line the same bridge of the linguistic tree that i grow to see my own position on the tree of languages more clearly English Speakers could easily grasp the code terminology of the european languages but were generally to the equally large influence of other languages like arabic or chinese or hindi that had spent spread across big parts of the globe. We cannot hear or see a tremendous coat terminology among various other language families. To our detriment not understanding a tightly interconnected other parts of the world were when we make enemies in the middle east we alienate whole parts of africa without even knowing it. The word that the students wanted to teach me about the most. One day over lunch the co