“It’s Like a Cow’s Opinion. It Doesn’t Matter. It’s Moo.”

Few people enjoy a “word joke” as much as I do. It doesn’t matter the venue or the type — a turn of pronunciation, a ridonculous definition, a case of made-up vocabulary — they get me every time.

I’m reading The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. I’ve known about it for a while (it’s from the 30’s, for goodness sake), but I’ve never actually read it. Hyman is an immigrant in the Beginners Class in the US naturalization program, and his story is one (earnest) word joke after another. There’s some humorous stuff from the English teacher side of things too.

One of my favorite parts so far is when Hyman writes an assigned letter to his brother. He originally signs it “Your animated brother,” but when his class and his teacher, Mr. Parkhill, inform him that he ought not refer to himself as “animated,” he sets out to find the perfect replacement adjective. After rolling through a few common ones, he finally comes up with what he believes is the ultimate answer: “Magnificent!”

The class is in awe, but Mr. Parkhill breaks the spell by pointing out that “magnificent” isn’t really appropriate either. As Hyman leaves class that night, he has a conversation with another student, Mr. Bloom, that is overheard by Mr. Parkhill.

“Kaplan,” said Mr. Bloom enviously, “how you fond soch a beautiful woid?”

“‘Megnificent,’ ‘megnificent,’” Mr. Kaplan murmured to himself wistfully. “Ach! Dat vas a beauriful void, ha, Bloom?”

“Believe me!” said Mr. Bloom. “How you fond soch a woid?”

“By dip tinking,” said Mr. Kaplan.

He strode out like a hero.

Sure, the dialect and the scene are amusing, but what I really like about it is something that’s not on the page — a memory that it conjured up for me.

As you probably know, I taught Basic Writing and Freshman Composition at HSU. You probably also know what Freshman Comp. is. Basic Writing is a course required for students who did poorly on the English portion of the ACT/SAT. And it’s basic. I mean, start with “You need a subject and a verb to make a sentence” basic.

In the semesters that I taught that one, I saw all sorts of students, some who were honors students in math but just sucked at English, some who were so overwhelmed by the empty page that they couldn’t write more than two sentences in an entire hour, some for whom English was a second language, etc. There were even some who maybe shouldn’t have been in there at all, but most were like the student who turned in an essay without a single verb in it because I had instructed them to decrease their use of the passive voice by “taking out 50% of your ‘be’ verbs.” I also talked about how to replace those verbs with action ones. We spent an entire morning reconstructing sentences as a class, even.

But, still, I got a verbless essay.

No matter the level of the student, though, they all had one thing in common: They didn’t want to be there. Even if they eventually liked me and had fun in the class, in the beginning they all felt like they were being punished or singled out by having to be in there in the first place. That’s a decent-sized teaching challenge, I think.

But it’s not one I had to face on the other side of campus.

During the time that I taught Basic Writing, I also worked in the Writing Lab, which was a free tutoring service to all students in all disciplines. Usually, the only students who took advantage of it were the ones assigned to by their professors. But every now and then, we’d get a student who came in on his own. One of those, we’ll call him Desi, came to see me at least once a week. Desi was an ESL graduate student, who spoke with a thick accent and broken English.

When I stopped working in the Writing Lab, Desi sought me out in my office in the Logsdon School of Theology, where I was a secretary and he was a seminary student.

“Those other tutors are nice enough, but they don’t explain things like you,” he said. “They just tell me what I should write. They don’t show me how to fix it and help me not make the same mistake again. Can I come here for you to help me?”

My boss was under the impression that my services should be available to all of Logsdon, so long as I did his work first. He actually went around telling all the other professors to feel free to ask me to do anything for them, so I graded and proctored, etc, for a few other professors from time to time. Once I got into graduate school (in the Literature and Language department), he decided that I ought to be doing grad assistant work (i.e. research and writing) for him in addition to my usual secretary work. And, despite the fact that I wasn’t majoring in anything in Logsdon, he even had me tutor a few students in some basic stuff like New Testament, Old Testament, and Methods of Biblical Interpretation. (To be fair, I did minor in Bible, and I did get an A in all of those classes.)

Plus, I’m a pretty nice girl. So, of course, I helped Desi.

Desi came to my office with every single paper he wrote, whether it was a film review or an exegesis. Sometimes we’d go through the whole thing together right then and there. Other times, he’d leave it, I’d mark it, and then he’d come back and we’d go through each of the marks.

One of my favorite things to tell students is, “Read it out loud. A lot.” There’s something about hearing it that makes a big difference. It’s easier to hear if you’ve got the right word or the right tone or good flow than it is to read it and tell. If you read it out loud a few times and verbally stumble on the same paragraph more than once, that paragraph probably needs to be reworked. I gave the same advice to Desi, and he followed it. But what he really liked was for me to read his papers out loud.

No, not because he loved my voice. Because he loved hearing and catching his own mistakes. (I think he could recognize a mistake more easily when it was said by an English-speaking individual without a foreign accent.) He loved learning how to correct his mistakes. And he loved English words.

Sometimes he wanted me to read out loud just so he could hear me say a new word that he had looked up in his dictionary. I’d read the word and he’d get a far-off, dreamy look in his eyes and interrupt:

“Katy, don’t you think that is a beautiful word?! I looked it up last night. It works, no? It’s okay to use it here, this way, no? It’s so beautiful!”

Other times, I’d point out a word that he had used several times close together and we’d work on finding some different options. Eventually, he’d point out those instances himself and say, “Let’s find another word!” with more enthusiasm than I’ve ever seen any student have about anything other than getting out of class early or my getting engaged. I’d list off some options until he heard the perfect one. His eyes would light up and he’d nearly jump out of his seat, “Yes! That one! That one!”

At the end of the session, he’d walk out my door saying the new word over and over to himself and then pause in the hallway and glance back at me, nodding:

“This is a beautiful word. Thank you so much. Oh, yes, I am going to use this one!”

If only he’d put stars in his name.