That Volunteer Thing

Two months ago, I decided to finally act on taking a volunteer job that I'd been pondering for quite some time. There had been notices in the local library asking for conversation partners for non-native speakers of English on Wednesday mornings and, given my experience with ESL teaching and curriculum development, it seemed like a good fit. I was looking to use my skills as well as meet new people through this outlet.

When you think about a job of any kind, be it volunteer or paid, you imagine a situation. I thought this was going to be a single native English speaker partnering with a single non-native speaker in order to help him or her improve or practice. The situation was very far from what I envisioned. There was a huge room filled with tables capable of seating up to four people. Two of the tables were pushed together such that a large group sat around each. Usually, this meant there were two native speakers and six non-native speakers per group.

I will admit up front that the organization of the situation did not encourage me. I knew from my experiences in Japan that large groups never functioned as well as smaller ones and I didn't know why they'd choose not to break the groups in half when possible to pair three non-natives with one native. Bigger groups tend to end up with more "listeners" rather than "speakers" and it is harder to manage the conversation. 

This first sessions started with a deadly dull and incredibly tedious video presentation on library software for people who want to learn other languages. It was a half hour long, which is 1/3 of the 90 minutes allotted for the club to operate. Since this was my first time, I wanted to use that time to "read the room". I noticed that most people had pretty much checked out after 10 minutes. Some were shifting in their seats, others were looking at cell phones, and still others were slumping lower and lower as the time dragged on.

In order to justify this useless presentation, the librarians who offered it tried to tell everyone how great and important the software was. This was underscored by the woman who is in charge of the program, Nancy. It was clear that the whole thing went over like a lead balloon, but in order for the organizers to convince themselves that it was important and valuable, they carried on like cheerleaders long after the team had lost dismally to try to convince the spectators that it had really been a great game.

After that fiasco, I shared a group with a woman named "Jean". Jean was a retired school teacher and she approached her group like a bunch of students under her tutelage. She started by asking them to introduce themselves and a quick round of anemic introductions that included only their names and place of origin followed. This was a silly way to introduce people because there were placards in front of each person with their names written on them anyway, but that was the way each of three shared sessions that I had with other volunteers seemed to go.

Jean then asked if they had done anything the previous week. Some people had nothing to say. A few were more outgoing and told a story. One had bought chocolates in Korea (her home country) and gave one to each person. The chocolates had chili pepper in them and everyone - except me - was reluctant to try it. I gamely gave it a shot and said that I used to write a snack blog about foreign food so I was generally okay to try anything. I described the taste and then asked the non-natives if they had noticed that American chocolate was different than that in other countries. I did this to give them a chance to talk about something which could be common ground. Jean hijacked the conversation to say her relatives were originally from Switzerland and the chocolate there was the best then she changed the subject (rather nervously) to something she wanted to speak about. That killed the talk before everyone could comment on something which I had hoped was common ground for each person to speak about.

In Japan, I found that there were certain "universal" experiences through which everyone could share their lives. One of them is food. I found that it was also a "safe" topic that never brought up controversy or bad feelings. Other such topics included holidays, family, work, and education. I could rely on these as connections that everyone could bond over, but Jean had a need to run the show as she likely always had - as a teacher who introduces what she wants to discuss rather than allows the students to carry on.

Jean chose a few random words to write down and ask the students if they understood. She also asked what they thought of the video and none of them liked it. One student never said anything. A few said very little, and a couple tended to dominate while Jean acted like an elementary school teacher to stitch it all together. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great. I finished thinking that the opening video choice displayed a gross lack of understanding of what non-natives wanted to hear about as well as too much of an investment in promoting services and not enough in helping people actually speak English, but I wanted to try again.

At the second session, they opened with an off-the-cuff suggestion that we do a "morning mingle". This was poorly explained and implemented. It was mentioned that we should walk around talking to different people, but it was clear that this was not heard or understood. Shouting vague instructions at native-speaker speed to a large room simply does not work. It's dicey at best even when everyone speaks the language fluently. It's quite ineffective when the people who need to hear the instructions don't.

I ended up spending the entire "mingling" time talking to the same low-English-level Korean woman who locked onto me like a duck imprinting on its mother and wouldn't let me go. She was nice enough, and I could tell she was shy and relieved to have someone who she was comfortable speaking to, but this was nothing like a "mingle".

During a deadly dull meeting after this second session, another volunteer said that she experienced the same problem and that they needed to do something to make sure people changed partners if they were going to use this exercise again. This meeting, incidentally, informed me very clearly that the focus was on what the volunteers wanted to do and needed and not on the needs of the learners. All of the talk seemed to center around what they wanted to do or how they could fill time. Not one person asked or considered what might be good for the learners or seemed to talk about the operation from any perspective other than the library's resources and providing fuel for the volunteers to burn up the minutes in the session.

During this second time I took part, I shared a table with a woman named Shannon who had also taught in Japan. She had lived there for 13 years and ran an English school. I could tell by the way she managed the table that she was more adept at this sort of thing, though she did employ what I'd call some of the more unsophisticated ways of handling a group. She'd break us in pairs so we'd talk to each other. She'd try some of the common tricks of getting people to talk which displayed mechanistic knowledge, but did not betray any sort of subtle reading of the group or members and finding common threads to talk about. She had a good bag of tricks, but it was the stuff that people used after a few years of teaching, and nothing inventive or interesting.

To offer an example of what I'm talking about, a new teacher will use structured materials to conduct a class. For example, he or she will play a game or use a pat question and answer method to get people to talk. An experienced teacher will ask some questions or creatively find what people want to talk about and then expand upon that. I used to do this all of the time with students with very specific interests so we'd cover what they wanted to rather than some arbitrary method. Shannon was fine. She used the arbitrary methods, and it felt a bit rigid, but it was okay.

During the third session, we opened with the "morning mingle" again, but this time they re-explained it and turned the lights off every 10 minutes to indicate that we should switch partners. The sort of half-assed implementation that happened the first time was indicative to me of the amateur thought processes behind how things were being done that I had been noting. Things were being done poorly and corrected later, at least when it was being noted by the volunteers that there was an issue because it bothered them. I was also noticing the things which were not working well from the side of the non-natives.

The dull thuds and loud clunks of what was an issue for the learners was an aspect which no one, but me and, possibly Shannon, was noticing. At one point, I mentioned the large size of the groups to Shannon and asked her if she thought this was for the best. She looked uncomfortable and said that it was Nancy's group and it seemed to be working for her. It was clear that she also felt things could be better, but wasn't going to rock the boat. It turns out she knew better than me in this regard.

I had my worst experience with sharing a session with a woman named Shauley during my third time. She was of Chinese descent, but spoke like a native speaker with a bit of an accent. Her qualification to call herself a native speaker was not in question, but her ability to run a group was pretty bad. She favored the two Chinese people in the group and a woman from France spent most of the time looking bored and unhappy as she was rarely given a chance to speak. It was clear that an elderly woman (one of the two Chinese people) followed the same practice each time and that she always paired with Shauley as Shauley explained that this old woman read her introduction - a long, rambling document about her home town in China - each time. It made the old lady more comfortable, but it was a killer of the energy and conversation at the table, especially as part of the start of the group. It didn't help that she finished reading her page and broke out into loud, heaving sobs because she missed her home so much.

At one point, I tried to introduce a technique to allow the learners to do most of the talking instead of me during my introduction, but Shauley hijacked it and distorted it so that they spoke less and she talked more. Instead of allowing the learners to ask me questions, she asked me questions. I tried to mitigate this by asking on occasion if one of the learners knew the answer. For example, I was asked about the Amish in Pennsylvania because I live there and an Italian woman to my right indicated that she knew who they were after watching a documentary, so I asked her to talk about them instead of me. Even this effort was undone by Shauley as she started answering the question about the Amish herself instead of allowing the Italian woman to do it on her own.

Shauley displayed to the greatest degree a problem that new teachers in Japan had and that every single volunteer there had shown. That is, they are so uncomfortable with a moment of silence or hesitation that they jump in to fill the gap. When you are dealing with non-native speakers, you have to get comfortable with their pauses as they collect their words and express themselves. Most people, especially Americans, have so much discomfort and inner turmoil about pauses that they can't sit with this. I sit with it just fine, and this was one of the reasons students chose me as a teacher. I was not dealing with my internal issues. I was accommodating theirs because I understood that it was hard to speak a second language and they needed time.

In each shared session, dealing with the volunteer's handling of matters was a problem for me. I would try to set the stage for a method through which the non-natives could express themselves, and the native volunteer would grab it and start talking or change the method before everyone had an equal chance to speak. I found this immensely frustrating. I am not used to being in a group of people in a social setting and allowing some to be largely ignored. Even when I tried to draw in the bored and clearly dissatisfied French woman by talking to her about the fact that she mentioned her boyfriend was going to buy a car (as a connection to my hating to drive here), Shauley hijacked that before the French woman could answer beyond a few words and started talking to one of the Chinese women about her driving.

After this third session, I felt very tenuous about going back, but returned for another. This was the first time that I was able to run the show myself as there weren't enough volunteers for me to share a table. I noted that Nancy only decided to move me to a table alone after another volunteer said she didn't think she could do one by herself and she remarked to me, "You can handle one on your own." Yes, I can. This was a concrete reflection of what I'd already perceived again and again. This show was being run for the volunteers, not for the people that they were there to "help".

The opening activity for this time was a golden oldie of the English as a second language game. It's called "find someone who". We used to use it in large groups in Japan all of the time, but we were always careful about the content to make sure that it matched the capability of the participants. We didn't use vocabulary that they couldn't understand. We also explained beforehand that it was for practice in asking questions. The documents for this versatile activity always were structured as such:

Find someone who...

...has been to New York City.
...has eaten fugu.
...has a sister.
(etc.)

The small challenge for the learner is to structure a question like "Have you ever been to New York City?" During the use of this in the ESL club, no one explained the purpose so everyone was walking around saying, "Has been to New York City?" They just read the stems because of the inadequate introduction.

Beyond the poor explanation, the document had clearly been grabbed off an internet site and no one bothered to think about whether or not the words were comprehensible to most people. The first question was "...a jack of all trades." This old-fashioned term is not only out of favor in the modern age, but extremely complex to explain and unlikely to be in the arsenal of words of a non-native speaker. Though we sometimes had to use words that we believed students might not know, we always made an effort to explain those words before the activity. Again and again, the approach in this group was to confuse and then explain (if at all). This is a sloppy approach and it's a bad experience for the learner as not understanding too much makes them stop trying to understand at all. It also makes them feel like they are failing constantly.

After a month of sessions, I planned to give it one more shot before deciding to continue because the fifth one was to occur just before Halloween and there was supposed to be a pumpkin-carving activity. In fact, I was really looking forward to this as I felt that it would be structured around actions rather than be oriented toward the volunteer's needs. Unfortunately, I got sick, and the following week I had already planned to skip because of my husband's birthday. In the interim, I got an e-mail from Nancy saying there was going to be a meeting in which they would discuss whether or not they should break the groups into levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

She asked for my feedback about the levels, and I gave it. I gave it mentioning a lot of the problems I'd noticed and how they'd impact separation into levels. In particular, my concern was that the "beginners" (who she mentioned in her message that no one wanted to work with) would require far more preparation and structure than any other group. I also mentioned that, if this was social thing, it was better to leave them mixed. If it was a learning thing, then they needed to break them up.  I also talked about the group size and how it tended to be a bigger issue for lower levels (as higher level students dominated) and that generally the whole thing wouldn't work unless the volunteers were trained to manage the time without any insecurity about how they'd fill it. (Note: I didn't use the word "insecurity", but tried to be "nice" about how I said everything. I may have failed in that regard, but I really tried.)

I mentioned a lot of things, and I should note that, after the first session, Nancy told me that even if I only came once, she wanted my critical feedback. I came four times, and when I gave some of that critical feedback, I could tell by her response that she wasn't happy about what I'd said. She essentially blew off every concern, justified every choice they were making, and dismissed my difference in opinion as the reflection of someone who'd primarily done ESL in business and didn't understand what they were doing there. She did this all as nicely as possible, but I could tell that, while she asked for critical appraisal, what she really wanted was mostly validation of what they were doing. She said quite clearly that she didn't think I understood what they were doing and had hoped she could talk to me later after I had properly comprehended their program.

It is true that my experiences were primarily with business in Japan. I even noted that I understood that they were dealing with volunteers so it was different. However, I think it's not uncommon for volunteers to receive training and these ones were getting none. Not one of those people knew what they were doing and the whole situation smacked of people who were well-intentioned, but largely throwing things at a wall and waiting to see what stuck. What was worse was that they were only viewing success through the lens of what worked for the volunteers. No one had a clue about what it was like on the other side for the non-natives. In fact, until I mentioned this point to Nancy, I don't think it even occurred to anyone to even think about that aspect of the situation and I'm pretty sure right now that Nancy won't think twice about what I said now that I'm gone.

Had Nancy received my comments less defensively, I may have returned and even offered training had they wanted it. I have copious experience training people to teach English and a huge bag of techniques to share. However, it may surprise no one that I decided I was done. It's not because I wasn't being "heard" by people who knew far less than I did. It was because I already was tired of costarring in an amateur hour when I am a pro. Sharing sessions with people who are unskilled was already close to unbearable for me. Sitting with them as they thwarted my efforts to help the learners so that they could talk more themselves is just something I wasn't prepared to keep doing. It was simply too frustrating.

The thing is, I'm sure no one will really miss me. This is a free service and I'm sure most of the non-natives in that room have had experience paying high fees for what they were getting there for nothing. The population of the area I currently reside in is so diverse and filled with people who are here temporarily while spouses work on various contracts that there is a large supply of people who will take what they can get as long as they don't have to pay for it. There's also the fact that those who are learning a language rarely possess the capacity to evaluate an experience qualitatively. If you have only ever eaten consumer level cheap candy, you have no idea that expensive, quality candy tastes much better. They have to have had excellent experiences to realize that what they're getting isn't "good".

The question of whether or not I stayed or left was really about only me. The learners weren't going to be or feel deprived. Nancy and the other volunteers weren't going to care that much as they would certainly continue to pat themselves on the back and see success even when neither was warranted. The big question was what I was going to "lose" or gain by going. What I was going to lose was something I did value, and that was meeting new people from various cultures and having the potential to get to know them. Unfortunately, unless I managed a group alone (not a high probability or something I could control), I found that I couldn't get to know anyone because of how the other volunteer directed the verbal traffic. The frustration to enjoyment ratio was just too high, so I decided it was best to stop. I wrote to Nancy and told her that I wouldn't be continuing due to personal issues (true, but vague). I didn't complain or mention how disillusioned I was. That's not really her problem to deal with. It's mine.

In the end, I am glad that I did this volunteer stint. The biggest reason is that I don't like it when I say I will do something and I simply never do it. There are often logistical reasons why I don't get to things. For example, I wanted to join Toastmasters, but they're too far away to travel to conveniently at the correct time. This ESL club business was at a library within a ten-minute walk of my apartment so there was nothing in my way except me. I'm also glad because it reinforced something that I already knew and, even though it's not a "happy" conclusion, it did provide clarity.

That is, I am as outside of American culture now as I was outside of Japanese culture there. I'm an outsider in my native culture even after two and a half years back. This experience somehow crystallized that and made me feel more "okay" with the difficulties I'm having. I'm just really not like other Americans and integration is probably not going to happen (ever). I'm too educated and intellectual. My sense of self is not based in enough trivial external interests (T.V., sports teams, etc.). I seek and enjoy complexity rather than simplicity of thought and understanding. I'm too sensitive and worldly relative to the average person. I am capable of taking too many perspectives.

It was the last one that killed the volunteer experience for me. I didn't operate from the perspective of the volunteers. I operated from that of the learners, and I just couldn't live with the fact that the 12-16 people who ran the situation were the priority instead of the 60-80 who they were there to help. In the end, what I realized was that the majority (the native speakers - mostly white people) couldn't adopt the perspective of the minorities they were serving. Having lived for many years as a minority, I could. This will always make me an outlier. I'm okay with that in general, but it does make it harder for me to do this sort of work, particularly when I'm not being paid to put up with it.