Complaint Mode

Had a 10am appointment downtown at the research center today. It's Day 4 of the Dengue Vaccine Study for which I'm volunteering. Barb, the so-new-she's-horrible nurse at the JHU research center down in Foggy Bottom, is doing her post-grad work and needs help with her writing/grammar. She wants to know if I can give her the title of some very ESL user friendly grammar and composition books, so she can try to teach herself. I want to tell her that she would benefit more from seeking tutoring along side the harder books she already owns instead of purchasing a book that talks down to her, but I hold my tongue and promise to bring in some titles. I do this because 1) I wouldn't want to unwittingly embarrass/insult her since she was asking me in front of four other staff members, and some people think "tutoring" is a bad word, and 2) I'm kind of still holding the tiniest grudge against her from earlier in the fall.

Backstory #1: The first blood and urine screening, coupled with consent form signing, for this study had actually taken place in September. The study, which only started on Halloween last week, had originally been scheduled for at late Sept start date. I was tight on time, as I usually am since this place is not convenient to where I live or work and isn't open when I get off in the evenings. When I arrived, for some reason which I couldn't understand, they were running twenty or so minutes behind schedule, yet no other patients were in the center at the time. When someone finally saw me, it was Barb. She was bubbly and had a thick accent, perhaps of Korean dissent. She announced unnecessarily that she was new here, and then proceeded to run through the 8 pages of health history I had just filled out with the pace of a refrigerator magnet. She then left me with a ten question True/False quiz over the study logistics which took me seventy seconds to complete, for 15 minutes. When she came back in, she didn't just check my Ts and Fs with her answer sheet. She went through and read each question aloud, told me what I had chosen as the answer, and then read the correct (and same) answer from the key. Finally, once she had wasted my time to her best ability, I was sent back for HIV and pregnancy testing, controlled by a nurse who knew what she was doing. All told, my 30 minute appointment last nearly an hour and a half. Ugh.

Backstory #2: They had needed me in for a half-hour Re-screening appointment, once my original tests were no longer current for the new study start time, on a morning that I needed to be up in German town by 10ish. So I scheduled the appointment for 8.3am, as early as they could make it. But when I got there at 8.20am, I had to wait on her to finish a loud, personal phone call until 9.15. She was laughing and discussing her school work and lord knows what. At least I had brought in some grading. At 9.45 I scrapped my dreams of getting to school early and grumbled out of there.

I have never taught an ESL course, but I've tutored hundreds of ESL students, and my regular composition classes are heavily peppered with ESL course graduates. What I've seen is that the ESL student who is past ESL specific instruction needs to grapple with the non-ESL texts. Of course, I'm not advocating doing this blindly; the student needs someone else to help transition her into understanding the text, so that the student doesn't always feel like texts
are "above" her.

So, I am going to offer her this book, which I've taught to basic/developmental students. And, I guess I'll also perhaps contact the goddess of ESL at school tomorrow and ask her what she recommends.