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Monday 27 October 2014

ESOL and Cleaning: Let's Celebrate Success!

Dusters, brushes, mops, polish – you name it - we had the contents of our cleaning cupboard at Coventry Jesus Centre laid out in the main hall where we run classes ... If you can’t find the hoover, folks, or the mop and bucket, it just might (probably will be) in the classroom!

After a visit to the powers-that-be at the Job Centreplus last year, I was told that most of our ESOL students, if lucky to get a job at all, are best placed to be cleaners so I decided to write a tailor-made course for them – ‘ESOL and Cleaning’. (ESOL stands for English for Speakers of Other Languages.)

It was great fun. What better way to learn prepositions? Mop behind the table, sweep next to the fridge and don’t forget to clean under the table!

  
We practised heavy lifting, got our heads around cleaning codes and working with dangerous chemicals, practised putting on PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) and filling in accident reports – all with plenty of laughs but what a great learning experience! How about drilling (modelling and practising pronunciation) ‘suspicious object found in the toilets!’

Last Monday was a great day. We gave out certificate for those who had achieved 85% attendance and had a celebration. Why not? Celebrating success is very important to us. For some of our students, our in-house attendance certificates are the first they ever achieve! And, hey, if they manage to get a much-coveting cleaning job they will be better equipped! ‘ESOL and Cleaning’ certificate, here we come!”



Thursday 23 October 2014

Ten Years On: Reflections on the Death of Danielle

“I can’t believe it, it’s a girl.” Those unforgettable words, spoken ten years ago this month, are etched on my memory, the most acrid words I have ever heard in my all years as a teacher.

 You’d think that a friend or family member had had baby. But, no, these were the words Steph, my boss spoke, at the Chase Neighbourhood Centre the day we all trooped stunned into work after one of the  young people known to our project, Danielle Beccan, aged 14, was shot dead outside her house in St Ann’s, Nottingham, after a trip to Goose Fair. We’d expected reprisal shootings but always felt it was the lads that were most at risk.

We wore pink, Danielle’s favourite colour. We all mourned; we mourned for weeks. We stood by the place she was shot in stunned silence. Her young friends stood in silence too; some of them had watched her die; they’d never been trained to deal with a gunshot wound.

The press were everywhere; police stood by with guns; St Ann’s was treated by some (utterly mistakenly) like a grim, vice-filled ghetto, a byeword for all that was foul: drug-dealing, gang-crime and murder. An aquaintance of mine said she could not come to see me – I lived in St Ann’s. 


I wrote this poem; it was read at Danielle's funeral service; the sentiment expressed in it is still fresh in my mind; the memory lives on.

Danielle:
May your life not be wasted,
Your death not in vain.

Young life, so precious,
Lost forever,
That dark October night,
After spending,
Your last fun-filled hours
At the fair.

Surrounded by the friends you loved,
And dying in your mother’s arms,
Dear life, so precious,
Slowly ebbed away,
The cause – a bullet
Never meant for you.

May your bitter death,
That broke so many hearts
Give rise to something new round here,
St Ann’s.
A hatred, or perhaps best say,
A violent love against all that would destroy.
Our dream, St Ann’s, a place of peace
Where guns are never seen as cool
Or revenge regarded as right,
Where old and young, again, can walk
Our streets and ways
Without fear of violent gain
Or dark revenge
From knife or gun;
And no more matters where you live -
Or where you’re from - Iraq, Iran,
Meadows, Radford, St Ann’s
For all are welcome here.

Danielle,
Rest in peace but,
From your bitter death we long to see
 A day of better things - St Ann’s!


Friday 10 October 2014

Courage of an Extraordinary Kind

Cokie van de Velde and team
Much is made of British jihadists going to fight for IS. What is it, 500 from the UK? Maybe more. Yes, and it is shocking. But recently we’ve heard of other volunteer fighters  - not heading for the Middle East - but West Africa - several hundred of them too.

This is no fight for extremism, conquering and slaying the unsuspecting and innocent in a barbaric military assault; no, this is courage of an extraordinary kind: leaving the relative safety of these shores to fight the deadly Ebola virus that is ravaging West Africa.


One such person is sanitation expert, Cokie van der Velde, who has left family and grandchildren behind, stares death in the face daily and yet continues to fight. The risks are huge; for many it’s a bit of a gamble – but courage always comes with risk.


So, there are fighters and fighters but, in their intentions, they could not be further from each other: both risk life and limb but, oh, what a different warfare!


Let’s big up the courageous Britons fighting Ebola  ... I can’t help being proud of them. They’re displaying courage indeed, of an extraordinary kind.

Saturday 4 October 2014

A Fun Relaxed and Informative Day. ESOL Training at Coventry Jesus Centre

What a great day last Saturday (27 September) was! My sister, *Rachel Hatfield, came to Coventry Jesus Centre to give a days training for our Jesus Centre ESOL training volunteers and staff. (ESOL stands for English for Speakers of Other Languages.)
 
Attempting to decipher the Bengali script, feeling something of the difficulty and humiliation of those beginning to learn the Roman script as adults, howls of laughter as we learn how to drill and are the happy recipients of our very own Farsi drillers, assessing our grammar knowledge (or lack of it) and learning how to make our ESOL sessions practical, relevant and enjoyable.

Altogether, it was a fun, informative, relaxed day and, most of all, we were inspired by Rachel’s energy and enthusiasm. We learned such a lot and have already began putting it into practice.

Watch out learners, here we come! Drilling begins on Monday!

*Rachel teaches the CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults) at Brooklands College in Surrey.