"Verbos es una palabra que espresa accion."

I sat down at a table today with four teens who are still learning English. Our goal was to learn the past tense of some irregular verbs, like drive/drove and eat/ate. Most of us who grew up in this country take for granted the fact that we know delightful grammar rules like this. This is often a struggle for these kids, and if you ever tried to learn a foreign language as an adult, you can sympathize.

So like I said, I sat down at the table today and started off with, "Today, we're going to talk about verbs. What is a verb?" Fingers snapped in the air, accompanied by several "ums" and desperate appeals to the ceiling tiles. In their Spanish-mumbling, I heard the correct answer—in Spanish—so I asked them to teach me. It wasn't enough to just tell me "accion", they taught me an entire sentence: "Verbos es una palabra que espresa accion." I butchered it. They corrected me. One boy fought to keep his hands from molding my jaw into the proper stance to pronounce the words. They erupted into loud applause when I finally got out all the words without stumbling.

Their eyes shined like they had just won permanent immunity from all standardized English tests. It was our moment. You see, it's easy to dismiss these kids as slow or lazy when they don't pick up the language the way we think we did. Believe me, there are many times I do that. There are days when I struggle to even smile at them because I don't think I'm making a difference. It takes far more energy to embrace them and listen to what they have to say.

By the end of the lesson, they all knew the past tense of burst and caught. I was reminded again that the way to a person's soul is to show them you care about who they are instead of who they should or could be. In the end, that's all that matters because that's all we really want anyway—to be loved.