INSPRATIONAL STORIES

The Smile of Thomas Tran
by Mary Noonan

It's the smiles I remember. Students come and go, but the memory of each smile is unique and calls up a host of associations. One of my favorites belonged to Thomas Tram, but that particular smile was a long time in coming.

Thomas, a Vietnamese immigrant, was the smallest student in my fourth-grade class. Barely three feet tall, he was easy to miss. He could neither read nor write, add nor subtract, understand nor speak English. Caught in the ESL limbo of immersion, he was drowning fast, and I was getting desperate for a way to help him assimilate into his new environment. The other kids in the class mostly ignored him, until the day of the chopstick incident.

At that time, the students in our school ate lunch in the classrooms, forming little groups around the room to engage in a brisk blackmarket trade in desserts and snack chips — all but Thomas, who usually ate alone. On one particular day, Thomas was eating a traditional Vietnamese dish brought from home using traditional utensils, also brought from home. Several students spotted the chopsticks and started pointing and laughing. Before long, Thomas had his head down on the desk and was quietly crying into his traditional lunch.

Somewhere there is a god who watches over teachers, who wisely inspires us to hold onto the odds and ends of junk no one else would look at twice, including 200 pairs of chopsticks. Within minutes of my announcing excitedly, "Oh, Thomas, I've always wanted to learn to use chopsticks! Could you show me how? Anyone else want to try?" Thomas was the center of a circle of 26 people struggling with the one thing in which he was proficient— Using chopsticks. It proved to be a key to literacy for Thomas.

From that day on, our curriculum included every possible connection to chopsticks that the 27 of us could think of. We wrote descriptions of chopsticks and directions for using them, drew pictures of ourselves using them, made up math problems, and located Asian countries on the map. We ate, drank, and slept chopsticks. Thomas's skills gradually improved, and he started making friends. But still now smile.

Near the end of the year, the class was given an assignment. They had to make a group presentation and interview a health professional using information from the textbook. Because of his limited English skills, Thomas was carefully groomed by the other members of his group to be the interviewer, reading prepared questions from a script. Groomed was the operative word, as Thomas was dressed in a dad's suit coat, white shirt, tie, a black construction-paper mustache, and fake glasses. While the rest of the class watched, Thomas slowly and solemnly read the questions, receiving cues and encouragement from the "director" on the set and a nudge from the "health professional" when it was time for the next question. At the end of the interview, there was an extra round of applause for Thomas, and in return, a small, tentative smile. It was a long time coming, but was worth the wait. It was one of the smiles I'll never forget.