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Sims, Jaehee
Professor Megan Howard
ENGL 101/A
Profile Portfolio Draft
5/ 6/ 2016
A fifty-year-old classroom
While warm afternoon sunlight was flooding into a small kitchen, a large pot was
making a noise on the old stove, and a savory smell was beginning to waft in the 50-year-old
kitchen. Jenny Waid, 83, a retired elementary school teacher and a long-time resident of
Montgomery County, Maryland, grabbed one of her Italian herb bottles and sprinkled herbs into
the large pot on the stove. I knew she was smart, Jenny said confidently. As Jennys hazel eyes
were sparking with vivid memories, the spicy aroma from her pot started filling her small
kitchen.
Jenny Waid is a second-generation immigrant in the Washington, D.C. area as an ItalianAmerican. Her father and mother were Italian. They moved from Italy because of World War ,
and settled in Washington, D.C. after WW. Her father could speak English due to American
military training from WW, but her mother could not speak English well. That fact did not
bother Jennys family living in America in the 1940s because the street where they lived was
considered as a little Italy in the Washington, D.C. area. Most of their neighbors on the street
were Italians, including some of Jennys relatives, and that area had its own Italian grocery store,
shoe repair shop, and even a church.

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Even though Jennys family lived comfortably on Morton street with other relatives, her
father decided to move to another street for better educational opportunities for his one boy and
five girls. On Illinois avenue, where many highly educated white neighbors lived, life was
different in 1944. Most Italian immigrants were stereotyped as low-skilled workers and potential
criminals by American society until late 1990s (Laurino 223).It was sad that in our street
nobody talked to my mother. They treated her as an invisible person, and they also talked to their
kids not to play with us because we were Italian-American, Jenny said. Because of enduring
ethnic prejudice and discrimination from white neighbors, at age 12, Jenny had a certain
realization of what it meant to be an immigrant in American society. This gave her good
understanding about foreign students when she became an elementary special math teacher in
Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1969.
In the late 1990s, one day, when Jenny passed the fifth grade classroom, something
captured her attention. There was a girl who had just moved to the U.S. from Taiwan. She was
sitting at her desk alone, and coloring on paper, while everybody in the classroom was busy with
math activities, such as matching math cards, with the teacher. Jenny was sure that the
Taiwanese girl was smart enough to grasp the U.S. math curriculum even though she did not
speak English at all, so she immediately went to the principal's room and asked the principal to
put the girl from Taiwan in her special math classroom. First, Jenny gave a math test paper to the
Taiwanese girl with plenty of explanations with numbers. In minutes, the Taiwanese girl solved
the test with correct answers and a smile. Sometimes, people do not try to understand others,
ignore them or underestimate them because others cannot speak English. I knew she was smart.

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I knew that Asians, they put a lot of effort into education. I just knew I could help her because I
grew up in an immigrant family. My mother could not speak English, but she spoke and wrote
Italian and Latin. Her handwriting in Italian was beautiful. She was a smart and amazing lady.
Jenny explained why she helped the Taiwanese girl. After joining Jenny's class, the Taiwanese
girls academic learning bloomed, and the Taiwanese girl did not need to color on paper anymore
in her school days.
In 2001, Jenny retired from her 32- year teaching career. After she retired, her
neighborhood had shifted from white neighbors to multiracial neighbors due to the influx of
immigrants in the 2000s. Newcomers, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Hispanic families,
moved from their countries to her street to seek better life opportunities for themselves and their
kids in the United States. Some of them could speak English, but a lot of them did not have a
certain level of English ability for surviving in American society.
One late afternoon, when the 5-year-old neighbor boy,who had moved from Venezuela,
knocked on her door with watery eyes, Jenny had a hunch that the boy had a problem in his
school. Although he went to English for Speakers of Other Languages/Bilingual Programs
(ESOL) which were designed for foreign students as English learners in Montgomery County,
Maryland, he had a hard time speaking proper English. The boy said to her that he did not know
why his teacher said to him that his English speaking was not English, and he added that Jenny
was the only American he knew, who could help him. In her kitchen, Jenny did not hesitate
to give a small lesson to the boy in how to pronounce B and V.
Starting with the small lesson that afternoon, Jenny realized that her passion to teach

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someone who needed to be helped never retired, so she has offered free English lessons for
foreign neighbors in her house for over decade. She still keeps her math and writing curriculum
books, both published in 1987, which have several pencil marks from previous neighbor
students. In the past decade, a newlywed couple from Peru, a Chinese old lady, and a young
Korean mother were her students in the old kitchen. Anybody who was eager to learn English
was welcomed. My neighbors, they are hard workers. They are here to look for their dreams
and raise their children in better circumstances than what they had back in their countries. If
someone wants to learn English, I love to teach him or her. I am good at teaching, Jenny said
with her bright brown eyes.
When darkness falls on the street, one of her neighbor students will politely knock on her
door. Her 50-year-old kitchen will turn into a classroom, and her old textbooks will have another
pencil mark from her student. Her boundless enthusiasm for teaching and the spicy aroma from
her Italian cooking will continue to embrace the 50-year-old classroom.

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Work Cited
Laurino, Maria. The Italian Americans. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Print.
Waid, Jenny. Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2016.