The English Lesson
“The English Lesson” is a short story written by the Latin American writer Nicholasa Mohr in 1996. The story is one of many from the text book “Change & Continuity”, of which the subject is refugees and immigrants.
In the story we meet Mrs. Hamma, who teaches Basic English Tuesdays evenings at a local public school. The people she teaches are mostly Spanish-speaking from South America as William and Lali, but the student group also contains immigrants from other parts of the world; there is Mr. Fong from China, Diego Torres from the Dominican Republic, Aldo Fabrizi from Sicily, and Stephan Paczkowski from Poland. What they all have in common is that they have immigrated in the search of a better life and a lot of them to be American Citizens as well.
What indicates that the story takes place in New York is that Mrs. Hamma lives in Queens, that the student Mr. Fong says, that he has been in United States, New York City for almost a year is working in Chinatown, and that Lali says, that she has lived in New York City Lower East side since she got married.
Mrs. Susan Hamma is a very tall, angular woman with large extremities. She is even the tallest person in the room with students. She lives in Queens and works there in the local junior high school, but every Thursday she drives all the way to the Lower East Side to teach the group. As she says: “If these people can make it to class after working all day at those miserable, dreary, uninteresting, and often revolting jobs, the least I can do is be there to serve them, making every lesson count toward improving their conditions!” (p. 34, l. 1-5) Mrs. Hamma is a very positive person; she encourages her students to go ahead with the English language and is very enthusiastic about them. When the students are doing presentations on themselves, she emphasize that everyone deserves applauses after