บทเรียนภาษาอังกฤษจาก หนังสือพิมพ์ New York Times

อาจารย์สอนบทความจากหนังสือพิมพ์ New York Times
เกี่ยวกับหญิงชาวจีนที่ได้รับ Citizens หรือ สัญชาติอเมริกัน และเพิ่งมีโอกาสเลือกตั้งครั้งแรกในชีวิต

เธอมาอยู่อเมริกาหลายสิบปี ภาษาอังกฤษก็อ่านไม่ได้ ไม่ได้ในที่นี้คือ A-Z ไม่ได้
เพิ่งได้มีโอกาสเรียนภาษาอังกฤษเมื่อ 2 ปีที่ผ่านมาจนกระทั่งสอบเป็น Citizen
ก่อนหน้าขึ้นรถเมล์ก็ไม่เป็นรถไฟก็ไม่ได้

อาจารย์สอนเรื่อง Knowlede is Power ซึ่งสามารถเปลี่ยนชีวิตได้ เหมือนกับสุภาษิตไทยที่ท่านสุนทรภู่
กวีเอกแห่งกรุงรัตนโกสินทร์บอกว่า "มีวิชาเหมือนมีทรัพย์อยู่นับแสน" เหมือนกันเลยครับ
ความรู้ทำให้ชีวิตดีขึ้นนะ ถ้าคุณมีความรู้จะมีอาชีพ หาเงินได้ ถ้าหากเงินหายไปหรือประสบความล้มเหลว
แต่ความรู้ยังอยู่ก็จะทำให้เงินกลับมาได้อาจารย์สอนให้ห้องอย่างนี้นะครับ


ถ้าหากท่านได้อ่านบทความนี้จะเห็นถึงความยากลำบากให้การใช้ชีวิตของผู้อพยพในประเทศสหรัฐฯ
ซึ่งมีอยู่หลายล้านคนถ้าหากไม่มีความรู้ภาษาอังกฤษจะใช้ชีวิตอย่างมากมาก

ให้ทุกท่านดูวีดีโอพร้อมกับอ่านบทความจากหนังสือพิมพ์นิวยอร์คไทม์จากลิงค์นี้นะครับ
ถ้าหากอยากดาวน์โหลดวีดีโอมาเก็บไว้ที่เครื่องอ่านวิธีการจาก blog ที่ผ่านไปได้ครับ
รบกวนแสดงความเห็นในบทความจากนิวยอร์คไทม์หลังจากเรียนเสร็จแล้วว่า
ท่านมีความคิดเห็นอย่างไรกับหญิงชราคนนี้และอาจจะทำให้พวกเรามีกำลังใจในชีวิตต่อการศึกษาหาความรู้ครับ


http://docs.google.com/View?docid=df3q59nd_5fxkkd5fm
บทความจากหนังสือพิมพ์ New York Times

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The New York Times
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July 28, 2007
With Citizenship Comes a Passion for Politics, and Life
By ELLEN BARRY


When a group of new United States citizens posed for photographs yesterday in a Queens basement, Zhai Ruiyun, 68, was invisible except for a floss of white hair at the top of her head. But if you peered behind the shoulder of a tall man, and between the tiny flags on wooden dowels, you could see that she was glowing like a firefly.


Get her talking about voting and Ms. Zhai speaks breathlessly, thumping her breastbone for emphasis. Last fall, the night before she cast her first vote, she was too keyed up to sleep, she said; she stood in the voting booth for what seemed like an age. She was used to thinking of herself as an old immigrant woman, she said, of so little use to anybody that at one point she contemplated a fade-out suicide: she would catch a bus to nowhere, and starve to death.


That first vote — for Ellen Young, a Chinese-American who went on to win a seat in the State Assembly — made tears run down Ms. Zhai’s face. “I could not believe that at such an old age I could have this right,” she said yesterday in Cantonese, through a translator. “It’s beyond my words.”

Yesterday, Ms. Zhai celebrated her new status along with 40 other immigrants at Selfhelp Community Services in Flushing, which helps immigrants prepare for the citizenship test. The honorees — mostly Chinese and in their 70s and 80s — wore ankle socks and orthopedic sandals; the walls were cinder block, spruced up with balloons and streamers. Everything about it was ordinary, and also extraordinary. Ms. Zhai’s teachers murmured about her, the way she walked into the citizenship program and shot past their expectations.

Ms. Zhai talked about politics.


“Hillary has a brain,” said Ms. Zhai, who had six years of formal schooling in China and spent 30 in a factory, hunched over a buffing machine, shining metal parts. “When Clinton was president, the economy was good.”

“Hillary has a president behind her,” she added. “I have decided to vote for Hillary.”

On weekday mornings, 200 students crowd into this cramped basement space, where mah-jongg tiles clack in the corners. Among them are bereft members of an urban elite and villagers who labored for decades in laundries and workshops, too exhausted to learn. Others are like Ms. Zhai, brought to America to care for their children’s children, and cut loose, late in life, to figure out where they belong.

Passing the citizenship exam transforms her students, said Jing-Juan Yu, who teaches English and who watched the ceremony from the side of the room.

“It seems that their face is shining,” said Ms. Yu.

Three years ago, when Ms. Zhai first turned up at the center with her husband, she sat across from Jane Qiu, the center’s director and a social worker, and wept. A daughter in Arizona had hoped that the Zhais could provide child care, but instead, Ms. Zhai needed treatment for breast cancer. The family cleaned itself out trying to pay her medical bills, which Medicaid does not cover for green-card holders in Arizona, and her daughter finally asked them to leave.

Life with a second daughter, in New York, was tumultuous: Relations between mother and daughter became so strained that they communicated only by writing notes, Ms. Qiu said. After six years in the United States, Ms. Zhai could not read the alphabet, and she was afraid to venture onto the subway, sticking to the one bus she knew well, the Q58.


“There was no road for me,” said Ms. Zhai. “I wanted to kill myself.”

The center helped her enroll in Medicaid, and when she finished her treatment, she began English lessons. This did not begin well; she was undereducated, even for a Chinese woman of her generation, and most of the other students at least knew the alphabet. But the week after Ms. Yu taught her the alphabet, Ms. Zhai came back knowing it. She surpassed her husband, who began preparing dinner for her in the evenings.


“Her cognitive ability surprised me,” Ms. Qiu said, and over the next two years Ms. Zhai “learned English from scratch.” Last July, she astonished her teachers by passing the citizenship exam on the first try. This month, the center closed Ms. Zhai’s case.

Every now and then, Ms. Zhai crosses a threshold. A year and a half ago, a friend took her to Manhattan on the subway for a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then left her alone to find her way back. Ms. Zhai panicked: Where was the Q58 when she needed it? She clutched a map and studied it. She got on the wrong train and reversed herself. The afternoon wore on. She made the transfer to the No. 7 at Grand Central Terminal, and as the train crossed the river into Queens, she flushed with satisfaction. She rides the subway all the time now.

“What makes me the most happy,” she said, “is to do what I want to do.”