The student is a teacher of English at a private high school in her town.

Before the class, my staff administrator told me the student was interested in having a not so traditional class, but something more of a free conversation lesson.  Later, I found a copy of Obama’s acceptance speech sitting on my desk with some red ink at the top indicating that *this* is what I was supposed to use for the upcoming class.

It turns out that the student requested this material.  It was fairly obvious when I saw her come to class with her own copy of the speech which was a few pieces of paper that appeared to have gone through the exchange from hand to hand in her repeated review of the papers.  It had pencil marks here and there where she’d translated the information.

But she was hungry for more.  She wanted to understand the speech.

Her questions began with “Who is ‘Ann Nixon Cooper’?”  I couldn’t have felt more priveleged to be the person to explain the details of who ‘Ann Nixon Cooper.’  So, I had her begin to read from the words “This election had many firsts…”

We read through paragraph by paragraph until we reached the end of the speech discussing each phrase she didnt understand in detail.  There were actually parts of the speech while she was reading that I had to contain myself.  I felt a bit emotional.   At first her thoughts about the speech were about how blacks suffered alot.  By the end of the lesson she was determined that the meaning of the speech was not about the ups in times or the downs in times, but the times between those in which we as Americans overcame adversity.  She smiled repeatedly as she understood more and more about the speech and she’d whisper “yes…..I can!”

She told me at the end of the class that her favorite part was in the middle of the speech and she would study these couple of paragraphs with her English students.  That part is where Obama said “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”   And then she got a big smile on her face as she read it.

It really amazes me how many people including this student are interested in Obama’s acceptance speech, including myself.  America has finally put it’s money where it’s mouth is.

It was unfortunate for the Japanese people sitting around me who weren’t able to laugh at the same points as I and there were many.  This is because the movie was sub-titled in Japanese at the bottom of the screen and was not close to being able to pull off much of dialogue based humor as would have been nice.  As a matter of fact, there were a lot of translation points that were very weak.  For example, there’s a scene where the drunk super hero comes home with his new found friend to be greeted by his son.  The son says something like, “Dad, who is this guy?”, but the translation just said “Papa!”

My next task will be to find a theme that I’m pleased with.  The one I had before was ok…..but I’ll look at others again.