How Tia Lola Learned to Teach Read online

  As Juanita and Miguel are hurrying to gather their things together, Miguel remembers something he wanted to ask his mother. “Do you think Tía Lola knows we’ve told her a little white lie about it being a special day at Bridgeport?” After all, if they’re going to have to pretend, they’d better know what they’re in for.

  Mami considers for a moment, drying her hands slowly and more thoroughly than usual. “Actually, Tía Lola said something that makes me suspect she knows we have something up our sleeves,” Mami explains. “Buenas razones cautivan los corazones. Good intentions win hearts. She realizes we’re all trying to make her feel less lonely, and that has won her over. Even though she’s a little scared, she is willing to go with you to Bridgeport.”

  “But only for today, right?” Miguel asks. He doesn’t mind giving in to his good intentions if it’s just for this one time.

  lesson two

  En el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey

  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king

  On her first day at school, Tía Lola is a huge hit.

  Before the bus has pulled into the parking lot, Tía Lola has taught everyone to sing “Pollito, chicken; gallina, hen,” a catchy rhyme that helps you learn words in English and Spanish. “Lápiz, pencil; pluma, pen.”

  When they arrive, Mrs. Stevens is at the door, shaking hands with each and every student.

  Tía Lola has no way of knowing that Mrs. Stevens begins every day this way. She thinks that the principal is giving everyone a special welcome because today is Bring a Special Person or Object to School Day. Tía Lola has yet to ask Miguel or Juanita why she seems to be the only visitor.

  “I’m so glad you agreed to come.” Mrs. Stevens shakes Tía Lola’s hand vigorously. And Tía Lola doesn’t just shake back. She throws her arms around the principal and gives her a great big hug. And Mrs. Stevens, who is very proper, laughs!

  “That’s a Spanish hug. Un abrazo.” Tía Lola tells Miguel to translate.

  “Un abrazo,” the principal practices. “How do you say ‘Welcome to Bridgeport’?” Mrs. Stevens asks Miguel and Juanita.

  “Bienvenida a Bridgeport,” Tía Lola pipes right up. It’s as if she can understand English once she has become friends.

  Mrs. Stevens tries the phrase several times until Tía Lola cries out, “¡Excelente!” which sounds enough like “excellent” that Miguel and Juanita don’t have to translate for the principal.

  Mrs. Stevens suggests that Tía Lola start by visiting Juanita’s class, and then Miguel’s. That way, their aunt can get acquainted with the schedule and the layout of the school before she is on her own in the other classes.

  “This is Tía Lola.” Juanita introduces her aunt to her combined second-and-third-grade class and their teacher, Ms. Sweeney. “‘Tía’ means ‘aunt’ in Spanish.” From her seat in the circle of chairs, Ofie nods proudly, like she and Juanita invented Spanish all by themselves.

  Milton raises his hand. He always has a question. If someone ran into the room and yelled, “Fire!” Milton would probably raise his hand and ask where the fire was and what could have caused it.

  “Milton, do you have a question?” Ms. Sweeney asks nicely, as if there’s ever a question that Milton has a question.

  “What are we supposed to call her, since she’s not our aunt?”

  Ms. Sweeney turns to Juanita. “Can you ask your aunt what she’d like us to call her?”

  Juanita thinks she already knows the answer, but she asks anyway. “My aunt says she wants to be Tía Lola to all my friends,” Juanita translates when Tía Lola answers.

  Milton raises his hand.

  “Does anyone else have a question?” Ms. Sweeney looks around the room. No one does. She nods at Milton.

  “What if we’re not friends with Juanita … yet?” Milton asks.

  For a moment, before Milton adds “yet,” a worry line travels across Ms. Sweeney’s forehead. This is only her first year teaching, and so she tries very hard to see that everything goes smoothly, which can make for a bumpy ride. “That’s right, Milton,” she says, relieved. “Everyone at Bridgeport is either a friend or a soon-to-be friend. Tía Lola it will be!” She smiles at Tía Lola, who plants a big kiss on Ms. Sweeney’s cheek, as if they have been friends forever.

  Ms. Sweeney asks the class if they have any questions for Tía Lola. This time, not just Milton’s hand shoots up.

  “Where is the Dominican?” Chelsea wants to know.

  “Anyone know, besides Juanita?” Ms. Sweeney asks. She is probably thinking Juanita has raised her hand because she knows the answer. But Juanita just wants to explain that the name of the country is the Dominican REPUBLIC, not the Dominican. After all, you wouldn’t call the United States the United!

  Ms. Sweeney calls on Ofie, who guesses that the Dominican Republic is near Mexico.

  “Close enough,” Ms. Sweeney says nicely, pulling down the rolled-up map above the blackboard.

  Tía Lola’s face lights up when she sees her little dot of a country, south of Florida, floating on the ocean. She touches the spot and calls out, “¡Cierren los ojos y abran su imaginación!”

  “Shut your eyes and open your imagination!” Juanita translates.

  Suddenly—or does Juanita imagine this?—the room fills with screeching parrots. Ocean waves crash against the blackboard, and jungle flowers press against the steamed-up windows. The sun is warm on her skin, and her feet sink into soft sand. All around, Juanita hears her classmates talking in Spanish. Oh my! Juanita knows her aunt is special, but this is extraordinary, and totally surprising.

  “¡Ya!” Tía Lola claps her hands. Juanita pulls herself away from this tropical wonderland. Her classmates are also rubbing their eyes and shaking their heads. Everyone looks slightly tanned, and extremely impressed. Even Milton is silenced, though his mouth is wide open in wonder. Hannah, a quiet, usually shy girl, speaks for them all when she says, “That was … awesome!”

  At the door, Miguel has arrived to escort Tía Lola to his classroom.

  “Adiós, Tía Lola!” the children call out. “When are you coming back?” It’s not every day they get to have such an amazing visitor.

  “The next time you have a Special Visitor Day,” Tía Lola says, and tells her niece to translate.

  Juanita and Miguel exchange a look. Their little white lie is getting bigger and darker.

  Tía Lola is thoughtful as she and her nephew walk down the hall. “Why didn’t your sister translate what I just said?”

  Is this the time to tell Tía Lola the truth? Miguel wonders. But if he tells her now, it might ruin her visit to his class. The end of the school day will be soon enough.

  “I think maybe Juanita was having such a great time, she forgot to translate,” Miguel says, which is sort of true. In fact, when Miguel had opened the door, the whole class seemed to be in a trance. He himself had felt a blast of warm, sunny air on his face. Not only that, he thought he’d heard parrots! Parrots in Vermont, in the middle of winter?! It was like that classroom was under a spell. “You didn’t work some magic in there, did you?” Miguel asks his aunt bluntly.

  Tía Lola laughs and shakes her head. “No hice nada.” She didn’t do a thing. The children just used their imaginations.

  “Fifth graders have really great imaginations,” Miguel brags. He wants to be sure Tía Lola understands that she is moving up in the world. From third to fifth grade is an enormous leap. It’s like going from being an ape to being a human being. In his imagination, Miguel sees Juanita suddenly turning hairy, with a long tail coming out of her dress. He can’t help but laugh.

  Tía Lola looks over at him as if she knows exactly what he is thinking.

  Suddenly, Miguel can see himself transformed into a big, dumb orangutan. Quickly, he turns his sister back to her normal self in his imagination. Lo and behold, he can see himself turning back into a boy. He slows his steps. He wants to be sure that the change is complete before he faces a room full of his classmates.


  Mrs. Prouty, the teacher for the combined fourth and fifth grades, has already met Tía Lola a number of times in town. They kiss like old friends. Tía Lola asks after Mrs. Prouty’s gorditas, which Miguel can’t really translate, as it’s not really polite to call his teacher’s twin daughters fatties. His mother has explained that Tía Lola actually means the word as a compliment. Back on the island, where a lot of people are so poor, being chubby means your family is well-off. But here in the United States, it would be a mean thing to say.

  “Tía Lola wants to know how your daughters are,” Miguel translates.

  Mrs. Prouty’s face turns pink with pleasure. They are very well, thank you, taking skating lessons, eager to start middle school in September. Throughout this exchange, Miguel is busy with the back-and-forth translation. He hopes Tía Lola soon picks up English and his teachers and classmates learn Spanish, or he will be working extra hard from now on. Hey, maybe he can get paid for his services? Now, that would be awesome: earning money like an adult while going to school like a kid.

  “Miguel?” Mrs. Prouty is asking. “What would your tía Lola like to do for her first day as our Spanish teacher?”

  Oh no! Miguel can’t really translate what his teacher has asked or Tía Lola will realize she has been tricked. One good thing about being the only one in his class who knows Spanish is that he doesn’t have to translate exactly what Mrs. Prouty says and get into trouble.

  “What do you want to do today, solamente hoy?” Miguel asks his aunt in Spanish.

  “I am your special object!” She winks at Miguel, which is embarrassing in front of all his classmates. “And so whatever you want me to do on this Bring a Special Person or Object to School Day, estoy a tus órdenes.” I am at your service.

  “Whatever you want her to do,” Miguel pretends to translate.

  “My oh my!” Mrs. Prouty scratches her head. “It sure takes a lot more words to say something in Spanish than in English. Tell your aunt that we would love for her to tell us a little bit about what lies ahead for us in Spanish class. Will we need any special materials, say?”

  Miguel is sweating bullets! How to translate and still not let Tía Lola know she is now their Spanish teacher? Miguel might not look like a dumb orangutan, but he sure feels like one right this moment.

  “What did your teacher say?” Tía Lola prompts him.

  Miguel looks up at his aunt. Her eyes are full of love and forgiveness. Good intentions win hearts, he reminds himself. He hopes Tía Lola will forgive him when he finally tells her the truth. “My teacher wants to know how our class can learn some Spanish.”

  “How?” Tía Lola looks surprised by the question. “Why, I can teach them! It is so much easier than English.”

  “Tía Lola says you don’t need any special materials because Spanish is so much easier than English.” Miguel wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Mrs. Prouty says. “Anyhow, if you would tell your aunt …”

  Miguel glances up at the clock. Fifteen minutes down and fifteen more to go before he can translate the one word that will free him from this big, dark, messy lie: ¡Adiós! Tía Lola says goodbye!

  “How was school today?” Mami asks before even taking her coat off. They are the first words out of her mouth when she gets home from work.

  “Muy, muy bien,” Tía Lola says, smiling broadly. “But the most curious thing: I was the only guest in the whole school.”

  Miguel has been waiting for this moment all day. It’s time to tell Tía Lola the truth. “We didn’t mean to lie to you,” he begins.

  “We had good intentions,” Juanita adds. “And everybody in my class just loved your visit! They want you to come back.”

  “Let me, children,” Mami intervenes. “It’s really my fault, Tía Lola. I was the one who encouraged them. I knew you’d be great. You just needed to get over worrying about not knowing enough to teach the children. Didn’t I tell you that they’d love you?”

  Tía Lola looks around at all of them, a loving, forgiving smile on her face. “I didn’t tell you the whole truth either,” she admits to Miguel and Juanita. “Your mami knows how very poor our family was. We lived way out in the campo, in the middle of nowhere. So I didn’t get much schooling. I didn’t even advance to your grade, Miguel. I meant to go back. In fact, when my older sister died …” Miguel and Juanita know that part of the story. Mami’s parents died when Mami was a little girl, and her aunt Lola moved to the capital to take care of her. “In the city, I started night school. But I couldn’t keep attending.”

  Mami reaches for Tía Lola’s hand and squeezes it gratefully. Tía Lola is not saying so, but she was working long hours as a seamstress and also taking care of her little niece. She had no extra time to be a student.

  “I have had a beautiful life.” Tía Lola wants to be sure Mami and her little niece and nephew know she is not complaining. “But I haven’t had much schooling. So you see, I didn’t want to embarrass you by being dumb in front of your friends.”

  “But you know so much more Spanish than any of us, Tía Lola,” Juanita reminds her aunt.

  “That’s the lesson I learned today!” Tía Lola laughs. “En el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey.”

  “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” Mami translates. Miguel and Juanita still don’t get it, so Mami explains. “A one-eyed man doesn’t have perfect vision, but he sees a lot more than a blind man. Sometimes, if you know just a little bit about something that no one around you knows anything about, you get to be the leader. And Tía Lola actually knows a lot of Spanish in a place where hardly anyone knows a word of it.”

  “I get it,” Juanita says in her know-it-all voice. “So Tía Lola is like the king.”

  “You mean she is like the queen, la reina.” Miguel smirks back at his little sister.

  “Reina Lola!” Queen Lola claps her hands, delighted.

  For a brief moment, Miguel sees a gold crown sitting on Tía Lola’s head. He rubs his eyes. Fifth graders sure have an overactive imagination—from ape boys to queen aunts.…

  lesson three

  Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente

  The sleeping shrimp is carried away by the current

  Juanita’s head is in the clouds. She sits in her third-grade classroom, riding a unicorn from medieval times. She tries to add all the numbers on the board and ends up going down a sixty-foot rabbit hole. She gets up to answer a question and is suddenly airborne on a magic carpet, headed for the sultan’s court. But wait … someone is calling her name.

  “Juanita! Earth to Juanita!” Ms. Sweeney is saying. The class laughs. Juanita’s face burns. She knows her very nice teacher would never purposely embarrass her. Neither does she, Juanita, mean to be rude in any way.

  A little later, Ms. Sweeney goes from desk to desk, checking on each student’s penmanship exercise. But Juanita has not finished even the first line. She was just now trying to escape from forty thieves and having a very hard time riding on a camel.

  At afternoon recess, Ms. Sweeney asks Juanita to stay behind for a few minutes after everyone has gone out. “Is something wrong, Juanita? Everything okay at home?”

  Juanita shakes her head that nothing is wrong, then nods that everything is okay at home.

  “I thought your aunt was going to start teaching us Spanish.” It has been a week since Tía Lola’s visit.

  “She’s practicing,” Juanita explains. “She says she has to learn a lot more if she expects to be a one-eyed queen in the land of the blind.”

  Ms. Sweeney smiles uncertainly. “I see,” she says at last. But even if Juanita had only one eye, she’d see that Ms. Sweeney doesn’t understand what Juanita means at all.

  How does Juanita convince her teacher that she is not having a problem?

  In fact, a super, fantastic, extraordinarily wonderful thing has happened: Juanita has fallen in love with reading! Of course, she has been reading for ages,
like since kindergarten, but it was always hard work, sounding out words and stuff. But now reading is her favorite thing in the world! She looks at a page and the words all link together, and it’s like a string of Christmas lights that come on when you replace the one little bulb that wasn’t working.

  The words make up sentences, and the sentences take her deeper and deeper inside a story. Once she gets started, Juanita can’t stop. The story keeps going and pulling her along even after she has closed the book. She sits in the classroom, daydreaming.

  “Juanita!” Ms. Sweeney is calling her again.

  Slowly, Juanita descends on her hot-air balloon. She has been around the world in eighty days and has so much to tell, but all Ms. Sweeney wants to know are the names of the states bordering Idaho.

  Ms. Sweeney sends a note home with Juanita. Mami tears open the envelope and reads, the little line between her eyebrows deepening.

  “Am I in trouble?” Juanita wants to know. But her mami just looks at her daughter closely before shaking her head slowly.

  “Is Ms. Sweeney upset that I forgot to finish my homework?” This has been happening a lot, but Mami doesn’t need to know the exact number of times.

  “It’s nothing.” Mami folds the letter and puts it back in the envelope, then gives Juanita a brave smile.

  “Is it about not sharing my animals?” Juanita tries again. One day last week, Juanita took her two stuffed dinosaurs to school, but she wouldn’t let anyone play with them because they were actually keeping her company as she flew in a magic tree house back to prehistoric times.

  “No, amorcito, love. I told you, it’s nothing.”

  “But it’s got to be about something, Mami,” Juanita protests.

  Mami hesitates. Then, out of the blue, she asks Juanita, “You’re not worried about … the divorce or anything?”