I’ve since learned that being able to speak a language doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at teaching said language.  But I’ve also learned that motivated language students can still benefit even from an untrained, but enthusiastic teacher. 

And so there I was, every Monday night for several months, teaching the language I know to immigrants at Salt Lake City’s Guadalupe Center.  I taught small group lessons, no more than half a dozen students at a time.  Many of my students were coming straight from work and their sincere efforts to learn and make mistakes as adult learners, as well as their profuse thanks for my efforts, won my heart.¹  

Though not a professional ESL teacher myself, it helped that I had studied German and then Arabic in college.  Among other things, I knew the value of slightly slowing down my rate of speech and using familiar and simpler vocabulary especially with my beginner students.   

The time came to move back to Virginia and I said some goodbyes on my last night. Afterwards, the director of the ESL program, a gruff, “let’s just get this done” kind of guy that I had barely spoken with, hugged me.  He had never had a college student volunteer for their program.   

London. My next ESL opportunity was my only paid ESL experience.  Mrs. Anysecondnow and I – two people – were living in the UK, supported by a University of London fellowship for one. After a few months, getting low on funds, we started looking for extra work on the side.²     

Oxford Street in London has, among many other things, at least a dozen English language schools.  Going back to my “I don’t have too many skills, but I can speak English” mentality, I started knocking on (business) doors looking for side-hustle ESL work.  Not surprisingly, most of the schools would only hire someone with actual ESL teaching credentials, but one of them was willing to hire uncredentialledLooking back, it may have helped that I had a US law degree. In other words, 'Okay, this guy may not have an ESL certificate but at least he should be able to speak English correctly.' me as an on-call substitute.  

Unlike in Utah, where most of my students were older and Hispanic, I had young students from all over the globe in London.  Also, in contrast to most of the staff teachers who spoke British English, I was the slightly exotic American English-speaking substitute.  I would sometimes spend the last few minutes of class demonstrating differences between UK and American pronunciation and teaching some American slang.  They ate that up.  

One day, three students came up to me after class.  They had maybe 10 days off available to travel and decided they wanted to fly to the US and have an all-American experience.  More precisely, they wanted an all-American experience all over America – coast to coast.  What did I think? 

They just could not comprehend how big the US was. I gently explained to them that with only 10 days, they needed to focus on a particular area in the US.  I recommended California. 

“Fly to LA, rent a convertible and drive along the Pacific coast for a day or two.  You’ll feel so American you’ll be bleeding red, white, and blue.” I hope they did it.

Arlington REEP #1.  Back in the US myself, having moved from my Vienna home to Arlington, Virginia,  I volunteered to teach ESL classes for the Arlington Education and Employment Program (“REEP”).  I became kind of a permanent substitute for drop-in evening adult classes in my neighborhood.  

As always, I enjoyed the students and the teaching, but unfortunately, life got busier with work, a new daughter, and other community responsibilities. After a year, I had to quit REEP. 

Arlington Resource Center for a Better Life. Nearly 15 years later, with a little more time in my life, my church started an ESL program and I volunteered to teach.  For close to three and a half years I taught weekly classes at the Resource Center.   

Each term lasted 12 weeks and I taught classes from beginners to more advanced.  Although the student population fluctuated, most of the students were from Afghanistan, particularly at the beginner level.     

Several of my classes near the end of my time were largely filled with conservative Afghan woman who seemed intrigued by a male teacher outside of their culture. When discussing our favorite foods during one class, I mentioned how much I enjoyed the Afghan noodle soup aush. The next week one of my students brought in a pot for all of us to share. 

These women worked hard to master a new language, but I could also tell that English class for many of them was an opportunity to get out of the house and socialize with friends in their native language.  I would feel the same.  After cooking and cleaning for my family all day in the house, I can leave and hang out with my friends for the evening?  Sign me up!     

Arlington REEP #2.  After several years with the Resource Center, I wanted a change of scenery in a more professional ESL setting.  Mrs. Anysecondnow was in the midst of transitioning from a volunteer slot to a paid job with REEP and I rode her coattails to get back on as a REEP volunteer teacher.  Starting in January of this year, I ended up teaching Mrs. Anysecondnow’s former class – the Monday morning high beginner group.   

Though it had been nearly two decades, I remembered Arlington’s REEP program as a model ESL program.  I was pleased to see that it had only improved since then with even more teacher resources as well as dedicated leaders.  

My students are again from around the world, older than my London students, but as devoted to learning as my first students back in Salt Lake City.   As for me, I’m still uncredentialled, but happy to be back teaching English to people building new lives in the United States. 

So, am I changing the world teaching ESL?  Kind of. I’m changing it in the only way most of us can — doing modest, decent things in our own modest sphere of influence.  Hundreds of people can speak English better than before because I (and so many others) helped teach them. Hundreds of people got better jobs, picked up their prescription at the pharmacy, don’t have to ask their kids to translate everything, or got US residency and then US citizenship. My ESL teaching was a small part of every one of those great things.

Lately, for me, there has been another reason I like to teach ESL. There have always been Americans who demonize foreigners who come to this country looking for a better life for themselves and their families and hopefully become American themselves. For me, teaching English to immigrants has become my way of pushing back against that attitude.

In a previous post I noted how being involved in our community ameliorates feelings of helplessness. It’s hard to be completely cynical and untrusting when you’re personally out there in your community, trying to make a difference.

I taught about the symbols of the US flag in a recent ESL class. I then had the students draw pictures of their home countries’ flags and describe them to the class. In halting but understandable English, my students proudly explained how various symbols on their flags represented courage and strength or peace and purity and various other noble qualities. Not for the first time as an ESL teacher I thought to myself, they and their kids are going to be awesome Americans.

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1. If you are shallow like me and enjoy gratification, you could do worse than teaching ESL classes. The students always say thank you. Often with great sincerity. In my first ESL class this year with REEP Arlington, the students not only thanked me, but they applauded at the end of class. (This could have been a fluke.  Maybe one person clapped — or made a sound like a clap — and then everybody else joined in.  In fact, maybe some of them thought it was just an American custom to clap after the first class and didn’t want to feel left out.  It hasn’t happened again!)
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2. One of the entertaining ways we earned extra money was participating in University of London grad student medical and behavioral studies. They were always looking for volunteers and paid as much as 10-12 pounds for up to an hour of your time.  If this is starting to sound like Dr. Venkman’s ESP test in Ghostbusters, you aren’t too far off.  Neither Mrs. Anysecondnow nor I got electrocuted, but we did participate in various oddball experiments testing visual and mental aspects along with aural reactions and behavior.  Maybe we even contributed to some useful breakthroughs.
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Since we both have different parameters – I like warmth, she likes it cool; I lean urban, she hates parking garages; etc. – we rarely settle on a place that we both like. 

For a while, we were both liking Wilmington. Unfortunately, I liked the warmer, beachier, college town vibe of Wilmington in North Carolina. She preferred the Wilmington in Delaware — cooler with the nearby DuPont mansions and gardens. And the best mushroom soup of her life. So, yeah.

Which means maybe we’ll never move anywhere for retirement since we can’t agree.  

But maybe that’s for the best because according to AARP we already live in the #1 most livable “large community” location  Yes, our hometown of Arlington, Virginia is number oneNorthern Virginia overall does pretty great on this list. Arlington’s next door neighbor, Alexandria, is #2 and our smaller neighbor, Falls Church, is also #2 on the “small communities” list. .   

Eat your heart out, Sarasota, FL, Scottsdale, AZ, Austin, TX, and all you other Sunbelt retiree magnet cities – Arlington is #1!  Get excited!  

Actually, I don’t think ARLnow, the local daily where I saw the news, was enthusiastic enough about being #1 (for the second year in a row!)  I guess we’re just not a cheerleading, toot-our-own-horns kind of town.  We’d rather serenely go to our yoga class, stop by the local farmer’s market, and then grab a latte.  

Candidly, Arlington getting a high ranking on a liveability index is not a shock.  Whether we’re truly #1 or not, Arlington, the smallest county in the U.S., typically scores high on indicators like health, transportation, civic engagement, safety, and the like.   We’re even the fittest city in the U.S. Eight years running!

Arlington is a genuinely great place to live. Good schools, fine neighborhoods, lots of county services and community events, lots to do, decent people.  I can complain about something to the county and they will respond.  We’ve also got lots of visit-able memorials, including the nationally known Arlington Cemetery and Marine Corps Memorial, 

As well as America’s prettiest (in my opinion) urban multi-use path, the Mt. Vernon trail:

And, of course, all the museums, entertainment, restaurants and sights of Washington D.C. are just across the  Potomac RiverI think most Virginians really like having that river between us and DC.  Mentally, at least.  We tell ourselves, yeah, we’re close to DC, but if things get too crazy, well, we’ve got a river to protect us. We can even blow up the bridges if we have to. Yeah, right.. 

Arlington is so cool that we even have a rap. (Beware: lots of inside jokes here.)

So, why would we move away from Arlington?  It’s oh-so-livable (so says AARP), we know the area, and our friends and family are here. We like it.

I can think of three reasons we might move. The three “T’s”, if you will.    

Traffic. Like almost any metropolitan area, traffic here is an issue. I’d argue that Arlington, with its extensive street grid system, offers more alternative routes than many other jurisdictions, but traffic is traffic.  Bottom line, I’d enjoy a place with less traffic.

Temperature. Our mid-Atlantic winters are relatively mild compared to other parts of the country.  This isn’t Buffalo.  But I’ve noticed in a big way that as I get older I tolerate the heat more and the cold less.  December through February here is tough for me.  Of course, some of that is my own fault –  I’m out there riding my bike even on some of the coldest days — but warmer weather sure would be nice.   

Transition.  And, finally, the idea of someplace new appeals to me.  It would be fun to live our day-to-day life in a different place (maybe a foreign location?) even if for just a little while.  One of the reasons I like to travel is to figure out a new place.  Why not do that for an extended period of time? 

For now, I guess our long term conversation will continue and we’ll see if we ever agree on another location. And if not, well, we’re still in the #1 most livable place!

It’s amusing. My excuse is that I like to see if Barfield Financial has posted anything.  But then of course I also scroll through MLB videos, other financial stuff and, well, how to say this?  People doing stuff and failing. Failing by falling.  Skateboard wipeouts, trampoline chaos, construction mishaps, that sort of thing,  

It’s a little embarrassing that the Facebook algorithm has figured out, okay, this middle aged male likes financial information, interesting world facts, some light current events, some baseball and bicycling and . . . people falling on their faces.  Often in a painful way.  You are your algorithm, I suppose. 

Anyway, Facebook confessions aside, in a recent scroll session I came upon two posts showing two versions of the same information – the earlier you retire, the longer you live.  

Here’s the table from one of the posts:

Awesome!  Pretty smart of me to take an early retirement from the government, right?  

Well, hang on, this chart has no attribution, so . . . hmm.  Is this for real?  I don’t think so. The comment section of this post was, let us say, not favorable. I did get to see several entertaining memes and gifs.

To the contrary, the data on retirement and life expectancy seems to suggest the opposite.  In other words, those that retire earlier die earlier.  Oops. 

.  

To be sure, correlation does not equal causation, but retiring early as an indicator of early death makes some logical sense.  As is pointed out, someone who retires early is likely to be someone who has poor health and/or became disabled.  Or who couldn’t find a job and just quit looking.  Neither scenario would contribute to a long life expectancy

Assuming for the sake of argument that living longer is a good thingLiving long could be bad if we go Cold War- style nuclear Armageddon, Skynet takeover, zombie apocalypse, etc.  But let's think positive -- we made it past the Mayan end of the world as so memorably depicted by John Cusack in “2012.”  And we survived a global pandemic!  I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for this – yay, humanity. — and it seems that most people think it is — will retiring early extend my life in a meaningful way?  

Well, there are a few lifetime predictor calculators out there. One of them is on the the Social Security Administration website.  It is as basic as can be.  You enter your birth date and, boom, your average life expectancy pops up.  For a 54 year old guy like me, it is 82.5 years.  That’s less than 30 years left.  (Notably, if I were female instead of male, my expectancy would be 85.8 years.)  

For a more comprehensive and probably more precise life expectancy calculator, I tried Northwestern Mutual’s version. This was kind of fun because you could see the years accumulate or decline in the age box based on your answers to questions about family history of heart disease, diet, exercise, and so forth.  For example, toggle your response about smoking from “never smoked” to “2 packs a day” and you’ll lose at least 10 years before your eyes.

I ended up at 95 years.

I definitely like that result better than the SSA computation.  I gained nearly 13 years!  I can plan on 41 more years of life.  So says Northwestern Mutual.

Although I think of the 95+ year-olds I have known and am not sure how I feel about being that old. Life is getting pretty limited at that point no matter how healthy you are.  But that’s for another post.    

To conclude, none of the calculators I checked out asked about retirement age.  I think it is safe to say that retirement age, on its own, has far, far less to do with life expectancy than, say, access to quality health care.  Or your diet and frequency of exercise.  

That said, please check back with this website in 30-40 years (presumably using your cornea implanted quantum supercomputer that is accessing data centers on one of Jupiter’s moons) and see what happened. 

My mistake was that I didn’t have much of a plan in place when I started telling people.  (Of course, only three weeks into retirement, I still don’t have much of a plan – but I have a concept!)   So I would get the “What’s next, man?” question and I’d pause, which looks weird because doesn’t everybody know what they’re going to do?  Finally, I’d go into a mushy and too long answer about exploring different opportunities, maybe travel, and hey, good thing we’ve got some savings built up, etc. etc.  Save that mush answer for your close friends and maybe family who care.  For everybody else, which is probably 95% of everybody, you need a short and normal-sounding answer. 

For me, that answer became, “I’m getting certified as a mediator for the Virginia state court system.”  I was weaker on the follow-up questions; work colleague then says, “Oh, wow, interesting, what will that look like?”  Me, “Uh,not sure, I’m still finding out myself.”  But at least I had a go-to answer that didn’t kneecap an already perfunctory conversation.   Your goal is to get that subtle nod of conversational approval indicating that you sound like a person who will still contribute to society even in retirement and isn’t just going to, say, sit on the couch and add another blog to the Internet.  

Second common question: what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you walk out of here on your last day? Or the next morning?  Variations of this question start popping up when the retirement countdown is less than a month. Fortunately, I had a pretty good answer to this:  we’re going to the circus! 

This is not a normal response along the lines of, say, going to a bar and celebrating, but circuses are fun, right?  It also had the advantage of being true.  I had never been to Cirque du Soleil and they were in town the week I was retiring and so I bought tickets for my retirement night.  

As it turned out, the actual very first thing I did after walking out of my agency building was to change out of my work clothes and ride my bike down to Great Falls, Maryland to ride 30 miles on the C&O Canal Trail enjoying an impossibly glorious October 72 degree cloudless blue sky day.

After the bike ride, Mrs. anysecondnow and I ate at fake Florida restaurant Coastal Flats (love their lobster rolls) and then walked across the street to Cirque du Soleil. 

(Quick circus review:  you will not be disappointed. Everybody should go at least once.  Impressive visuals, both the prancing performers and the audience having a great time – except the contortionist; I don’t see how he could be having a great time, we were cringing while watching him.)

Do you have answers to these two questions? If so, you are ready to tell people about your retirement!