Helping someone become a United States citizen is a real thrill. In my volunteer work with Literacy for Life at the College of William and Mary, I’ve had that experience six times. Let me tell you about the first citizen-to-be I worked with.
She is from Thailand and she is really something. When I first met her in 2012, her child was a toddler; that child is now a middle-schooler who looks just like her mother.
How did this come about? In 2012 I had just retired from teaching and was looking around for something to do with my time. I had heard of Literacy for Life at the Rita Welsh Adult Literacy Center, and it sounded like something I would like to be involved with. I attended an orientation session and was asked what I would like to do; I said I’d like to help someone who was working toward citizenship. I was assigned to my first “learner,” and away we went. We met once a week for about six months to complete this process.
I didn’t know much about the citizenship process; fortunately, one of the other tutors in the program knew a lot about the process, so I asked him a lot of questions. There were several steps:
Paperwork: There were a lot of forms to be completed. My learner had already begun that process, so I learned along with her. It was also an expensive process — something like $600 at that time to file the application. It’s now more like $800. My learner had saved up to pay this expense.
Preparation for the citizenship test: I knew nothing about this. I soon learned, however.
There were 100 questions that the applicant needed to be prepared to answer; the topics included American History and geography, the forms and processes of American government, and American culture and holidays. At the citizenship interview, applicants were asked to answer ten of these questions. If they answered six of them correctly, they passed.
People preparing for citizenship were encouraged to do more than just memorize the answers to these questions. The Literacy Center had lots of material on hand to help me and my learner navigate this. The books about the citizenship test contained lesson plans that helped provide the backdrop for each question, with the idea that the learners would learn more than just rote answers. I soon learned that these lesson plans — which included such things as a discussion of the reasons behind the sailing of the Mayflower and the establishment of the Plymouth colony — led us to delve into the European Enlightenment and British history so that the events in the colonies made sense. My learner was well educated in Thailand, but her curriculum didn’t include much about European and American history. I had to figure out how to explain things to someone who had not grown up dressing up like a Pilgrim for Thanksgiving and who had never played cowboys and Indians.
Literacy: Applicants were required to do two things - read a sentence aloud in English, and write an English sentence from dictation. The sentences were also available in the prep books, so we didn’t have to worry about an interviewer throwing unknown words at the applicant. For my first learner, this was not a challenge, as she had been in the US for a number of years and was relatively fluent in English.
The Interview: This was the culmination of all the previous work. At some point after we had submitted her application, she was contacted by the Norfolk branch of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office and scheduled to come in for an interview. We started the process of preparing for this interview. We made sure she knew where the office was, and she made a practice trip there one day to make sure she knew how long the trip would take, where she could park, and so forth. We rehearsed what would happen in the interview. Fortunately, the prep materials also provided us with information about this process. We practiced “small talk” that might accompany her arrival in the office. We practiced taking off her coat, putting away her umbrella, deciding where to sit — all the things that we thought might happen so that she was comfortable when she got there. We had another tutor stage a mock interview with her and throw her some curveballs to see how she did. She was a rock star.
The first thing the interviewer was expected to do was go through her application with her — asking her questions about some of her answers. Things like “I see you have one child — do you have any other children?” or “I see you’ve moved several times over the past couple of years. Can you explain these moves?” We didn’t anticipate real “gotcha” questions — and there weren’t any — but we prepared for them.
We practiced answering the questions from the test. The questions would be presented orally, and the responses were to be spoken. We practiced answering questions in random order. We practiced saying “could you repeat the question please?” We practiced tapping the chin and saying “let me think” while preparing to answer. This all sounds very theatrical, but it was in the rehearsing of these techniques that my learner became more comfortable with the process.
The reading and writing part wasn’t hard for my learner. As I said, she was pretty fluent in English and she was both smart and studious. She was prepared. I had other learners for whom this was a serious stumbling block.
She called me after she got home from her interview, very excited that she had passed. She bubbled and stumbled over herself as she explained how it had gone. Apparently, she hadn’t encountered any of the anticipated challenges as she did the interview, but she was very comfortable with the process.
A couple of months later, I was honored to watch her take the citizenship oath in the House of Burgesses chamber with probably 100 other new citizens from all across the globe. (That’s the picture above) We all had tears in our eyes as we recited the Pledge of Allegiance together.
I still see her regularly. She has continued to take classes at Literacy for Life as she has worked through various licensure programs to improve the life she is building for herself and her daughter.
I have worked with other citizenship applicants — from Turkey, China, Mexico, Honduras, and Russia. They came to me with a variety of skills and dreams. But they all succeeded in becoming citizens, and I am proud that I played some role in this.
Fantastic, and happy to see you're still teaching even though retired.
What a great story. You were fortunate to have as your first learner someone as well educated and conscientious as you describe. She was fortunate to have such a good teacher to help her through the process. Kudos to both of you!