Learning Matters Blog and VAL Updates

Garcia’s Bistro: VAL Student Opens Restaurant (12/8/2021) - There’s a new restaurant in northern Vermont and a VAL student is the owner. Yesica Garcia opened Garcia’s Bistro in November on Main Street in Enosburg Falls. Yesica, grew up in Jicarito, Honduras. She moved to Vermont in 2018 to join her family. She is the mother of three young adult children who are students at Norwich University and the Community College of Vermont Yesica is an English Language Learning (ELL) student at Vermont Adult Learning. She recognizes that as a community member and business owner it’s important to speak English well. “It’s a beautiful thing that I’m learning English,”…

Volunteer Profile: Janet Whatley (12/2/2021) - Janet Whatley, a VAL volunteer, retired after many years as a professor at the University of Vermont. She earned her Ph.D. in French, and taught courses in French Language and Literature and the Humanities. She spent the early years of her retirement interpreting and translating for Congolese refugees before teaching at VAL. She’s helped New Americans apply for asylum, prepare for LNA courses, and apply for jobs. Janet brings her talents as a teacher and her advanced linguistic skills to help VAL’s English Language Learners (ELL) find their footing in Vermont.She helps with language practice for acquisition as well as…

VAL Student Walks for VAL (11/18/2021) - Laurentia Batchelder of Springfield, Vermont is on a mission. She is a student at Vermont Adult Learning and is taking it upon herself to organize a personal, Thanksgiving Day Walkathon, to raise awareness and funds for the nonprofit. “I am so excited to be able to walk for Vermont Adult Learning. They have done so much for me these last three years I would like to give back a bit to them. It is because of their Physical Education that I started walking and 17 months later I have lost 102 pounds and am now walking 6 to 9 miles…

Student Writing: If I Were… (11/9/2021) - If I were an animal I would be a whale, calm and lonely, floating through years of cold and all consuming water. I would be a whale moving slowly, but yet peacefully. If I were a car I would be an old model with shiny new paint. Perhaps deceiving to the eye in brightness and appeal but tired and worn down all the same. If I were an item of clothing I would be a hat, an interesting decoration but not essential and only needed or desired periodically. If I was a day of the week I would be Wednesday, hanging between the…

Paco: Farm Manager, Poet and ELL Student (10/28/2021) - Paco carries a small black notebook, ready to capture his poetic musings. Trained as an accountant, he attended university in Mexico and worked in a bank for thirteen years before arriving in the United States. Paco cultivates his poet’s zest for beautiful words while managing a Vermont dairy farm. He is earning money to pay his daughter’s tuition in Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. Paco is an English Language Learning student at VAL. He admires the writing of Mario Benedetti (1920-2009), an Uruguayan poet, novelist and journalist. Benedetti was a member of the famed Generacion del 45, an Uruguayan intellectual and literary movement,…

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Learning Matters Blog and VAL Updates