Student Profile #1

Since I spend so much time with my students, I thought I should blog about them a little more. Partially as filler, though mostly as pieces of actual interest, these entries should provide delightful, humorous, and occasionally poignant sketches of the people with whom I spend most of my waking hours.

I suppose the portrayal of Jeffrey (still considered one of my best entries) is really the first profile, but this account marks the official beginning of (what will hopefully be) an occasional and entertaining series. I begin with Anthony.

Technically, Anthony isn't really my student; he's in the homework room that I monitor for 30 minutes before his actual teacher arrives. Of the 15-20 students who come early for homework help, Anthony is among the best behaved: he works quietly, never allowing himself to be distracted, and rarely, if ever, causing disruptions himself.

His most conspicuous characteristic--which one, if he has one or more functional ears, cannot help but notice--is his speech. It's really a mixture of several curious features that makes it so fascinating. The first is that while he hasn't yet hit puberty, Anthony's voice registers somewhere in the same range as Barry White, or perhaps closer to the Godfather. Either way, I'm sure that when his voice deepens, it will drop below those amplitudes audible to the human ear, rendering him effectively mute. The first time I heard him talk, I thought he might be a chain smoker with an acute case of laryngitis.

The second aspect that contributes to his unique sound is his accent. One of the reasons I likened his speech to the Godfather above is that his pronunciation an ineffable amalgam of Italian and Chinese accents; honestly, it's so bizarre that I'm having a hard time trying to generate the sound in my mind's ear. My best guess is [Click on photo for higher quality pix.]
that he was raised by Chinese speaking parents, but lived in the Bronx until moving here recently.

To top it all off, he has a lisp. It's not a lisp per se since he can produce sibilant sounds just fine. I'm not sure exactly what kind of speech disorder it qualifies as; maybe it's related to his peculiar accent.

This photo is of Anthony wearing a female classmate's jacket. He thought it was funny, and declared, "I'm a crossdresser!" I'm not sure where he learned about drag queens and the transgender phenonena (too much Jerry Springer?), but actually to me he looked like a pimp in the jacket (don't you think so? A little Asian pimp). Ghetto fabulous.