The students at Project Hope's adult education program are or have been homeless. After studying about the process of homebuying as one of fifteen classes involved in this year's A.L.R.I. Homebuying Readiness Project, the class invited the center's Shelter Manager to speak to them about how she herself was preparing to buy a two-family house in Mattapan for her and her son. The Shelter Manager had also been a guest at Project Hope more than ten years earlier, and the students felt inspired by her story and grateful to her for sharing it with them. The following are excerpts from letters which the students wrote to her the next day in class:
I think that it's great that you worked hard and saved your money--a single woman got her head on strong and wanted something and you went for it. I hears you! Go Girl. When you get in your own home you can fix it up anyway you want to and when you get tired of that you can do it over! --Gwendolyn RobertsIt is very interesting to hear about how to buy your own home. We need more women like you with us. Very independent and strong too. Just to go for what they want in life. You also let me know that we can do it too if we just put our minds to it. I will pray for you and wish you much luck in your dream home. --Sereta Thomas
These student writings are just a few of the many products of this year's A.L.R.I. Homebuying Readiness curriculum project. This project, under the auspices of the FannieMae Foundation, was created to offer a vision of hope for low-income ABE and ESOL students who are studying with the intent of creating a better life for themselves and their families. For the fifteen teachers and over three hundred and twenty-five students who participated, it was also meant to provide an opportunity to experiment with content-based instruction and learning. Encouraged to develop their own teaching approaches and lessons--ones that were suitable to the particular needs and wishes of their students as well as challenging and of interest to the teachers themselves--this year's project generated more than fifty new homebuying lessons.
Because the project's goals also included the advancement of student and teacher access to new and meaningful technologies, one of the products of this year's work will be a user-friendly manual designed to introduce students and teachers to some of the available homebuying resources on the World Wide Web. The manual, together with this year's homebuying webpages, will be available this summer through the A.L.R.I.'s web site. We would love it if you take a look, give it a spin, and tell us what you think.
The following, by Sam Bernstein of the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, is an excerpted sampling of one teacher's creative approach to this complex topic. The remaining fourteen teachers' lessons, homebuying resources, and students' writings will be available on the web site.
--Deborah Schwartz
Early in the semester we started the material in our program-designed text which includes an introduction to very basic banking concepts. I introduced the thought that we might be working a lot on apartment finding (a topic from their text) and maybe--a new twist--house-buying. Students liked that. We also incorporated grammar into these lessons: "How long does it take to______?" "It takes (time) to (do something)." That Friday I gave them a writing assignment that combined the above elements. The assignment included questions about the difference between banking in China and in America. It also included the questions: "How long will it take you to be comfortable in America?" and "What will it take you to be comfortable in America?" It seemed to me that housing and banking and the idea that time was an important factor would probably lead a lot of students to begin the process of establishing some goals; buying a house was a predictable goal for many Chinese families.
Throughout the homebuying unit, we moved back and forth through old and new ways of teaching and learning. For example, as I mentioned earlier, our regular curriculum includes some fundamental concepts about banking and house repairs and the search for an apartment. But I also wanted to incorporate the FannieMae Foundation materials and to try some new approaches as well. At a certain point, I decided that the pictures in the FannieMae Foundation's ESOL curriculum, How to Buy a Home In the United States, could work to catalyze a good discussion and might lead students into some initial research about homebuying. So I copied and cut out all 40 pictures from the workbook.
During that class, I spread out the pictures on the table in front of pairs of students and asked them to choose two pictures per pair, talk about them together and write a question about each picture. The students hemmed and hawed. They had a lot to say in Chinese, but not much in English. They were hard-pressed to wrap themselves around the specific details of the pictures; they were equally hard-pressed to put themselves in a questioning mode. I walked around trying to encourage them and corrected grammar here and there. Then I asked a student from each pair to write their question on the white board. The questions were pretty bad. For example, one pair of students wrote an out-of-focus question about the different types of houses, colonial, duplex, etc. How much does a Victorian house cost? Finally, I helped the whole group revise everything and we came up with a list of about six questions that I could e-mail to a realtor that we had invited to class in order to address the students' more technical homebuying questions.
In early March, Dekahn Wong, a realtor who is based in Chinatown, came to the class to meet students, make a presentation and answer their questions about first-time homebuying. Dekahn knows our student population well because he's been a substitute and part-time teacher at our school for many years. He speaks fluent Cantonese and some Mandarin. Dekahn spoke mostly in Cantonese. He had excellent bilingual materials. He compared the advantages and disadvantages of renting and owning, highlighting the tax advantages to owning a home. He showed pictures of different kinds of homes so students could compare them. He explained in detail how a broker functions. And he presented a monthly payment chart based on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. All of this was very much what students were ready for and they had good questions. Here are some examples of the students' questions:
1. How can you buy a house if you don't have money?2. Is it cheaper to buy a condo?
3. How much does a condo cost?
4. What's the lowest down payment one should pay? (Some students thought it was 50%.)
5. How much do you have to pay a year?
6. How do you get a credit card?
Another route to finding answers to these student-generated questions was via the Internet. Because we have a 12-piece Pentium Lab at the school, and because we now have our own homebuying web site created by eight students and myself as part of a FannieMae Foundation/A.L.R.I. mini-grant, I imagined that we would be able to answer many of the students' questions using the technology now available to us. I demonstrated how to type in the site address and hit "Enter' using our one 17-inch monitor. Students picked up the idea quickly, but typed very slowly. They all made mistakes in typing in the address, too. So I had to move around to every machine myself and type it in for them. This was very time consuming. Many of the students found that the English level on visit description pages was too high. And of course, the specialized real estate jargon intimidated them. A good deal of patience was required for our level 2a students to stick with the program.
On top of that, some of our students wanted to print out student interviews with a banker and broker, but our printer was only grudgingly cooperative. Finally, a group of students started looking at some of the current ads on "realtor.com," a large industry site with lots of information, including the listing of particular houses in particular neighborhoods complete with maps and photographs of houses. Four or five students thought this was fascinating. Other students were beginning to get interested too, but time was running out and not one person had answered any of the six questions. In fact, the students had stopped looking for the answers, and instead were looking around at whatever seemed of interest to them.
In our final week with the homebuying project, I asked students to try to remember something they had learned from Dekahn, the realtor. I wrote down their comments and translated some of them into English. I also asked them to review their initial set of six questions and try to see if they now had some answers. Students told me they had learned a lot, but that the most useful aspect of the unit was meeting Dekahn in person and knowing that he was a resource for them. Now they know they have someone who will help them when they decide to buy a home. For their final assignment, students wrote up a report of the visit from Dekahn based on the in-class notes that I had taken for them. Then, I set up some photographs of Dekahn's visit in a table on Web Page Editor and asked a group of student to try and write the report into the HTML document. They partially completed it, and later I filled it in with excerpts from some of their writing. The following are two samples of student reflections about homes and homebuying.
--Sam Bernstein
When I was young I liked big beautiful houses. I used to dream about the future. In my dream if I get married I will have a very beautiful house. A lot of years passed, but I can't realize my dream. Maybe it's just an image that I can't realize in my lifetime. But I yearn for it because all people yearn for nice things.Now I came to America, I think if I have enough money, I want to buy a three-family house in Brookline. One apartment for my family and two apartments for rent so I can have money to pay off the bank loan.
If in the future I have a lot of money. I want to buy my dream house. The house I dream of will be built in one of the beautiful places in America, like Hawaii. It will use a bigger land area for a bigger house. It will have its own golf course, race track for horses and its own indoor swimming pool. I will have a garden to enjoy a nice life. I can't realize this desire, but the desire is enough because the idea makes me so happy. --Hu Gui Fen
Someone asks me if I would like to rent a house.... No, I have never liked it. If you rent a house, you will pay rent to landlord and you only $2,500 maximum for the deductible on Massachusetts income tax. But if you want to buy a house, you will pay mortgage to the bank and all your interest is tax deductible on federal income tax. Especially you only pay for a period of time such as 10, 15, 20, 30 years.
Well, I am too poor to buy a house. If one day I have much money, I would rather buy a house than rent a house. What kind of house had I to buy? Condo, single house, family house? If you buy a condo you won't pay fees for insurance, maintenance and bills for water and sewer, but you must pay condo fees. There is less privacy and you don't own the land by yourself. If you buy a single house you will have more privacy, space and own a piece of land, but you must pay the water and sewer bill, maintenance and insurance. If you buy a family house, you must pay the same as a single house. But a family houses is different from a single house. It has more space to rent. --Helen Lee
Deborah Schwartz is the Coordinator of the Homebuying Readiness Project at the A.L.R.I. Sam Bernstein is an ESOL teacher at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center.