Proud

I guess this story starts in December, because that's when I decided to reread the book "The Catcher in the Rye." Not only that, but I also read the German version of the book at the same time.

And, well, after seeing what amazing results doing such a thing had on my own language skills, I was eager to have one of my students do it, too.

But my students are adults: they're employees, they're managers, they're parents . . . They are busy. But not Razia. Razia is a very bright student of mine who is 18 and always eager to learn.

So, one afternoon in early January, I sat with her in the Hamburg library and, without giving her any background info, simply told her to choose between two books: "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Truman Capote or "Slaughterhouse 5" by Kurt Vonnegut.

Personally, I was hoping she would choose "Slaughterhouse 5," Kurt Vonnegut's seminal fictional/nonfictional/sci-fi novel about his experience of having survived the Bombing of Dresden as an American POW during WWII.

Razia did wind up picking "Slaughterhouse," and right after she did, I promptly picked out the English and German versions of the book and told her to read both. And we were off and running.

Or so I thought.

"This book is weird," she said to me a week later, when we met again for our lesson. "Of course, it is," I told her. "This is Kurt Vonnegut." However, due to her not not coming from the same age group as I and not having the same frame of reference as I, the comment didn't mean much to her.

I told her to push through, that the novel gets easier after the first two chapters are through.

She did, and still had trouble. She didn't understand particular references and had other problems, too.

At one point, I even said she could stop reading the book and change it if it was too hard, to which she replied, "No, I'm going to read it, but . . ."

Secretly, I was happy that she had said that. But I was still cautious.

And then the breakthrough. A few days ago, I got a pic from Razia in which she had circled a sentence in the book: "He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo."

"The book is getting interesting," she wrote, along with some smily faces.

I was truly proud at that moment.