Professor Gaby Rinkerman's ESL Page

A place for those interested in the teaching or learning of English as a Second Language.

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About Me
I am a full-time tenured associate professor at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, USA.  I am also the Director of PCCC's Community Technology Center. 

 
 
Thank you for visiting my page!  If you are a teacher, I hope you find my materials useful. Feel free to use them as you wish, but please send me a note (email me) and let me know. If you have a page, please send me the link so that I can link back to your page. 
If you are a student, I hope that you enjoy my materials.  If you have a question or a suggestion about topics that you'd like me to work on, please email me and I will try to develop them.  


My Story
 
     I was born Miryam Gabriela Filito in Adrogue, a small quaint town in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The story goes that my mother had a hard time conceiving so she made a promise to our Patron Saint (Saint Gabriel) that if she got pregnant, she would name her first born after him. However, since my mom really didn’t like the name Gabriela, she chose it as my middle name hoping that no one would ever know about it. Needless to say what really happened is that no one ever knew (until I came to this country) that my first name was Miryam since I was always called “Gaby” (a nickname of Gabriela.)
     My parents were Argentinean but of Italian descent.  We don’t know much about my dad’s family, but I had the unforgettable opportunity of meeting my mom’s relatives in Mirabella Imbaccari, Sicily in 1999. At 21, I left my parents and sister, and I embarked on an adventure which would change the course of my life forever: I came to this country. However, here I came to the disheartening realization that after taking 3 years of high school English in Argentina, the extent of my learning was to be able to say “this is my book; that is your book.”  (I have to admit that English wasn't my favorite subject in high school so I never applied myself.)
     Like most of us immigrants, at first I didn’t know what my choices were and didn’t know that even though I didn’t speak English, I could attend college. I was lucky enough to run into another more experienced immigrant who literally grabbed my hand and took me to a place which unbeknown to me at that time, would become a significant part of my life. This place was Passaic County Community College. Starting at the beginning level of English as a Second Language (ESL) at PCCC, I completed my AA degree from PCCC in two and ½ years, got a B.A. degree in Psychology from Montclair State University, and a M.A. in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Teachers College, Columbia University. All of this happened in a span of 10 years. One of the happiest days of my life was when only ten years after I had arrived in this country as a non-English-speaking immigrant, I was hired as full-time faculty in the ESL Department at PCCC. 10 years later, in 2000, Dr. Rose, President of PCCC, appointed me to be the Director of its Community Technology Center (CTC.)
     This was a pivotal event in my career. By now, I knew that teaching was my calling, but I was about to find out how rewarding it would be working directly and helping the very same community where my students came from. Today, I work at the Center and I teach ESL. Through the years, students as well as fellow teachers have asked me to share with them some of the materials that I’ve created. This page is an attempt to do that.
To read an article (in Spanish) about me, my story and my work:
 

To find out more about my professional work in ESL and in community building, go here:
http://old.pccc.edu/pctc/biography.htm
 
To read my blog:
or
 
 
My Family
 
Here is a video of my youngest, Camille, singing Bohemian Rhapsody. I love Queen and I've been playing it in the car since she was a baby and I guess, she really memorized it (words, music, and all!)
 
 
 
A page about Osvaldo "Lelian" Filito, my uncle, a writer in my native town of Adrogue with whom I spent countless afternoons in my childhood learning to love reading and writing.

http://www.almirantebrown.gov.ar/escritores/fillito.htm


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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My Writings / Mis escritos
 
I've always dreamed about gathering letters that I've written through the years and publishing them in a book. These are letters which were never meant to be seen by the destinatary. They were written in Spanish, but I started translating them. Here is an example:
 
 
My High School / Mi escuela secundaria

This is link to a site I created about my high school - (Mi escuela secundaria) - El Colegio Regina Apostolorum en Rafael Calzada, Buenos Aires, Argentina

http://www.reginaapostolorum.org

 
My Professional Credentials 
 
If you would like to see my resume, please go here:
 
For Passaic County Community College's ESL Department page:
 
For PCCC's Community Technology Center page:
 
For information about Silk City Media Workshop, a multimedia skills after school program I co-founded, click here.
 
Here is the latest product by the kids in our program. At a time when "No Child Left Behind" has almost eradicated the arts from our schools in favor of remediation, we thought that now more than ever it's so important for our afterschool programs to allow children to express themselves through the arts. In response to this and in partnership with the Paterson YMCA and Arts for Kids, Inc. we created the Music Video Project. For the past ten weeks, six kids from Silk City Media Academy, CTC's afterschool program, learned to create their own music video. On the way, they strengthened their literacy skills as they wrote the lyrics and the storyboard for the video and their math skills as they composed and recorded the music, even though they probably didn't realize that they were doing this!



What you'll see, is all work done by the kids: they wrote the lyrics, composed the music, recorded the soundtrack, choreographed the dance, performed and produced the video. (Not bad for six kids meeting only once a week for two hours during 10 weeks!)


Da Yunginz
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lM1kkUSWgM
 
 
 
 
 
 
Adrogue and Borges
 
Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, loved the city so much and spent many summers during his childhood there, that he dedicated a book with poems under the city's name. An excerpt goes:
 

"Wherever in the world I might sense the smell of  gum trees (eucaplyptus), I feel as if I had been taken back to Adrogué. And that is exactly what Adrogué was: a large and quite maze of streets surrounded by lush trees and country houses, a maze of many peaceful nights that my parents liked to traverse. Country houses in which you could guess how life was behind those country houses. In some way, I have always been there, I am always here. You take the places with yourself, the places are within yourself. I am still among the gum trees and labyrinths, that place where you can easily get lost. I guess you might as well get lost in Paradise. Bizarre statues turn pretty, a ruin that is not a ruin, a tennis court. And then, in the very Las Delicias Hotel, a big room with mirrors. I have certainly found myself in those infinite looking glasses. Many arguments, many scenes, many poems that I imagined were born in Adrogué or were fixed in Adrogué. Whenever I talk about gardens, whenever I talk about trees, I am in Adrogué; I have thought about that city, it is unnecessary to name it." (1981)