Years ago when Marwa Elmasry arrived in the United States from Egypt, an immigration officer at the airport yelled in her face when she didn’t answer to her last name. Elmasry was accustomed to the Arabic world, where people address each other by their first names.
The incident crushed Elmasry’s spirit for a time, but then ignited her passion to become a bilingual educator, determined to give a voice to younger Arab Americans struggling to learn English and to dispel myths about their culture.
Elmasry, who teaches Arabic for non-Arabic speaking teens and Arabic for Heritage Speakers at Oak Lawn Community High School, recently won the Bilingual Teacher of the Year Award from the Illinois State Board of Education. Earlier she taught bilingual students at the school in social studies, history and other subjects.
More than 100 Illinois teachers were nominated for the various Teacher of the Year awards, according to ISBE.
“Mrs. Elmasry is an extremely dedicated teacher whose passion and appreciation for learning can be seen every day,” said World Languages department chair Kristin Kuchyt. “Her classes have insightful conversations that lead to a deeper understanding of the material.”
And just as importantly, “she has an ability to make all students and community members feel welcome in our school,” Kuchyt said.
More Top Picks Best Golf Balls For Distance
When Elmasry started as a bilingual teacher, she noticed many people associated Arabs with 9/11. So she worked with bilingual/social studies teacher Benjamin Reiff to integrate a history of Arab Americans within the curriculum, which included material about Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Palestine.
“So students understand they didn’t come out of the blue on Sept. 11 … they have a long history,” Elmasry said. “We need to mention all these minority groups in our curriculum and then mention their contributions to American society.”
She also noticed Arab-speaking students were sometimes overlooked because of their lack of English. Some had low self-esteem and were forgetting their own language. She helped create honors classes in Arabic so students could excel, and started heritage classes, so they could learn and feel proud of their language.
“They couldn’t go to other (honors) classes because of a language barrier,” Elmasry said. “This kind of hurt my feelings to see students who are very, very good but can’t be in honors classes because of the English barrier.
“They felt, ‘finally I have a class I am good at,’ and that also affected their performance in other classes because they had confidence.”
Elmasry, who also sponsors Arabic Honor Society at OLCHS, said one thing she loves about teaching is helping students just like herself when she struggled to learn English. But she also reaches students from other backgrounds, asking them during one class the meaning of their names to show similarities between the various cultures.
“I want to share it (the language) and I want to learn from them and they learn from me, so we can have cultural understanding, bridging the two cultures together,” she said.
Several of her students said she was irreplaceable.
“Mrs. Elmasry makes sure we understand every single thing she teaches us, whether by us coming to meet her separately after school or during class time,” said Latifa Almatahen, a junior in Elmasry’s Arabic 3 class who had her in previous classes too. “She makes sure that everyone is able to have their voice heard in class.”
Sajida Mulhem, also a junior in Arabic 3, said her passion for teaching shows every day.
“She is very dedicated to this class and you can tell,” Mulhem said. “You can just really tell how much she cares and how much work she’s putting in to make sure everyone is doing their work, understanding and involved with each other.”
Janice Neumann is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.