A Teacher Noticed A Young Boy Struggling In Her Class — Then 20 Years Later She Got A Phone Call
Susan Lung knew the seven-year-old boy in her second-grade class was smart — but he was in danger of being left behind. The boy had forgotten how to speak English after a summer at home in Afghanistan: that meant he was struggling to make friends and he couldn’t do his schoolwork. But Susan was determined not to give up on him and did everything she could to help. And that was the end of the story — until she received a phone call 20 years later…
Starting on the back foot
The boy’s name was Jamil Kochai. The reason he struggled with English was that he was born in Peshawar, Pakistan, and only came to America when he was one year old. Jamil was raised listening to Pashto and Farsi because his family couldn’t speak English, either. So when the young Jamil started school, he was at a severe disadvantage — and the schools really didn’t help him.
Cast aside
“When I started kindergarten, I didn’t know a word of English,” the grown-up Jamil explained in a series of tweets in August 2022. But the real problem was that Jamil’s teachers didn’t know what to do with a child who only had English as a second language. He said one teacher would “punish [him] for not understanding his directions.” That’s why, for Jamil, school represented only “punishment” and “exclusion.”
A fateful summer
To make matters worse at school, Jamil’s family would often move house as his father tried to find work. This meant Jamil attended three schools in just one year — all the while struggling to get a grasp of the language. And then in the summer of 1999 Jamil’s family left America and relocated to Logar, Afghanistan. It was a good move for the Kochais… but a terrible one for the young Jamil’s American education.
Losing the language
“I fell in love with my parents’ home village in Logar, but pretty much everything that I learned in first grade, I ended up forgetting by the time the summer was over,” Jamil told NPR in August 2022. It was so bad that when Jamil started second grade in America, he could only remember “ten letters from the alphabet.” But then he met Mrs Lung…
