‘A win-win across the board’
On a recent summer morning, Maria Isabel Brum took a break from her job as an MIT custodian to read the dictionary. Originally from Portugal, the avid gardener had just learned the word “perennial,” and she was excited to use it to talk about the watercress in her garden that had been invaded by red beetles. She looked up the word in the lexicon and spelled it out loud to Tsering Mulug-Labrang, an MIT custodian born in India, who repeated the word before writing it in her notebook. Brum and Mulug-Labrang have gathered around a table in MIT’s Department of Facilities nearly every Tuesday for more than a year to practice their English in a class led by retired MIT employee Ellen Stordy. The advanced conversation class is part of a volunteer-based pilot program sponsored by the 1,400-member MIT Women’s League. The program offers free English as a Second Language...