About BGL

Born to a neurosurgeon and the first woman city commissioner in a medium-sized city in the Midwest, the middle girl of three girls, I was raised in a conservative Dutch community. I began college at a small private school, but blasted out of there when my dad was injured, had to quit his medical practice and went off to earn a PhD in marine biology at the University of Hawaii. I spent six years there, goofing off, being my dad’s diving partner and volunteering at a free health clinic in Chinatown.

I graduated from UH with a degree in Anthropology, which was useless, so my mom sent me to secretarial school. That was dreadfully dull, and I somehow fell into teaching, and earned a Secondary Diploma in Education from UH, through VISTA, which simply threw students into the worst schools in Hawaii and handed them their diploma at the end of the school year without one hour of lesson planning or curriculum development.

That experience pretty much set the pattern for the rest of my life: jump in and figure it out. After substitute teaching for a year, I returned to the Midwest and was hired to teach ESL, not because I had any training, but I was the most persistent in bugging the personnel director. I was assigned to eight schools, nine grades, given a stack of books twenty years out of print, and no budget. I figured it out, and taught at that level for three years.

Subsequently, I went on to earn a PhD in Applied Linguistics at Michigan State. i was hired as an assistant professor of English at Cal State, Chico, teaching, among others, Grammar for Teachers and History of the English Language, which I not only had never taught before, but had not even taken. I figured it out. I also taught Methods of ESL, and introductory Linguistics. From there I proceeded to the University of Wisconsin, where I taught Linguistics, supervised student teachers, and ran the ESL Credentialing program.

After the death of my children’s father, I left academia and returned home to care for my aging parents, teaching ESL and Remedial Writing. I spent a year with the English Language Fellow program training teachers in Syria at the height of the war with Iraq, and then two years in Nepal. In both cases, I was simply trusted to do whatever job was needed, and told to simply have at it. I figured it out. Finally retiring in 2018, I failed miserably at trying to find ways to be useful, and returned to the university to earn a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan. I now work at a psychiatric hospital, which is challenging in ways teaching never was.

I have three kids, two step-kids, five grandkids and seven great- grandkids, one cat and two formidable but very nice dogs.

I speak Arabic badly, Nepali stumblingly, am proficient in French grammar rules, but very bad at understanding spoken French, can swear in a bunch of languages, and have taught English grammar so many times I can probably tell you the eight + two rules for using “the” by heart.

I am the author of four books,  The More Than Just Surviving Handbook: ELL for Every Classroom Teacher, with 3 editions, and Assessment and ESL, with 3 editions from Portage and Main Press, and two, written specifically for teachers in Nepal, for the Office of English Language Programs. I have also written articles and white papers in the field of ESL.

After I returned from Syria, I wrote a memoir of that remarkable year. But with the secret police so vicious, the paranoia so pervasive, I hesitated in trying to publish something about people I cared for and was worried about. War broke out, and I watched as the death toll mounted: 65,000, 100,000, 500,000. I lost touch with most of my friends: I am only certain as to the whereabouts of five. Now that the brutal Assad regime has fallen, and the millions of refugees are beginning to return, it’s time to tell the tale of life before the failed Arab Spring, and the seeds of a second spring.

A draft of my memoirs of the wild two years in Nepal is sitting on a shelf somewhere, waiting to be dusted off and sent out.