"How many languages do I have to speak...?" WOAH! hold the phone! I went to Glory on the same day of the week like I normally do, only that day was one of the worst days I had ever experienced in my voluntering at the school. Let me first take a couple steps back and explain Mr. Yeller and what I do with the class now. Im not entirely sure what the circumstances were but Mr. Yeller is in fact used to teaching in a High School setting, not middle school. At hearing this my first thought was "why on earth would you lower the grade you want to teach?" with that aside teaching 6th graders is diffrent than teaching 12th graders or 1st graders. Each grade level requires a certain amount of paitentes and some require more than others. My role in the class is not a tudor like my fellow classmates have talked about with their classes. I am more of the teacher helper, whatever he askes me to do, if he askes me to get paper...I get paper, if he askes me to grade student work....I grade the work and so on and so forth.
On one occasion my teacher was off to a really BAD day. The first class of the has only one white boy, but there is also one middle eastern girl. Telling the first period class to do things sometimes is like pulling teeth. My. Yeller asked joe to sit it in his seat after telling 2 other students to do the same he yelled "HOW MANY LANGUAGES DO I HAVE TO SPEAK FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND". I was shocked and did not know what to do. In Claude Goldenburgs article "Teaching English Lanuage Learners" he talkes about how teaching children in their native language should be incorperated into the schooling. Remeber though theses kids are in 6th grade. Goldenburg claims that the population of ELL's (english language learners) have jumped from "2 million to 5 million since 1990"(p 10). There is obviously a very large population of students in the school system who have english as their second language. Mr. Yellers statment hit me like a bus, because I have seen the students talking to each other in the halls in Spanish. Goldenburg also explains that "since spanish speakers tend to come from lower economic and educational backgrounds than either the general population or other immigrants and language minority populations"(p10).
I kind of just sat there watching Mr. Yeller yell thinking to myself how could a professional be so ignorant to the fact that for over 95% of his first class speaks another language over english. When Goldenburg mentions that spanish speakers come from lower educational backgrounds, a little girl Lilly came to mind. Lilly is the middle eastern girl who was mentioned before. I absolutley hate to admit it however since the class is composed of mostly spanish or hispanic children but Goldenburg was absolutely correct when he said other ethnic minorites have more possitive educational backgrounds. Lilly has to be one of the brightest kids in the 1st period class. I must say that almost all of these kids are fluent in both languages, so their elementary schools must have done well with incorperating their langugage with that of english.
I felt as though it was an insult to the childrens ethnic background for Mr. Yeller to make a comment like that. These kids are all bright children who if they stay in school can achieve great things. The populaion of ELL keeps growing more and more, and it is very evident in the Mr. Yellers 1st period History class.
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I agree that this teacher’s comment didn’t show he was very sensitive to linguistic differences in his classroom. I also believe that by pretending all the students in the classroom had no background would be much worse. A comment like “how many languages do I have to speak to you?” could mean very different things taken out of context. It could mean the teacher was questioning the students’ ability to understand English, the teacher could have been frustrated with the students not listening to him so he used a (somewhat untactful) figure of speech, or he could have been joking with the students.
ReplyDeleteBy pretending the students don’t have different ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds would be a disservice to them. It is like saying you are “blind to color” instead of saying you see people for themselves, not just their race. Being “blind to color” implies that one doesn’t see the differences and unique qualities people bring to the community (or classroom community), and shows one is ignorant to the perspectives different cultures could contribute. Seeing people for themselves, not just their race shows that you know the potential of every individual and are not ignoring their race or classifying them because of their race. Trying to ignore the topic of race stifles the possible growth of a community. I don’t think that bringing up the different linguistic backgrounds of the students in a classroom is bad- in fact I think commenting and talking about it will help the classroom environment, especially in a usually discussion based setting as history is.
It’s quite strange thinking a teacher would give up a job in a high school to come to a middle school where they knowingly would be teaching a large Hispanic population if they had any prejudice against Hispanic people. The teacher could have said the comment and meant that the students couldn’t understand him because they were not well educated in English. However, because you say they were not sitting at their desks, the students probably knew better, but were goofing off. The teacher possibly could have been frustrated with the students and said the comment the way others say “do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth”, “am I talking to a brick wall”, or “are we speaking the same language” . Another way the teacher could have meant it would be as a joke. If the majority of the students in the classroom are fluent in multiple languages and the teacher is multi-lingual or not, he could have said it to comment on the linguistic diversity in the classroom.