January 25, 2015 - 12:17
When I was seven years old, I began the second grade knowing only the English taught to me in my first grade immersion classroom; it wasn’t much, but at this point of my life it didn’t seem important. The first day of school, I remember waking up so excited to return to school that I jumped right out of bed put on my clothes, ate breakfast, and grabbed my backpack as I headed out the door. I was stopped by the fact that I was 20 minutes too early and my brother and sister hadn’t even woken up at this point, my mom had to drive us all together, so I waited 20 excruciating minutes. I made it to school and was so excited to start learning again. At the end of the day, something was odd. I felt this year was going to be different from years before but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t shake the feeling, all we did was do introductions but something made it different. The next day, I wasn’t as excited to go to school and this time I was the late one. At school it was yet another day of uneasiness and I couldn’t quite get why.
A few weeks into the year I wasn’t doing well in school. I was falling behind my work, I wasn’t understanding much of what I was learning and I was just having such a hard time. It was really frustrating and I didn’t know why. Finally, one day as I was talking to my friend during class time my teacher interrupted us and announced to the classroom, “Please don’t speak Spanish in this classroom or else you’ll fall behind like Sergio.” I finally got it. The whole class was taught in English and unlike the immersion setting I had before, this year I was placed in a full-English classroom where I fell behind without the Spanish support. As the year progressed I continued to fall behind and I grew resentment towards my teacher because I felt it was her fault that I was falling behind. If she knew Spanish I wouldn’t have such a hard time understanding the material and I wouldn’t be the example of failure. It was the cultural barrier between the languages we spoke that was counterproductive to our roles as teacher and student.
Eventually my teacher called me an imbecile for my bad attitude and bad performance in English. It was completely unfair because my performance was not on my skills as a student it was on my skills in English. My performance in mathematics was great but without Spanish support I was up in the air. Needless to say, a big scandal arose from this comment that almost got my teacher fired. One day I was in the principal’s office sitting outside while my mom, my teacher, and the principal met together to discuss the comment. I could hear my mom yelling at the teacher for being so disrespectful and at the principal allowing her to keep teaching. After all of this I returned to my teacher’s classroom and things were different. She was much more conscious of my needs and gave me much more attention as a competent student than she did before. Although she wasn’t able to speak Spanish, the fact that she was being patient with my English and being there at each step went a long way and at the end of the year I was able to pass on to third grade without any other problems.
Recently I found out that in California a law was passed a few years before I began school that required students described as “LEP” (Limited English Proficiency) students to be in English-only classrooms until they are ready to move into the “normal classes.” This must have been what I experienced and although the intention of this was to help non-English speakers, it was detrimental to my learning experience as an English-only classroom only made me feel ashamed of my cultural background in Spanish and it made me resent both school and myself. An immersion or bilingual classroom would have fulfilled my needs as a student and would have given me a space to be proud of my language and heritage as well as a space to challenge the language barrier. At the time my teacher’s anti-Spanish position and her position as my educator damaged my understanding of my cultural identity in a negative way that I carried through my public school education. It also greatly damaged my identity and sense of belonging as an American that I do not feel comfortable calling the United States my home and I do not consider myself an American. If Spanish would have been appreciated in the classroom and not just completely shut out, I would have had a much better experience as a student and my identity development would have not been reliant on my teacher’s oppressive comments.