How My Never Mastering Spanish Helps ENLs

I guess when you live in Metropolis, USA, things happen. Nine million people squashed onto little islands, we jostle around a bit more than other places. It's the biggest city because it is a living city, not some office buildings clustered inside of business extensions to the highways. People come and go, and in my borough, they mostly come, come, come, and I, for one, welcome them. Queens has not much in the way of attractions, but if you travel for the people, then you can skip Times Square. My students speak Tagalog, Polish, Urdu, Ki'iche, Fulani, Cebuano, Albanian, Russian, Tibetan, Serbo-Croatian, Ilocano, Arabic, Mandarin, Bengali, Kreyòl, Ukrainian, Hindi...I'm forgetting something...

Oh, yeah. Spanish. I have lots of Spanish speaking kids. I know a few words in almost all the languages that my students speak. Some of them, such as the Urdu word for "factor", pronounced "ansi", is the result of modeling factoring for 2 twin boys who spoke no English, and no one else in the class spoke Urdu. Others, because I have friends and neighbors who teach me a few phrases. I've always been fascinated by languages. I'm where I should be here in Queens. But, of those languages, I only can

La Uniesfera

passably "speak" in Spanish. 

I took two years of high school Spanish, and still cannot conjugate a verb beyond the present tense, and sometimes not that, if it's irregular. But, I am fluent in French, and between my nouns and verbs and specific math and teaching terms (tarea, mochilla, cuaderno) I can be understood, if only by committee. It gets the kids talking, even if only for a moment, about what I actually meant, which they all have an opinion about, because I'm all over the place with Spanish. Kind of like they are with English. And math.

This, I find, is engaging for the kids, and models how they should attack the problem of math: headlong. I mean, hit a ratio problem with the circumference formula kind of gusto! Get people talking. Someone's going to throw up their hand and call out, "NO!". Disregard, as I do, the certainty that a small-minded admin will "ding" me, on the "rubric" for this, as not having set up classroom expectations. I will then ask why, and, rather than the child answering, I'll thank him or her for starting the conversation, and, as I see others who are also indicating "no", I'll ask one of them why they agree. And so on. 

In other words, I can really teach. I know my kids. I am teaching my kids. Not all, because no one can get them all. I'm dealing with kids with many, many issues, not the least of which is puberty. They don't make great choices. The love of my life, Tootie Pie, is the exact age as my students. Sometimes she has moments of brilliance, and other times I think she has hummus for brains. When you throw in language and poverty, food instability, and COVID...

I love teaching, because I have to put on an interactive show. In the "precedented" times, I would perform 12 shows a week. It's hard enough to get a crowd going at 8:12 a.m., especially middle schoolers who have the natural biorhythms of Dracula. Try doing it to a bunch of blocked video feeds! It can be done. It will take monumental effort and a LOT OF TIME! If the small-minded powers-that-be have their way, they will push an unrealistic timeline for curriculum to be given, when students don't have access to reliable internet. Inexperienced teachers will follow the dictum to the tee, until everyone finds out, in the end, that it didn't work for exactly the reasons we said. I'm a bit salty. Yeah.

But NYC can really take a punch! And even though my kids lived in the ironically named epicenter of CoVid, Corona, they will, and I will, and we will model for the country how it's done. Because we have been knocked down time and again, and we're at so many disadvantages here, but that only makes us stronger.