Those Who Can Do, Those Who Can't Teach

My mother is a New York City teacher and being a bilingual teacher she has always taught in the poorest neighborhoods. I have known nothing about education other than what I have learned from hearing about the trials and tribulations of the children my mother taught and the families they came from. They often came from poverty in their own countries and acclimated fine to the poverty of New York, because it was always a step up in many ways. You could see the struggle in the faces of the parents and the worry in the faces of the children. And the other thing you saw was community. Many were from the same country, some where from the same town, but all where the same thing, Hispanic. And in a world where they were the outsiders, that thin bond was enough to form a strong community.

I remember going to my mother's school, which in the early eighties was a bilingual school, what is now called dual language. Half the day was spent in Spanish, half the day in English. Being in a predominately Puerto Rican neighborhood at the time, we were taught cultural things like how to dance La Bomba and La Plena, which were traditional dances. It was such an enriching experience, not only for us of Puerto Rican descent, but also the Irish kids who's parent's were smart enough to send them to the school to be exposed to such beauty of language and culture.

All this reminiscing had actually been sparked by such an act of unkindness that my fury and rage did not know where else to go. See, my baby sitter is from Ecuador and her daughter was born here. Though her English is good, she is still nervous about it. She went to speak to her daughter's teacher to ask about additional homework instructions. The teacher brushed her off. Later that night her daughter asked her to never talk to her teacher again, because she embarrasses her. Having never heard anything like that from here daughter before, she pressed her for more information as to why she would say something like that. Her daughter told her that she saw and heard her teacher tell another teacher "This mother just came to talk to me, she can't even speak English right! Why don't these Hispanics just go back!" Her daughter was right there to witness this! This is the same school where the teacher of the previous year told the mother to stop talking to her daughter in Spanish and not to send her to Ecuador to visit her Grandmother, that it would confuse her language skills. Her daughter speaks both languages flawlessly. She never had a problem. The confusion is in the teacher's brain.

This is the sort of prejudice, intolerance and stupidity I understand we have to share the planet with, but I hope by raising bilingual children, and encouraging others to raise bilingual children, we can just outnumber them one day.

Have you ever experienced such bias? As the mother, what would you have done?