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Today I met with some parents after school. The mother, hefty and wearing this terrified look that some parents wear, pulled self-consciously at her pink “Disneyland” shirt, while the father scrutinized the posters on the wall, possibly just avoiding my gaze, or perhaps examining the promises posted of college, career, life after graduation. I know, based on the student records, that neither parent has graduated high school; perhaps such a luxury was not afforded in their former residence in Mexico, where mandatory schooling ends at 8th grade. Mother looks terrified as I shake her hand, offering casual but simple conversation, and father greets me the same. They’ve learned a whole new language of acquiescence here in America, where most English directives or questions are met with wide-eyes and uncertain agreement. I imagine how I feel in a room of Spanish speakers, nodding quietly while trying to keep up with threads of conversation, aware that for whatever I understand I could never be able to offer response with proper articulation.
The same day my colleague tells me that he “knows” Spanish. If so, then why is he so divided against my L1 students, and why can he not communicate his expectations? Because speaking and writing fluently are a whole ‘nother beast.
In college, I graduated having taken a mid-level language course: “Spanish for Reading Comprehension.” It had been nicknamed, long before I took it, “Spanish for Graduating Seniors.” Be the learner semi-literate, or incredibly literate, there is something to be said for visual cognates that is not found in the rapid speaking of the same words. Throw a book in front of me, and I can perhaps grasp how to decipher the meaning. The most fortunate of my students — the ones who can both understand, speak, and READ Spanish — can attest to the boon of recognizing the accumulation of letters in print. These are my most silent students — the ones who excel in reading, but fall mute when it comes to verbal communication.
There is a massive blockade when it comes to expressing yourself, one to which people fall people fall mute, receding into listening and nodding where they determine a meaning.
This is the roadblock between myself and my student’s parents, as the mother looks at me with trapped eyes, nodding in recognition of the basic words I utter — too terrified to respond in kind, to expose the soft underbelly of reciprocal language — and the look I send back at her as she eyes me with both recognition and terror. As I, even weaker than she, nod and smile and pretend that gap doesn’t exist between us.
This is the feeling I get every time I meet a parent who is striving for the life of his/her child in this country. This is the moment where teaching reverses on me, to make me helpless, finally understanding what my students feel. This is the moment where our exposed nerves rub raw against each other, wanting the same thing, but from separate ends of the social spectrum. This is the moment where we stand face to face, wild-eyed, and biblically babbling with nothing to guide us but the apology and shared-fear lining our faces. Where everything seems to tear haphazard across our nerves, as we share the moment of agony — surely more acute on their end, for everything they’ve gone through to get here — and we avoid each others’ eyes, embarrassed by what stands between us, and what stands between them and the border.
How strange it is to realize, that “in a minute there is time… for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” And to know that that was not what I meant at all…
So fucking pretentious, even now. Unable to escape the world of which I became a pawn.
Regardless, I held those hands, and I cried for that son, and I have faith that he — among all — will evade such condemnations, thrust into success by the parents who wanted it just. that. bad.
Even in the moments my job hurts me, it offers me something to which I can cling.
Oh we are infinite!
