I don’t know if you heard about the Spanish teacher in a school in New York who gave the students worksheets with racist/pro-White sentences to translate. It’s a disaster, but the article missed the fact that the very fact of giving students worksheets in the first place is a disaster. Not that that’s something that they would think about, since they have allowed the travesty of worksheet language education to go on for decades now.
Just giving worksheets is a heavy and dark burden on children. Don’t forget the anti-Latino part, but look at this fact too. No wonder that by the end of their 12 years in elementary and secondary school most student have been ruined for language study, the childish delight and light in their eyes and all the promise gone, not to mention that the instruction resulted in a complete loss of confidence in them as life-long language learners.
Whether it be racist language teachers or well-intentioned language teachers who give worksheets, the negative effects pile up. Although the former type of teacher is far worse, far more glaring, it is extremely rare. More insidious and more destructive are the worksheets.
We need to start looking at our jobs not so much in terms of language proficiency gains by a few usually white privileged kids who are college-bound, and more in terms of building community. The first is about the few, the second addresses every child in the class and therefore does much to bolster the feeling of equity and the web of human connectedness – sorely lacking in our society these days – in our language classrooms.
Is it not apparent by now that languages are learned in community and that we, many of us who privately harbor feelings of despair because our jobs don’t seem to have much of an impact on our fellow human beings, have the potential as a professional block to have massive positive effects on American society, very healing effects, if we just bring our students together into community in our language classrooms and let the CI juggernaut do its thing?
If the racist Spanish teacher in New York had tried to build community, maybe he or she – they didn’t name the teacher – would never have asked the students to translate those sentences (ex. “That Mexican is ugly.” “That American is handsome.”).
After so many decades of inventing activities to build greater proficiency gains in the few, I now see that I have been focused on the wrong goal. The goal of any language program should have been all along a level playing field and happy students across the board, not getting a few (five or six in each class) kids into college because of heat put on us by parents and administrators who don’t realize that the real purpose of education is to help all our students grow up, the ones we’ve been given, and not just some of them.
When we think about how long it takes to learn a language and that we don’t even have a chance to get our students to high levels of proficiency because to the 1/20 thing I’ve talked about in other articles, we need to realize for that reason and for the mental health of our children and ourselves that we must now state together to anyone who will listen that the real goal in language education should be only secondarily gains in proficiency, and primarily the success of all our students regardless of individual perceived differences in skin color, etc.
Our real goal should be equity. When we have achieved that goal, we will have accomplished something far greater than what we are doing now.