Fearing Humiliation at a Public School I have been singled out in front of my entire class while being nowhere near prepared for the discussion. This led to my everlasting anxiety about speaking out loud; and this is indeed nerve racking. Now imagine that feeling if you did not even speak the dominant spoken language. After several years of teaching, John Holt comes to the conclusion that schools are places filled with danger and silence. Schools are initially known to be refuges but are not always that sort of a place. Throughout the essay, “How Teachers Make Students Hate Reading,” educator and writer John Holt uses several examples from his prior teaching experiences and explains his acquired knowledge. Based on the different assignments he gives his students, he shows his readers why school can be a place of danger and silence. Holt’s ideas concerning students staying silent at school and their feeling of endangerment are echoed in Richard Rodriguez’s personal narrative essay, “Aria”. Rodriguez is silent at school because he lacks the confidence to …show more content…
Because he was an English language learner, he did not believe that he could speak a single public language (241). This meant that Rodriguez lacked confidence because he was put into a school that did not offer a bilingual program; English was their main focus. Having to learn English was not something he was comfortable or confident in doing. He believed that in his case, “…such bilingualism could not have been so quickly achieved” (241). Spanish being his first language, he felt like learning the English language was nearly impossible. Rodriguez’s parents’ and the school nuns pressured him to learn to speak the public language, although he refused and remained silent. Rodriguez did not feel confident in himself because he feared the potential costs him and his family would have to
At the beginning of elementary school, the teacher placed Luis in the back of the class and let him play with blocks because she did not know what to do with a non-English speaking child. As mentioned in the book, Luis accordingly became more withdrawn and socially isolated; so bad that he did not even tell somebody that he had to go to the bathroom and the others in class were mocking him because he peed himself. Furthermore, children would get punished for speaking anything but English, a giant obstacle for Mexican-American children who were not yet able to speak coherent English such as Luis.
As a young child, Rodriguez finds comfort and safety in his noisy home full of Spanish sounds. Spanish, is his family's' intimate language that comforts Rodriguez by surrounding him in a web built by the family love and security which is conveyed using the Spanish language. "I recognize you as someone close, like no one outside. You belong with us, in the family, Ricardo.? When the nuns came to the Rodriquez?s house one Saturday morning, the nuns informed the parents that it would be best if they spoke English. Torn with a new since of confusion, his home is turned upside down. His sacred family language, now banished from the home, transforms his web into isolation from his parents. "There was a new silence in the home.? Rodriguez is resentful that it is quiet at the dinner table, or that he can't communicate with his parents about his day as clearly as before. He is heartbroken when he overhears his mother and father speaking Spanish together but suddenly stop when they see Rodriguez. Thi...
Throughout Richards early childhood development he quickly understood that in order to succeed in America he would have to learn to confidently speak in English. Richard is Hispanic American and although he was born in America, Spanish was the only language that he was exposed to as a young child. He grew up in a home where Spanish flowed freely, but he soon realized outside of his home the language that he primarily knew was foreign. His parents spoke fluent Spanish along with all of his relatives. The brief encounters he experienced of his parents speaking English were only in public places and the proficiency was very poor. Rodriguez’s home was as a safety net for him and his Spanish speaking family with they are his only real connections to the outside world. It wasn’t until Richards encounter with his teachers that he and his family was heavily impressed on the importance of developing a public language. After the encouragement of the visit home from a teacher as a family
Firstly, in the author’s childhood, he felt ashamed of his parents poor English. To support this experience, Rodriguez shows his embarrassment by saying, “I tried not to hear anymore… I
Even from an early age, Rodriguez is a successful student. Everyone is extremely proud of Rodriguez for earning awards and graduating to each subsequent level of his education. But all his success was not necessarily positive. In fact, we see that his education experience is a fairly negative one. One negative that Rodriguez endures is his solitude. Education compels him to distance himself from his family and heritage. According to Richard Hoggart, a British education theorist, this is a very natural process for a scholarship boy. Hoggart explains that the ?home and classroom are at cultural extremes,? (46). There is especially an opposition in Rodriguez?s home because his parents are poorly educated Mexicans. His home is filled with Spanish vernacular and English filled with many grammatical errors. Also, the home is filled with emotions and impetuosity, whereas the classroom lacks emotion and the teachers accentuate rational thinking and reflectiveness.
Richard Rodriguez offers an alternate yet equally profound truth: While our heritage and culture may remain forever tied to and expressed in our native or "home" language, only through the dominant language of our country (English in most cases) can we achieve a place in society that gives us a feeling that we belong amongst everyone else. The only way we can truly become a part of our community and fit in is to dominate the current spoken language. In the United States, the dominant language is Standard English. In this excerpt from "Aria," a chapter in his autobiography entitled "Hunger of Memory": The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez discusses public and private languages, and agrees that his achievements in English separated him from his Spanish family and culture but also brought him "the belief, the calming assurance that [he] belonged in public." We as human beings want to feel we belong. We search for that place in society where we are most comfortable all our lives. One should consider the benefits of mastering the dominant language of the society they live in, but should also take into account the harm of taking your native language for granted. I will attempt to explore both of these considerations and examine Rodriguez place in life now, by stating the facts of who is now by the childhood decisions that were made.
Rodriguez discusses in his piece. In his childhood, he spoke Spanish at home and English in his
So that was the case for Richard Rodriguez in “Aria”, he expands on his life as a kid learning to speak English. And his parents not knowing how to speak English fluently. He would not like going to school because when he would try to speak English he would get made fun of. English was never comfortable to him. But that all changed when the nuns from his school came to his house to tell his parents to speak more English at home. He felt broken, there was no talking in Spanish in the house just English. From there he started to learn more English at school and became fluent in it. He even forgot how to pronounce things in Spanish after that. Richard Rodriguez said, “I would speak, or try to speak, Spanish, and I would manage to utter halting, hiccupping sounds that betrayed my unease” (Richard 319). He felt disappointed in himself for not being able to speak Spanish. This is a showing of how language has power. Just because he stopped speaking a language, he forgot it and became more fluent in another
My parents decided to immigrate to the United States when I was six years of age. As we established ourselves in the United States, my first language was only Spanish. Spanish was the language that I was taught at home, and it was the only language to be spoken at home. Rodriguez describes when he first entered his classroom where he was introduced to a formal English-speaking context, writing that, ?I remember to start with that day in Sacramento-a California now nearly thirty years past-when I first entered a classroom, able to understa...
Rodriguez views the same as a public and private language. He explains that the term “private” relates to Spanish language, while the term “public” is the kind of English language he speaks outside home. As he writes “… I wrongly imagined that English was intrinsically a public language and Spanish an intrinsically private one…” (513). In addition, Rodriguez’s reference to the English language as a gringo sound gives an impression of a child’s resentment towards said language. The term gringo in Spanish means los gringos which is a “derogatory term for English-speaking Americans” (512). When Rodriguez parents stopped communicating at home in Spanish, the laughter at home faded along with his private language. This further supports Rodriguez’s statement that “… as we learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents” (515). Thus the end of a once full of laughter home, yet the beginning of Rodriguez’s mastery of the English language. Similar to Tan’s experience, the writer’s rebellious nature challenged her critics by proving that Asian’s skills are not limited to Math and Science. Thus, the decision behind to shift from pre-med to English major. As Tan writes, “I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions made about me” (510). Hence Tan’s strong conviction to resist the convention of
In the beginning of the article, Richard started out by mentioning how his public language which is Spanish will not get him nowhere in life, however by learning a public language which is English will help more in life and make stuff way easier for him. He mentioned being scared and hard for him to learn a public society language. When I came to America 11 years ago, it was hard for me to learn a second language and I doubted myself all the time, however I had family members, teachers and friends pushing me to learn and telling me to not give up even
Lacking the necessary support, many start to devalue the importance of doing well in school deciding that perhaps school isn’t part of their identity. In Susan’s case she’s eliciting multiple forms of subordination, and within each dimension she’s being subjective to different types of oppression; racial oppression, gender oppression, and class oppression, she’s experiencing cultural alienation and isolation and is not only based on her ethnicity as a Latina but is also influenced by how she is treated as a female, as a member of a certain socioeconomic class, and in relation to her English language proficiency, and even her perceived immigration status. In this sense, students like Susan experience different forms of discrimination or marginalization that stems from
While reading this article, one of the most shocking sections was when the students were talking to Monzó and sharing their outlook on their place and their language’s place in society. These students, even at this early age, are feeling how devalued their first language has been. They feel like they have to speak the right* English, only use English in public places, never their first language, and that they must assimilate to the American culture as much as possible. This reminded me of a chapter in Lippi Green (2012)’s text. Within this chapter, Lippi-Green (2012) discusses how in the United States Spanish speakers are not only expected to learn English, but they are expected to learn and utilize the right* English determined by the majority and assimilate entirely to American culture.
Richard Rodriguez states himself he was an “imitative and unoriginal pupil” (Rodriguez 516). He takes what he reads and goes along with it; there is no analysis or individual thought. Unlike his brother or his sister, he feels the need to prove himself. Richard Rodriguez displays a strong yearning to be different. To be special and have esteem like the teachers and professors he venerates.
Goldman, Carrie, and Dorothy Espelage, Ph.D. Bullied: What Every Parent, Teacher and Kid Need To Know About Ending The Cycle Of Fear. First Edition. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2012. 140-141. Print.