At Least Show Effort

          Danny Martinez's story and by extension the story of his parents, is really interesting and moving, because it is reflective of what so many people experience going through American public schools. When Martinez describes his mother's leaving WHS, he said that she was "pushed out," instead of saying that she dropped out. I liked that he reframed it this way, because that's what it really is. Shoving a student out the door when more effort is needed to help them. Going from being mocked for having an accent and called a wetback to being a teacher in the space of a generation is a remarkable achievement. Even more so because it was at the school that Martinez's parents where considered outcasts at.

        There are so many powerful statements to be found in that reading, but possibly the most powerful is Martinez saying, "I observed youth attempting to make personal and contextual connections with literature only to be dismissed for not using experiences directly from the text to engage in meaning making." (181). What doesn't occur to a lot of teachers is that the reason students aren't making connections directly to the text is because they're using the wrong texts. When they can't find themselves in the works they read or they can't understand what they read, students are not going to suddenly rise to the occasion and make connections to experiences and language that they don't have access to.  In schools English and the structure of power that English use represents is what holds sway and that's supposed to be where all the answers are. But there's other ways.

     Why is it okay to give babies the benefit of the doubt when they're developing language skills, but with Spanish, Mandarin, or French speaking students, they need to be plunged headfirst into the icy waters? The way that schools typically handle instruction of ELL students just doesn't make sense. Instead of providing the maximum amount of resources by letting them use their first language to think and process information, they're hobbled into that stage where they're being treated like children that don't know anything. What Fu is talking about is employing common sense measures to determine exactly what the disparity between first and English language skills is. There is always going to be a major difference between the two when the student is highly literate in their first language. There is a need to categorize whether schooling was disrupted, limited, or sufficient to get new English learners on the right footing to keep up with their peers. You're going to need to treat students differently in those cases. Having ELL students write expressively is a way to asses this, but expressive writing is also a way to relieve students of the draining task of academic writing and the boring task of having to go over the same vocabulary and grammar repeatedly.

    Ultimately ELL students need to feel like they have a community that they can turn to. Sometimes that community is fairly small and just includes the one other person that speaks their language. In other instances this community can be a combined mix of languages and cultures that have shared experiences. Getting to know them and learn about what their concerns are and the challenges they are dealing with will go a long way toward connecting these students to the people they need to thrive in their classroom environment so that they don't end up being pushed out by teachers who value only one official language and can't be bothered to honor the languages that students hold so dearly. For emergent bilingual students, having access to education means having to let go of their words and their identity, but it doesn't have to be like that in the future.