prompt #6

Being in a school setting that was multicultural made for a lot of sociocultural and linguistic differences. Some of the classrooms tried to help this problem by having a teacher that spoke fluent Spanish. The problem with this, however, was many of these teachers did not speak fluent English.

Lisa Delpit’s article “The Silence Dialogue” talks about the culture of power and learning the rules of it. It’s very obvious that there is a culture of power in the United States right now, and white English speaking individuals fit that. Every child has his or hers cultural differences and while they should accept that, they must also learn how to succeed in our society. That is how it works right now.

One of the examples Delpit gives is that of a young Native American woman who submitted a completely illegible paper because she had little concept of spelling and sentence structure. Other professors thought that the woman should never have been let into a teacher preparation program, which Delpit did not agree with. She believe that he woman should have learned the proper grammatically rules that entail writing papers, but also that to bring this student into a program and pass them through without attending to her lack of expertise in the area is a crime in itself. Students need to be taught properly in order to succeed in life.

Two of the classrooms I was in had a very serious problem I couldn’t help but notice. When one of the Spanish speaking teachers helped students with their homework things didn’t quite add up. Many times I would check a student’s homework to see a string of wrong answers, only to hear from the child “Miss Cheri already helped me with my homework.” This is elementary school work; anyone in charge of helping these students should be able to handle the course load. Simple mathematical problems going over adding and subtracting are easy enough to check, a teacher should not miss errors in a student’s paper repeatedly. What was even worse is I saw teachers helping Spanish speaking students write English sentences. If I were to re-check their work nothing would make sense. I would have to go back over everything “Read this out loud for me. Tell me if anything sounds funny?” If a teacher isn’t able to recognize the nonsensical nature of sentence structure, how will a student ever learn to?

Yes, Delpit does believe in a diversity of style, and that every culture group should have the right to maintain its own language style, but I believe that there needs to be a primary knowledge of our nation’s first language because without it a person with struggle in every other aspect of their life.