Week Two: The New Girl (Esperanza Means Hope)

The facts in the following story are true. However, elements of people’s identities have been changed to preserve their privacy and anonymity.
We enter the fluorescent-lighted sixth grade classroom.

Janet, Amelia, and I are about to begin Spanish class. Janet, our project sponsor from Esperanza, is also a local college education major who is completing her student teaching requirement for graduation. Emi and I are teachers’ aides who take instruction from her.

Janet sets a poster down on the table. Señora Rodriguez, Janet’s advisor and friend, has already taken a seat next to one of the students and is currently taking attendance. The room is noisy, and just like any other classroom, harmless insults— ¡Cállate! No, ¡cállate tú!—fly around the room. Many of the students at Luis Muñoz Marín School are bilingual. Whether their first language is Spanish or English, they are exposed to the other via their classmates. But what makes the school unique is that Luis Muñoz is committed to making its students literate in both languages. The school, then, is a living laboratory for teaching reading and writing in two languages to a mixed population of native speakers in either or both.

After Señora Rodriguez finishes with attendance, Janet notices one girl in the corner who has not been accounted for.

“Are you a new student?” she asks. Heads swivel in the new girl’s direction, and the girl only nods. “What is your name?”

The girl stares at Janet, her sequin-studded red headband sparkling against her jet black hair. Pen and paper in hand, Janet tries again. “Your name?” she asks, holding the pen ready to write. The girl opens her mouth to speak and mutters something too softly for anyone to hear.

“¿Cómo te llamas?” one of the boys close to her snaps. The girl looks at him, then back to Janet.

“Lakisha,” the girl whispers.

“Lakisha. L-A-K-E…”

“L-A-K-I…” the girl corrects.

“S-H-A?” The girl nods.

“Okay. Well, welcome to our class Lakisha; it’s great to have you here,” says Janet.

“Miss, what’s she doing in our class?” pipes up one of the boys.

“If you have a question, raise your hand, Geraldo,” Janet asks. Geraldo raises his hand. “Yes, Geraldo?”

“Why is she here?”

“Is that any way to treat a new student? She just transferred, so I’d appreciate it if everyone would try to be nice to her, alright?”

“¿Pero ella entiende el español?” the same boy asks. When Lakisha doesn’t respond, he and his friends laugh. I take note of this exchange as part of a pattern I have observed. It appears that when a new Hispanic student doesn’t understand English, the other Hispanic students cover for him until he learns. The reverse, however, is not true. Spanish is a code language used to trump English speakers.

“Alright, let’s just calm down and begin. Clase, today we’re going to make sentences with the verb tener. Who can give me an example of a sentence starting with tengo?”

No one moves.

“Come now, I know someone has an answer. If you can’t think of anything to pair it with, you can use one of the articles of clothing up here on my poster board. Now, who can come up with a sentence using the conjugation for ‘I have’ in Spanish?”

One of the girls in the back raises her hand. “Yo tengo un lápiz.”

“Very good, Saisha. How about another one?”

“Yo tengo mochilla,” the boy next to the new girl cries out.

“Raise your hand next time, but yes, ‘I have a backpack.’ Muy bien. ¿Qué más?”

The new girl lays her head on the desk. I walk over to an empty chair and sit down beside her. She has a blank stare on her face, the kind that states I’m-really-not-in-the-mood-for-this-kind-of-thing-today. She focuses her eyes on her pencil, fiddling with it between the three central fingers of her right hand.

When Janet calls on the new girl to form a sentence with “él tiene,” the girl does not respond. “You can use the words in the poster,” Janet tries. “See—él tiene los guantes. Now, repítalo, por favor.” Again, silence.

After a few tries, Janet gives up and moves on. One of the girls asks to use the restroom. Señora Rodriguez asks if I can escort her and walk her back when she’s done. “It’s a school policy,” she whispers.

When we return, students have pieces of paper in front of them—worksheets, I soon discover, to test their tener conjugation abilities. Everyone except the new girl, whose head is still cradled in her arm-pillow on her desk. I return to my seat beside her. “What’s wrong? Did you not get a sheet?” I ask. No response. “Do you not have a pencil?” I ask. She shakes her head this time.

Then I ask her what I had been wondering from the beginning of class. “Can you speak Spanish?” I ask. She looks up at me, then looks back at her pencil.

“I don’t know a word of anything they are saying,” she says, her head and eyes tilted downward.

“Is that all?” I say. “Well, that’s no problem; I’ll help you out. I didn’t know Spanish either until a few years ago.” I ask Señora Rodriguez for a worksheet and she raises her eyebrows at the girl. “You want to work today?” she asks the girl. The girl nods.

The worksheet consists of basic tener conjugations—mainly, which verb matches which subject of the sentence. If she doesn’t know any Spanish, this’ll be tricky, I think to myself. Then I notice a box at the top of the table, consisting of the verb in all of its conjugated forms.

“Why don’t we try this,” I say to her. “Spanish grammar is no different from English grammar. See the box at the top?” Her eyes focus on the chart. We work through the I, you, he/she/it subject cases.

We continue this process until we get to the vosotros form. “You’re going to laugh,” I say, “but vosotros is kind of like ‘y’all’ or ‘you guys’ in English. It’s not used very often though, so I wouldn’t worry about it.” At the expression “y’all,” Lakisha smiles a wide Cheshire cat grin, as if the two of us are sharing a funny secret. I smile back at her, glad and more than a little relieved.

Completing the worksheet after that is simple. When Janet calls, “Three minutes left,” Lakisha increases her speed, her pencil frantically racing across the page trying to get the work done. She finishes right on time. Another student collects the papers.

“See, it’s not so hard now, is it?” I say. Lakisha flashes me one of those big smiles again.

When Janet tells Emi and me it’s time to go, I stand up from my desk. “Thank you for helping me.” I turn and see Lakisha, grinning her signature grin and upending every stereotype about inner city students who supposedly don’t care about school. She is bright. She wants to learn. She works hard to please the teacher. She has manners. I leave school wondering who learned more from Spanish class that day: Lakisha or I.