(photo of Luis Muñoz Marín School courtesy Cleveland.com)
Hi everyone! I hope all of your senior project endeavors are going well!
I have had a great and exciting first week of project. Emi Mainardi and I are working with a local non-profit organization called Esperanza, Inc., which is a Cleveland based program that places Spanish-speaking tutors in various schools in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Esperanza was designed to support students whose first language is Spanish, but it also brings Spanish instruction to non-native speakers. This week, we have been following our sponsor, a member of Esperanza, while she finished up her last week as a student-teacher at the Luis Muñoz Marín School.
As a quick overview, I am so thoroughly impressed by the number of bilingual students I’ve run across, some starting as young as first grade! Luis Muñoz truly is a unique school and community, as most of the students’ parents speak Spanish at home; in fact, most of the conversations before school and in-between lessons to friends are fired off in rapid Spanish.
Yet for as many people who can speak both languages fluently, there are a few who can only speak either English or Spanish. This inability to be on the same level as their peers usually results in students adopting an “I-don’t-really-care-about-school” façade, creating quite a tricky dynamic for the teachers commanding the classroom to overcome. But it doesn’t mean that underneath it all the kids don’t want to learn.
There are a couple of examples I’ve seen so far of this repeated behavior, but I’ll save that for another day. For now, I’m just content to continue taking mental notes about the lives of these young, impressively bright students! Thanks and good luck everyone! Can’t wait for week two!!
As someone who goes to Puerto Rico every winter break and can never really understand the natives even after years of schooling, i can appreciate how hard it must be to communicate with the kids and am really impressed you are doing this. Especially cause kids usually don't appreciate that its difficult for others, so will speak really fast and not slow down and will be impatient, so its great that you are being so positive. That said, as shown by the very optimistic nature of your post, if anyone can help kids get over those barriers and come to like school, you can, so keep it up!
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