Personal Narrative: Bilingual Education

I slowly began losing the language I used to speak so much, Spanish. As the years went by in Elementary

Again I was struggling not to let myself down and to learn the concepts of the new country. At first everything was hard; I had a lot of difficulties on all my classes due to the lack of reading and understanding the language. I remember when my 7th grade English teacher handed me the book “A Child Called It” by Dave Pelzer; I was stuck in the first page “I’d never realized so many words existed!”(Malcolm X 432).I kept solving my problems by myself, using the dictionary, searching words on the internet, and comparing some Spanish words with English ones. For some reason I didn’t like when people tried to translate and when the school tried to assign me Spanish tutors. I felt that getting help in Spanish wasn’t any good and it just disrupted my learning. Even though school was hard “I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky.” (Alexie 447).I accomplished my goal of passing 7th grade. During the summer I used to go to the library and read books, because I didn’t understand most of them, and I found reading in English innocuous for the first month. After I got the handle of reading and writing once again, I felt confident of myself, and my life came back to normal.

Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Richard Rodriguez is an essay that shows his readers a part of life that many have never experienced. Rodriguez uses this essay to show how he fights through his childhood to understand English. Speaking clear English will help him to fit in to society. He faces society while forfeiting his happy home life, to try to become a typical English-speaking student.

My entire family was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. After three and a half years of living there my family decided to seek a better future in The United States. My father would go to the United States back and forth to work and earn money to send to us in Mexico. Eventually my mother was able to get a visa and my brother along with my little sister had an alternate way into the United States. We lived in Dallas Texas and Atlanta Georgia before settling in Howard county Maryland in a very small apartment. Luckily we were doing pretty well with my dad being the only one knowing English at the time. My father was working two jobs and I was getting ready to start kindergarten. I was very excited because the education we would have received in Mexico was nothing compared to the education in Howard County. I was excited for what was to come, but there were disadvantages of knowing only Spanish. Being bullied because of my poor English had an impact on me. I was in completely separate classes learning things that were simple compared to the regular course. I was excluded from certain activities, field trips and assemblies. I was clueless at first though as I slowly learned the language I understood things a lot more.

Were they laughing at me? I did not understand what they were saying. I was not always bilingual. My roots and upbringing were implanted by Ukrainian principals. When my parents came from Ukraine, they did not know the English language; therefore, I was brought up only speaking and understanding Ukrainian. This caused a barrier in the way I interacted with kids my age. I was shy and timid, never leaving my parents side. Upon entering school, I had very limited knowledge of English. Making friends was hard because my accent was heavy and my school lunch smelled funny. I was mortified to go to school everyday. My papers always came back with a bit more red errors and I never did well on spelling quizzes. I lacked the ability to read books as efficiently as the kids in my class. Reading gave me the most trouble: silent vowels did not reach a recognition point, basic comprehension skills were lacking, and my words per minute was always below mediocre. Eventually, I was enrolled in an English Language Development (ELD) program for lagging behind in class. I loathed being the only kid in the class that had to leave. I was taken

Teachers have the power to change the world and to make a difference in the student's life. Teacher is a facilitator of knowledge, motivator, advisor and a positive person that can improve the student's education. I decided to pursue the career of education because I have the desire to help others. I also have the ambition to provide encouragement and support to the people that need it. Becoming a teacher means more than sharing my knowledge to the students. It is a commitment with society to shape the performance and learning of future generations.

When I entered school my parents refused to place me in the Spanish-speaking classroom. They feared the discrimination I would face as an immigrant segregated from Americans, a complexity that they combated everyday in their lives. No matter what my parents tried, they could not shake the feeling that they did not belong here. So much so that I was forced into an English speaking class with barely any knowledge of the language. Although I was scared at first, I was an obedient student and thus able to blend in like any American child, just like my parents wanted. After a couple years, I even began to give my father basic lessons in the English language during dinnertime, explaining to him the difference between hot dog and perro caliente. Somewhere between my effortful pronunciation and accidental commentary in English, I lost him. He exclaimed that he didn't need to know English, that I knew it well enough for the entire family. As the reality hit me, my

I no longer had my dad by my side to translate for me. Nevertheless, I still maintained my optimism. Our house was nearby the school, so me and my mom would walk together. When we arrived there was a giant playground with trees and rocks and a mob kids were running around. The teachers supervising told my mom that she had to leave, so she did. Suddenly all the excitement that I had felt had turned into sadness and loneliness. It had hit that I couldn’t communicate with anybody. So I stood in the corner by the teachers and watch the kids run around. When it was time to go inside I lined up with all the kids and went inside. For some reason, I ended up in Mrs.Pettingen first grade class. She gave us a piece of paper and some crayons, so I drew a picture. I ended up drawing El Faro de Chipiona and when she saw what I was drawing she started talking to me. I had no idea what to say, so I said the only thing I knew “hello.” From there on I just started speaking Spanish, trying to tell her that I didn’t understand English. Thankfully, there was a woman in the room that knew Spanish and started translating for us. The next day it was the same thing except I went with another teacher. This teacher had brown, short hair with round glasses and would take me to the stage. Every day we would go on the stage and learn some English. Throughout the year, I would bounce from teacher to teacher each one with the task of teaching me English. I

When I first moved here, from Mexico, it was great because I didn’t go to school due to the fact that we had arrived about two months before school ended and my parents didn’t think it’d be such a good idea to enroll me at that time. Then, I began school in Kahakai Elementary (second grade, since I missed a year and I had gone to kinder in Mexico) and it was really hard for me. Since I only spoke Spanish I felt intimidated by everyone who surrounded me because I didn’t understand a word they said and

It was a gleaming Tuesday morning, and first period I had my first Spanish class since I’d been gone on my two week trip. Scared out of my wits (for I had not reviewed the conjugations of estár), I stepped into the classroom, knees knocking as Mr. Copen stared me down. “Good morning, Ms. Ward,” he nodded, grinning, “shall we start off your first class back with a game of estár Family Feud?” As the class was cheering and sprinting to their places in line, I held back for the fear I might faint; this was it, this was the death of me. The line grew shorter and shorter as Kaci and I walked closer and closer together until we finally reached our two bells. Mr. Copen knew very well that I had not reviewed, and chose to give us the hardest conjugation,

English is not my first language but I wish I would’ve started learning English at a younger age. I have studied English in both reading and writing throughout my high school. However, the education system in South Korea does not fully encourage students to learn second languages, but the system is more focused on mathematics. For this reason, there were less hour of English classes per week compared to math.

In America today, 21% of K-12 students speak a language other than English at home and require some type of assistance to learn English in school. This equates to nearly 5 million students every year. The most common type of language assistance is an ELL or English Language Learner program. There are new and more effective solutions being practiced including Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE). Due to the rising numbers of non-native English speakers in the school system today, finding and implementing the best English acquisition program is key to helping these students be successful, which I feel is the Transitional Bilingual Education program because it will help students grasp English better, students stay on grade level and

My education started at South Suburban Montessori School, which I attended from kindergarten until the second grade. The Montessori School curriculum emphases free thought and creativity for its students. The emphasis was on doing what felt right. The teachers allowed me to confuse spoken and written words between the languages because they did not want to crush my creativity. While this worked for this type of school setting, it did nothing to prepare me for the move to public education or life. My parents eventually realized that the Montessori school was not meeting my needs educationally or socially. I still had difficulty transitioning between languages. I was not as successful in school as my sister had been. I had difficulty making friends. I was

It is the extraordinarily young hours of May 24th, 1993. The sun is trying with all its might to shine its’ light through the hospital windows in an attempt to bring life back into the world. In this hospital, the smell of the sterile hair fills everyone’s nose as the nurse’s bustle about, tending to their patients. Then, the wail a newborn baby rings out through the silent maternity ward halls; I have been born. Fast forward almost 21 years into the future. My name is Deanna Mix and I was born in Nashville, Tennessee to Aneta and Gary Mix. Five years later, my parents had my younger and only sibling, Samantha. I spent the first 11 years of my childhood in Tennessee, a state I truly love and intend on moving back to the fall season to continue my education in International Relations. In Tennessee, we lived with my babcia and dziadek, which is Polish for grandma and grandpa. Since my mother and her side of the family moved to America from Poland, I grew up in a bilingual family, and I was able to learn a second language fairly early in life. That being said, according to many psychological studies, learning a second language early greatly helps a child’s cognitive development (http://tip.duke.edu/node/866). Soon after my 11th birthday, I moved to Belleview, Florida were I still currently reside. Shortly after we moved, my parents went their separate ways, with both of them eventually remarrying. In the year 2012, I finally graduated from Belleview High school, and since I had

I grew up in the central part of San Antonio, a small little white house with paint chipping all over. The neighborhood I lived in was of much lower class. Both of my parents worked a lot; my dad was in the military so he was not around very often. My mom worked at Citibank with a somewhat regular work schedule. Every morning she would drop me off at my grandma’s, and I would stay with my grandma between 8 and 6 every day. My grandma spoke mainly Spanish, but growing up my parents kept my first language as English and never spoke to me in Spanish so it was very hard for me to communicate with my grandma especially if she forgot to tell me what she was saying in English. Over time I just really wanted to understand what she was saying so I would ask her to teach me things in Spanish. Every day we would sit down over lunch and my grandma would write on a piece of paper different words in Spanish and teach me how to communicate the basics with people who only spoke Spanish. It helped a lot, I was able to understand what she would tell me and even sometimes speak with her in Spanish.