Push and Pull
“Do you think one of your new students would be willing to share their story with my Geography class?”
I paused, half-smiled, and shrugged.
My colleague had stopped me for a moment during passing. High school kids collected around us, waiting for our conversation to move on with the flow of the afternoon. She was asking me if one of our newcomer students who had recently immigrated would describe to her class what it’s like to come to our school as an immigrant. Two young men had recently joined my caseload from Mexico and Honduras this year. In the first two weeks of school, we had been muddling through English and Spanish together; both boys endlessly patient with my attempts to make a mostly white, rural school a comfortable place for them.
I want to clarify my own voice: I am not an immigrant, but I work with immigrants. I’m an English Language Learner teacher for a suburban high school. The sort of school that has exceptional athletes, new furniture that coordinates with the school colors, and a graduation rate that leaves a small margin of students behind. Those students are often the students I work with. I’m coming to realize that I’m navigating what is supposed to be an a-political role at a time when my job could not be more politically charged.
Plyler vs. Doe, the 1982 supreme court case which granted immigrant language learners the right to an education is rounding thirty-six years, but there is still no legal binding which describes how we plan to guarantee an equitable education for multilingual learners — simply that we must. Where does that leave our schools? Where does that leave our teachers who are already balancing so many needs? Where does that leave our immigrant students? Especially the most vulnerable ones — separated from parents, from their homes, from their language, from the tools they need to show that they are indeed intelligent and valuable to this country.
My great grandparents immigrated from Germany. They were farm people and raised their children to help on their farm. There is a photo of my grandfather sitting with his four brothers on the stoop of a pharmacy, an advertisement for Cedar Crest ice cream behind them. Two brothers have on newsboy hats, and two brothers have shaved heads. Some of them have shoes, some do not. The family story goes that you had a choice every school year: shoes or a haircut, but not both. Sometimes I try to think about what it must have been like for my grandfather and his brothers who worked in the same fields that many immigrants now work in. What was school like for my grandmother, who was bilingual in German and became a teacher herself? Was it an alienating place, where she felt alone, or was she moving easily between English and German with the other farm kids in River Falls? By the time my grandmother passed away, the only German phrases she knew were “gazuntite” and “dummkopf.”
I never even thought to take German in high school. My literate life began in English, often on my grandmother’s gold paisley couch, reading old classroom books that had “Mrs. Hayes” written in the cover. Words and reading and writing felt personally connected to the people I loved. And easy. Getting an English degree was easy. Getting another one was easy. I’m not saying this with pretense. For a child who had the privilege of growing up in a literary family, being monolingual in a monolingual country was easy.
But trying to become bilingual at my job has been hard. So hard that I’m beginning to wonder if I have trouble processing languages other than my first. So hard that I sometimes wonder why, as a not quite bilingual white woman I was offered this job. And why are so many EL teachers in my consortium also monolingual white women? What is going on with this system and how am I contributing to it?
But I end up having to put those questions aside, because now I am angry. Because my struggle is nothing compared to my students’. My colleague had good intentions. Yes, our monolingual students need to learn about the experience of immigrants in our country, what it means to be a functional language learner, and what it’s like to be uprooted and moved to a place that is not home. But it is not the job of our newcomer immigrant students to educate their monolingual peers.
It’s my job, and the job of our education system.
And so this year, I hope to better educate myself in Spanish, and how to move beyond the suspiciously simple requirements of our system. Because I owe it to my immigrant great grandparents, and my students who are immigrants like they were.
