Aria

"No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness. Neither my older brother or sister rushed home after school anymore."
This quote made me so sad imagine being in school for about 6 long hours where you are forced to speak a langauge that is not your own and then be sent home and have to worry about continuing practing this other language when you native language just slowly dissapears. I certainly wouldn't wnat to rush home either if i had to be forced to express my feelings in ways that just wasnt natural to me.
"-mama and papa-I couldn't use anymore. They would have been too painful reminders of how much had changed in my life."
This really made me stop and think for a minute becasue not being able to call your mother and father what you call them in your language would be the absolute last straw for me these poor children are getting so confused and it is just over looked in the school systems becasue english is the right way and everything else is just secondary.
"Fewer words passed between parent and child."
How is a child supposed to succeed in something they are forced to learn when now there is no communication between themselves and their parents? The more and more english that was forced upon this family actually broke them apart and this is so sad because now they dont even know how to speak to eachother I couldn't imagaine going home and not knowing how to talk to my family but the school system is doing this to families all over.
This reading made me feel so sad for bilingual children. Being bilingual is amazing but i had no clue how painful it must be. I couldn't imagine having English be my second language and yet here children are getting a part of their culture taken away from them by being forced to use their English. I could not imagine coming home and being forced to speak Spanish but for Spanish people English is enforced so their children can do better I know if I had to speak Spanish to improve my grades my parents would certainly make me do it. This reading really opened my eyes to how one way school systems can be. I'd be appalled if someone made me speak another language before my own language but this is happening everyday in millions of homes and I never even thought about it. I'm 18 and I can't even speak two languages but now we have bilingual kinder gardens where these children are learning how to be perfect in English and just okay in their natural language. This reminds me of a girl in one of my classes in high school. This girl spoke three languages and English was her third and for the class we were in together we had to write a ten page paper. I could not imagine writing a paper in anything other than English but this poor girl had to put together ten well thought out pages of her third language. There is no way i could write a paper in another language so forget trying to write on in my third language. This reading really opened my eyes to how tough some children have it and how they are losing a big chunk of themselves when being forced to speak English. I feel like our education system really needs to adjust so everyone can learn properly and not be forced to do something in an unnatural language to get by and meet the proper"codes".

click here to see if you could understang the directions to this preschool spanish worksheet. Chances are you can take a guess because it is for preschoolers but there are words on the page i couldnt figure out if it wasnt for the picture.