Language

After a couple months of teaching English at Ak’Tenamit’s school for indigenous students, I have come to some realizations. Several students at our project come from an orphanage in Guatemala City. Often, these young people come from dire circumstances having been brought up in broken homes, been abused, and some on the streets. Knowing the reality for the majority of their lives was an existence on the street, it should be no surprise that these members of our community are as clever and street smart as they are. They learned to survive by any means necessary. Along with their trickster pranks (some certainly more serious than others) these ten kids or so, speak the best English at the project. The scary thing: they aren’t in the English classes. Yesterday, after five hours of trips on the boat as a chaperone, I think I might have come to some sort of a conclusion on the matter. The capitalinos have spent their lives – even while on the streets – surrounded by the globalized world and mass media. Television and movies in English, music in the streets and on the radios. For some time, this left me somewhere between blown away and ashamed. Blown away because these kids picked this language up living on the streets. Ashamed because these kids speak significantly better than the students in my class.
Chaperoning this trip gave me five hours on a boat with my students. Many asked me questions; there favorite being “como se dice…” followed by a complete sentence in Spanish, or “how do you say…” I want to play soccer today. It was a bit disheartening, especially knowing that many of the words they asked me to translate were words we had already learned. Ok, that aside. On this boat ride I began to feel these students need a “real teacher;” someone with experience because I felt helpless. It dawned on me at one point some time ago though that I have to begin to take each disadvantage that I see and turn it in to a positive, not only for myself, but for the students as well. Why did the students from Guate have a better level? Why haven’t my students the least bit of an idea to pronounce some of these words we have been learning for two months? In part the answer has to do with globalization. To this point, the extended arms of the western world, its media and money making machine have yet to completely infiltrate the communities where most of my children grew up. Television still isn’t prevalent, and even when it is, English doesn’t dominate the airwaves.
So although frustrated – often, by the low level of my students in the classroom – the reality is that we too, can flip this into a positive. Unlike many parts of the developing world which have been pillaged of resources, culture, and everything down to their language, the indigenous Maya communities where we work, where my students come from, have been able to maintain the aforementioned aspects of life. And had the same process occurred in these communities, yes, it is true that the level of English would be substantially better, even if driven by mass media. My job would be much easier, and the kids would probably have more fun, self-esteem, and determination to learn as they could measure their own progress by the results that were built upon their initial level of the language.
This, however, is not the case. And I realized too, on this trip, that if I had a classroom full of Mayan students who spoke at the level of English that those same students from the Capital speak, it may very well result in the loss of their own language. I’m always so proud to see my students proud of themselves, their culture, and their identity. If their lack of English is a trade-off for that pride, I should begin to welcome it openly and just work a bit harder to find a better balance to life.