Re: failure and resistance

From: Kevin Rocap (krocap@csulb.edu)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2001 - 10:11:45 PDT


Dear Renee,

Thank you. Very eloquently you have made one of the fundamental cases
for bilingual education in the U.S. Bilngual education theory and
practices are predicated on the distinction between social and academic
language development. The "sink or swim" model your daughter is
experiencing is what many folks who oppose bilingual education in the
U.S. want for all of our immigrant students and English language
learners. So it is not surprising that they become "at-risk," like your
daughter, in the process. I suppose my point is that your example of
personal "failure and resistance" is also illustrative of the effect of
systems of policies, research and practices (whether utilized, ignored
or opposed) on learners. The personal is political, and based in larger
activity systems as well.

In Peace,
K.

renee hayes wrote:

> Hi, I normally lurk and since I've been feeling a bit guilty about it,
> and since this failure/resistance discussion speaks to me on a
> personal level, I am going to contribute a personal anacdote about my
> daughter.
>
> We are from the US and moved to Spain one and a half years ago. In
> the place where we live, there are not many immigrants, I guess, so no
> services to help kids in school who don't speak Spanish. So my
> daughter just sort of went to school and sat in the classroom (she was
> 11, now 12 years old). The idea was that she would eventually get the
> hang of the language and gradually start to participate as she learned.
>
>
>
> But that's not at all what happened. It was a curious pattern,
> because for the first few months she got nothing but praise from her
> teachers, because she was learning the language so quickly, and seemed
> eager to learn, etc. Then things went downhill, and by the end of
> this school year in June she had failed the year, and her teacher
> described her as completely uninterested in learning and with an
> oppositional attitude.
>
>
>
> How did this strange thing happen? My interpretation is that she was
> very happy at school as long as she was able to perform better than
> was expected, this worked well when there were no expectations and
> when she could say "hola!" everybody praised her. Then, as the
> expectations raised (rather suddenly, I think, because as soon as she
> could speak conversationally her teachers assumed she understood
> everything in the class.) Her teacher reported that she seemed
> distracted and unattentive in class, and she reported to me that she
> was ashamed to participate in class because of her lack of fluency,
> and that she really didn't understand the lecture and was afraid to
> reveal that. Then she told me that her teacher seemed not to like
> her, and she became angry with him, which only caused her to withdraw
> more. I think for her it was better to seem bored and uninterested
> than to seem inadequate.
>
>
>
> For me this is a classic case illustrating the complex interplay
> between failure and resistance, because in a strategy designed to hide
> her inadequencies, she helped create an atmosphere of animosity
> between her teacher and herself. To make matters worse, my language
> skills were developing at the same time, and it was very difficult and
> intimating for me to try to speak with her teacher. I tried a few
> times, because my feeling was that this was all a big understanding,
> and we could resolve it through better communication. But my Spanish
> in the beginning just wasn't up to it, and towards the end of the year
> the relationship between him and my daughter and me (the shy, quite
> mom, which I am ANYTHING BUT in real life) had become so ingrained
> that it was hard to change.
>
>
>
> Maybe some day she and I will make a conference presentation together...:)
>
>
>
> Renee
>



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