Blog Post #8 - Aria by Richard Rodriguez (Reflection)
Aria by Richard Rodriguez is about his personal experience of growing up speaking Spanish in an English-speaking school. He says that when he was young, speaking Spanish was something special to him and his family. He described it as “private individuality” and gave them a sense of separateness when in public. Having to learn English for school was hard, but by the end of the reading, he says it gave him a sense of success. He felt confident in his public identity, even if it meant forgetting or leaving behind part of his private identity. In Teaching Bilinguals episodes, the teachers advocate for their bilingual students. They encourage students to use the language they know to express themselves in class. I noticed that there was a big contrast between Teaching Bilinguals and Aria. Rodriguez talked about his experience when teachers denied him the opportunity to speak in Spanish. In the videos the teachers are doing the opposite, they are encouraging students to become bilingual and speak in both Spanish and English. I think Rodriguez would have had a much different school experience if he had been encouraged to keep speaking Spanish in school. He would have been able to keep the part of his identity that connected him to his family, while also building the identity that connected him to his peers.
Rodriguez said a quote that resonated with me. He said, “Today I hear bilingual educators say that children lose a degree of ‘individuality’ by becoming assimilated into public society.” While I can’t relate to the experience of a bilingual individual, I do think this quote can also relate to other aspects of students' personalities. A lot of the time students feel the need to assimilate to their peers. I can remember times in my school experience when I felt like I couldn’t express parts of myself in different classes or around different people. This idea of losing part of your individuality, I think is a common school experience. As unfortunate as that sounds. I think if I felt more comfortable in the class environment I may have been more confident in myself. The article I’ve linked explains why individuality is so important. While it doesn’t explicitly talk about school, I think it can still apply to students or a classroom.
Hi Sarah! Your quote also resonated with me the most in our class discussion. I think it is very disheartening to see young individuals feel that they need to change who they are to impress other people around them. Becoming assimilated into public society causes individuals to lose a sense of who they truly are, which prevents them from really appreciating the beauty within their cultures!
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah, I agree with you on the fact that schools would make a greater impact in students' lives if they encouraged them to embrace every part of their identity, not making them choose between one aspect or another but making something greater by putting them together.
DeleteSarah I really liked your approach to this quote and reading. I think assimilation processes especially in a classroom setting creates these harmful effects on students' individuality creating this loss of connection to our backgrounds and what makes each person unique.
ReplyDeleteAfter seeing Rodriguez on video, do you see how he finally developed as an individual? What would those nuns say about him now?
ReplyDeleteI liked the article you included. It adds a great deal of context to the struggles Rodriguez referred to.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your blog and really like the quotes that you used. I think it is important to see how dangerous and harmful assimilation can be in the lives of students daily in the classroom. These students lose a sense of who they are and do not appreciate their culture for it's true values.
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