Aria by Richard Rodriguez Reflecion

This week has been kind of crazy and I feel like the best way to get my thoughts out about Aria is to write a reflection on it!

Richard Rodriguez's personal experience with having to change his language in order to fit into society is so enlightening. Everyone in our class is going to be an educator of some kind, whether its in elementary school, middle school, high school, or anything involving youth development and we're going to have to deal with children who may not understand English as their first language. And I think that's going to be so interesting for us as educators.

I volunteered at my high school's Writing Center when I went to North Providence High School and everyday there was a new challenge. Whether it was a student with learning disabilities or students who didn't have English as their first language. The best part of those tutoring sessions was when the student would have me help them understand what I was trying to say and ask for help with definitions and phrases.

The nuns that Rodriguez talks about in his article, the ones that went to his house and asked his parents to start speaking English around the kids, just aren't the kind of people I wish were teaching him. I feel like that we, as educators, should be encouraging students to understand their native languages and understand that English is not the only language in the world (and that's coming from someone who plans on becoming an ENGLISH teacher).

I found this really cool article by Joe Levitan called Bilingual Students Need Support in Their Native Language and it talks all about how important encouraging not only English but a need to encourage a student's native language is. Also, how important it is to understand a native language in order to learn a second language like English.

I just want to end with a photoset from a show called Modern Family, where one of the characters speaks English as a second language and its kind of like her running joke that she doesn't use words correctly or says phrases in a weird way. And this photoset shows the moment she stands up for herself and has "drop the mic" kind of moment where you realize that maybe this running joke wasn't really all of that kind or funny in the first place. As a comedy show, it does try to get a chuckle in when she says a phrase wrong in that middle left picture, but overall, hopefully the message is clear.