When I was twenty years old, I decided that for whatever reason, the main goal I had for myself in life was to learn five languages by the time I was thirty. I grew up in a Guatemalan household in which we were taught to respect the boundary between our “home” language and our “school” language. Home was Spanish, school was English. My mom believed that keeping this boundary would help us develop concrete fluency in both languages. Thanks to my parents’ philosophy, I grew up a fully bilingual Spanish/English speaker. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was given an amazing gift because true bilingualism is something that is hard to create. More often it happens through a collision of fortuitous circumstances.When I was eighteen, I decided to embark on another language by my own choosing. Learning french was an incredibly gratifying experience and is what I consider to be my first true learning experience, as I was painfully aware of every minute mistake, hesitation and awkward slip. I vividly remember struggling to make my mouth wrap around their (to me) foreign phonetic system. I remember my throat being sore for days after a 1.5-hour session on just the french “r.” I remember learning vowel teams that made no sense to my Spanish/English brain. I remember learning french syntax, then slowly blending in colloquial expressions, which opened a new uncharted territory of my brain in which I could no longer tie new concepts to familiar Spanish/English ones. Learning a new language as an adult was not easy or painless. It took many tiresome repetitions of conjugation tables. It took many repetitions of writing sentences in a particular syntactical structure until it stuck. It took learning complex sentence structures and adding in even more complex tenses. All in all? Six semesters of college, one summer in France and countless “language practice nights” to really get the hang of it.
So it was that at 25, I decided it was time for lingua numero quatro: Portuguese. I took six months of Portuguese in Austin, then two years later booked three weeks of intensive Portuguese classes, an apartment with two Brazilians and their bulldog, then hopped on a plane to the city of Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul. I relived each agonizing moment of the anxiety you’re faced with in what are usually normal, mundane daily moments. You would think that after a decade of dealing with banks, entering a bank wouldn’t be such an ordeal requiring the guard on the other side of the glass door practically yelling at you because you don’t have the vocabulary to understand that the metal detectors won’t allow the door to open if you don’t put all metal objects and your cell phone aside before entering. And let me tell you, it sucks getting stared at like an idiot by a sixteen-year-old cashier at a grocery store because they’re quickly mumbling acronyms of Brazilian systems you didn’t know existed, and you just shrug because you don’t know what they want from you. It’s equally embarrassing to order a plate of food for dinner, getting a skeptical look in exchange,, only to realize you basically ordered a huge plate of cubed cheese, nothing else.
And it was worth every moment. Now, having learned a new language with five years experience as a high school English teacher under my belt, it made me realize that learning a new language is quite possibly one of the most beneficial things I could have done for my educator self. As we age, we tend to get into our routines and comfort zones. We know (for the most part) what life offers us, and we become more selective about the experiences we want. Fully immersing yourself in a different language is like plunging into a deep, cold pool. The first few seconds are abysmally shocking, and it’s only after you start forcing your muscles to tread water, breath steadily and get into a groove that you start feeling ok about being submerged in this foreign matter. Learning a language is exactly like that. There are few moments you aren’t painfully aware of how you sound to other people, aware of how much much brainpower it’s taking you to recall, craft and pronounce every word and sentence. It takes weeks of “treading” to start feeling like you’re getting the hang of it.
As teachers, we forget what that process was like--being asked and forced to do things daily that push us past our natural limits. It is exhausting and it does take a certain amount of bravery to repeatedly do things in which we are very likely to fail. That month speaking Portuguese with Brazilians presented many moments to me in which all I could think about was how these situations were likely the ones my students experienced daily. It was certainly embarrassing to have to speak out loud days I wasn’t feeling on my game. I imagined my listener questioning how mentally proficient I was, much how my students probably feel when I ask them to read or answer critical questions out loud in class. Reading in Portuguese was often frustrating when I’d get to a phrase where a combination of vocabulary and foreign syntax forced me to stop, look up a word, try to figure out what the sentence was saying, and then realizing I’d forgotten what the paragraph was even about because it’d taken so long to do all that. That is probably what my students go through when confronted with any text slightly beyond their reading level.
And here’s the insane thing: I CHOSE to experience that awkwardness. Our students don’t have that choice. Education, after all, is compulsory in our country. Our students are asked daily to put themselves in the most humbling situations a person can experience, yet we become frustrated with them when they aren’t giving us their best every day, when they’re “too tired,” when they don’t provide us beautiful, thought-out responses. We don’t, however, stop and ask them to reflect on how they’ve grown day-to-day, why they don’t feel comfortable answering things out loud, reassuring them that “to err, is human.”
If nothing else, learning a new language will render you a more empathetic being, and will equip you to better to support your students with varying perspectives. You’ll have the presence of mind to know when you should be breaking things apart more for students, when to give more time, when to assist students with building confidence. As researchers of a study on multilingualism at the University of London, Birbeck concluded: “To speak a second language authentically is to take on a new identity. As with empathy, it is to step into a new and perhaps unfamiliar pair of shoes.” To further this analogy, walking in someone else’s shoes enables you to fully understand and reach that person better. As educators in an increasingly multicultural world, isn’t this one of our largest challenges? If many educators chose to undergo the process of learning another language, I get the feeling we’d have many more students being reached, helped and pushed beyond limits ever before seen.
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