Cultural Reflection

أنا لا أتكلم العربية

That says, "I do not speak Arabic," in Arabic.

On Sunday, I attended the 10th Branch. It's the Spanish speaking branch in our stake and we were attending for their ward conference. (I don't think I ever mentioned to the blog world that I got a new calling a couple of months ago to the Stake Primary.) It was an interesting experience because other than recognizing some salutations and numbers, I can't understand a lick of Spanish. I would love to learn, but haven't made it a priority to do so at this point.

It's actually a pretty humbling experience to be immersed into a culture where you know nothing about what's going on. It was humbling because I realize what many of my students go through when they come to the United States and are expected to start learning math, science, literature, etc., in a language and culture that they don't understand. I survived three hours in this environment, but I'm not sure how well I would survive it permanently.

Today, I decided to make my math students write an essay. Stevan came into 5th period, saw the laptop carts and nervously asked, "What are we doing?" I told him that today we were going to write! He very quietly replied, "I don't want to do it."

Stevan is from Baghdad, Iraq. He's been in the United States for around 1-2 years (if I remember correctly) and is a really great, hard working, sincere kid. He tries very hard to learn what we are doing and turns in all of his assignments without fail, except that he skips all word problems. He writes on the back of his paper (holes punched on the right side instead of the left) and very carefully centers all of his work on the lines of his paper, instead of the spaces. He has pretty good conversational skills, but struggles with academic language and will just put his head down if the class gets off on a tangent, talking about something unrelated to math. Also, he doesn't really want anything to do with Shayan from Iran, another student in the class. The dumb American math teacher assumes that Middle Eastern kids would gravitate towards one another since a lot of Hispanic kids do as well as African kids, even though they are from different countries. However, these two kids come from extremely different cultures, plus Stevan speaks Arabic and Shayan speaks Farsi. Stevan and Shayan don't really have much more in common than Stevan and say . . . Jose.

So, what am I writing about? Just as it was humbling for me to sit in the Spanish Branch on Sunday, it was humbling for me to view Stevan's response today in class. I asked him to not worry about the essay, but please try it. He obliged and I watched as he stressed over it. He was using a google Arabic translator and copying and pasting text. He didn't stop working for the entire 45 minutes he had to do it.

Here is what he came up with (the writing prompt, by the way, was to write an essay on whether we are too dependent on calculators):

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INTRODUCTON

We use the Calculator to do the hard work Many use it to resolve it, such as Calculator Riziat in engineering and other things we use the calculator just to work hard or difficult to be a question.Use the calculator only to those who have a question difficult.Or used by those who have digits long.Or to work fast homwork.

body1

We use the calculator just to work hard or difficult to be a question.Use the calculator only to those who have a question difficult becouse.Lessons in order to work fast without dont one halp me with my homwork and to do the hard work i dont kown how to What I know.

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I think we sometimes forget to put these types of experiences into perspective. How difficult would it be if any of us were in Stevan's shoes? Do we realize how easy we all have it? Do we realize how hard kids like Stevan are working to try to get a piece of what the rest of us take for granted? I forget sometimes.