Still in School

I have to send a big shout out to Mrs. Barbara Bennett, inimitable Spanish teacher for twenty five years, many of them spent at Banneker HS. First class at USDA last Wednesday (has it been that long?) was a breeze thanks to three years of her daily Spanish regimen, and one month spent in Cuba. The couple classes I took in school amounted to little more than fulfilled graduation requirements. Mrs. Bennett, on the other hand was the real deal. By the time I graduated, I was reading Marquez en espanol.

So why take Spanish now, ten years later? First motivation was so I can live and work abroad, perhaps Spain or Latin America. But, cruising through a few classrooms in DCPS, I was shocked at how voices speaking Spanish have just tripled, quadrupled, or just silenced English as the predominant language.

A little background. Obviously, with all the references to this DC school or that, namely Banneker, I went through DCPS as a twig with glasses. And in all of the fifteen or so years, I met a handful of students whose first language was Spanish, and/or immigrated here from Latin America. In our horribly unfair social system, non-native speakers were treated worse than the SpEd kids. At least the Sped kids understood English, (duh?!) the most basic of skills we reasoned with more jingoism than cultural awareness. We were ten years old and horribly self-conscious.

And an example to illustrate. Ethnic breakdown at Bruce Monroe in 2003: 3 Asian, 167 Black, 174 Hispanic, 3 White. (This is a school that was previously predominantly black, and not all schools have populations like Bruce Monroe). Of course it was predicted a few years ago that non-white people would become the majority sooner than we thought. DC even passed a law that mandates government documents be translated into five major languages spoken in the city (other than English): Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Amharic. Linguistic diversity is old news to policy makers, but new to young Washingtonian who encounters it in schools formerly all black and all English-speaking.

Back to the classroom. All signs in Bruce Monroe ES are in English and Spanish. At Tubman, Brightwood, Truesdell and I’m sure others, the office staff is bilingual. For these schools, these are new developments. No more running off to Mr. Rodriguez to translate for the Spanish speaking parent.

When I was in school, there was an older woman with orthopedic shoes who would pull out the two Spanish speaking students for English lessons. We never knew where they went. Truly a relic of old school pedagogy. Lots of classes in DCPS are supported by an in-class ESL instructor. The days of degrading escorts to the small classroom behind the storage closet-- numbered. Optimistically, I imagine Latino and Black students hanging out, studying together, kicking around balls on the playground, banding together to give the teacher a hard time.

Pie in the sky, it definitely is. In neighborhoods as resource-starved as some of ours in DC, conflicts are definitely going to arise and blows thrown. But once bandages are removed and classes back to normal, there is always greater understanding. This generation will be far more culturally aware, and hopefully more politically progressive than others, simply because they’re not afraid of the “other.” A Mexican student isn't an anomaly, a wonder, or an oddity. They are real people with realized identities (who can defend themselves against base fourth grade social strata).

The real struggle, I think, won’t be resolving conflicts in integrated schools. It will be actually integrating schools like Ballou—1084 Blacks, 2 Asian, 2 Hispanic, and 2 white as of 2003—that, in terms of cultural progress, are still in the 60s. What can be done about that?

Peace y’all, I’ve got a Spanish lesson to study.