The Insitution of Higher Assimilation

I'm working on a 15-page paper that is going to be due in a few days and I need to get my writing juices flowing. They've been a little bit dry as of late so I am going to use this post to get some thoughts out that have been itching inside of me the past few days to help get out the rust.

I have one more quarter left at UC Santa Cruz and I have to say that after the past 4-5 years of being here, I say that I absolutely loathe what the university does to relationships between students and professors. I had a great conversation today with my professor and today is also the day of my final. That's right. The very last time I am in front of my professor I have what is probably the conversation I have been wanting to have with someone regarding Spanish.

I didn't grow up speaking e-spanish for different reasons, the main one being that my mother was alienated severely for speaking Spanish growing up in the Central Valley of California. When she would speak in class, the teacher would actually hit her for not knowing English. Again, the theme of violence in schools comes up as a theme, and in this case a child, a girl of color was physically hit and psychologically scarred to the point where she refused to teach her children Spanish. But why? Don't we live in a different era? She simply did not want her children to have to go through what she did. Yes, it has been a struggle to learn Spanish, but I respect deeply my mother's decision to teach my brother and me Spanish. Nowadays she speaks to her grandchildren in Spanish when she can and I appreciate that because I didn't have that chance.

I've been taking Spanish classes since junior high and it has been a continual struggle to really grasp the language and be able to speak it, and through now I still am not very fluent. I can listen to it pretty well for the most part, but speaking is my greatest fear. The biggest problem I have is that I freeze up if I can't think of a word to express my thought. I get frustrated VERY easily and want to just give up and stay quiet and flush with frustration and anger at myself. I push through this as much as I can and try to keep my thoughts flowing. So imagine being in this position and taking a class completely conducted in Spanish including the reading, writing, and discussion.

For me, it was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. I had a tough time dealing with taking a class in Spanish because I understood so little of it. We weren't reading "Hi, how are you. Fine, thank you very much," kind of articles. We read articles discussing the histories and theories of modernization and the emergence of social movements in the era of industrialism and modernity. What is a social movement? Why do they start? How do we categorize them? How does globalization, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism play into the dynamics of social movements? Daunting yet interesting stuff, right? =p

So this leads us back to the conversation I had with my professor today (he's the professor for the class conducted in Espanish). I found the class very intimidating because of my inexperience with Spanish. He told me today, however, that I should continue developing my Spanish because the population of the United States is becoming more and more Spanish-language oriented. I laughed as he was saying this, thinking of the irony of his advice, and told him that believe it or not, learning many languages is a goal of mine. I mean a life goal. I want to learn as many languages as I can to be able to communicate with anyone who is in my community. Spanish? Hellz yeah! Vietnamese? You bet your ass! Zapotec? How could you think otherwise! Communication is KEY. It's a very daunting and heavy goal because it has taken a long time to really get a grasp on Spanish. And as I sat there telling my professor about that goal, he told me that I have a strong base in the language and he can tell. He said I need to take more classes conducted in Spanish (not just about learning Spanish structure) to develop it. And he left me with the metaphor that language is like music.

"Toques la guitarra? (Do you play guitar?)" he asked. "Sí," I responded. And he told me something along the lines of, "El lenguaje es como la musica. Cuando toques la guitarra muy bien, tiene dedos muy duros y puedes tocar música como quieres. Y cuando hace mucho tiempo que no tocarla, tus dedos no están muy duros. Si tratas tocarla otra vez, es más difícil porque no tiene dedos duros y la musica no sona la misma. Eso eso como el lenguaje. (Language is like music. When you play the guitar really well, you have hard fingers that let you play however you want. If you put the guitar down and come back to it after some time, you still might remmeber how to play, but the music doesn't sound the same because your fingers don't have calouses, and it can hurt to play after some time. And that is what language is like.)"

I sat in amazement thinking about how poetic he made that analogy sound, and began thinking about how the way the insitution of higher learning currently operates keeps students from getting to know professors as people. We do not go into the classroom as people ready to learn from one another. We go into the classrooms with our roles as students and professors/teachers. We should all really be considered the students and the teachers at the same time and be ready to engage with one another as people. I left there thinking of my professor in a much different light than when I first entered his class. I wondered if he was imply in a great mood today (or just recently in a good mood), but his words were very encouraging to me. They helped me feel inspired to continue working through my insecurity with Espanish, and also signaled to me that he clearly saw some sort of proof that I was being genuine in telling him my poor participation in the class had to do with being scared of Espanish.

And if my intuition is right about him seeing that effort from me, it made me feel like I actually connected with my professor as a person, and that he respected my making myself vulnerable to him in talking to him about my trouble with speaking Espanish. It felt good. It made me feel that much more that I would like to see a world where people enter the classroom or environments of learning with the idea that we can engage with each other as people. Shouldn't our education matter to our real life experiences anyhow? Otherwise, what's the point?

I love learning, but that doesn't mean I don't have any fears keeping me from really engaging. I hope to keep this energy up regarding my education, not just in college, but in life.

On a more political note: for folks out there who might be against "having" to learn Spanish or any other "foreign language" just to be able to communicate with people we live around, I'd just like to suggest that we think about language as a means for us to bridge communities and open the possibilities for getting to connect with people. While I feel an obligation to learn languages, I have it as a goal in life because I love the idea of being able to share and connect with folks who are silenced in this society for not knowing English. Everyone should have a right to not only speak, but to also be heard. And it's a beautiful thing to learn a new language, anyway because it gives so much insight into a culture to know a language. And what I mean by that is learning the language IS learning the culture - a huge part of the culture, but certainly not the whole thing. That's where the people come in. Man. It makes me happy just to think about it. So please take into consideration my suggestion.

So I end this with my original point that while I didn't go explicitly into, is still connected to everything I talked about. No more violence in academia or the classroom! Now! Violence is not connecting with people and treating each other as the roles we fill. I'm not just a student. I have so much history and experience that make up who I am, and so do you!

Thank you for reading and letting me share this with you. I appreciate all eyes and ears who take the time to listen. No joke, haha. And now, to get this final done!