Rethinkingschools. org published an article,? Que es deportar? “: Teaching from students’ lives”, Written by Sandra L. Osorio. In this article, Osorio is a bilingual teacher who teaches native Spanish speakers according to the second-grade curriculum. She that cares deeply for her students and navigates her way around the curriculum to include more space for her students to get involved during their time together in class.
Throughout this time spent together the students read books in which they can relate to, eventually they are more open and go on to talk about their personal lives and how they feel about school. Many of her students don’t have a positive view on school and feel left out. Besides difficulties at school they also face difficulties at home, often at times they carry worrisome emotions that shouldn’t be present in a kid. When reading this article, things to keep in mind is the main purpose.
The last paragraph was clear to state the main purpose, “I realized the importance of not grouping all Latina/o narratives into one stereotypical box. (Osorio)” In other words, Latino/a’s are usually all viewed as the same, but the truth is that not all have the same backgrounds and origins which makes these individuals different. The way this article is written, it seems like this conclusion does not suit this article well. The main point could have been, “Many Latino students face difficulties at school due their ethnicity.
The reason why this statement better suits this article is because everything in this writing connects back to how these students are performing and feeling about school, these students have a different culture and lifestyle than the typical American home so they will have a different view towards school. In this case fear of family separation, school curriculums and school communication, are connected to immigration problems that challenges these kids in school. The unfortunate truth is that many kids start to pick up after their parents worries causing school to be hard.
Under the subheading “Making Space for Students’ Fears”, Osorio’s mentioned what one of her students said. This student was describing a scenario in which her and her family were going out for a drive when they spotted a police car, after spotting this police car the mother directed the kids to slouch down in their seats so the police man won’t come after them. Alejandra later went to say that she feels bad being Mexican-American because her parents and older sister would get deported, while her and her younger sister would get to stay.
Keeping in mind that Alejandra is still only a second grader, she is already starting to develop fears of losing her parents. In such cases, where parents are always worried, children can be affected by this and carry this feeling of being worried onto themselves too. When children are presented with so much worried feelings it can lead to poor problem solving. According to Osorio these students scored low on the benchmark tests and pressured Osorio to teach more English to the students. In a 2011 study, 57 kids ages 6-10 took a test in which they had to responded to open ended questions.
At the end, the results concluded that children with high levels of worry have low levels of confidence and avoid problems associated with social situations (Wilson). Young children who carry adult worries tend to develop negative traits that affect school performance. Too often schools make Latino kids ability to succeed harder. For example, books that are brought into US. Schools make no connections with Latino kids. Latino students are growing up in different backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. On the other hand, American kids grow in different traditional US values than Latino kids.
Osorio made a great statement when she pointed out, that out of 5,000 children’s books that are published only 66 are about Latinos/as, leaving the rest Latino culture free. Most children books have more kinship to the American kids. Reading books in which someone can’t see themselves in, results in an unengaging learning process. In addition, these kids received low benchmark scores, so in compliance to the with the curriculums’ expectations, Osorio was asked to more English and to use less Spanish during class time—this also included less time reading in Spanish.
The answer is to let these students succeed, not repress who they are. These second graders are still young and learning at this point in age is critical. In a recent experiment research, bilingual infants around the age of 3 were used to participate in a study of language development where attention was focused on how much these infants can talk in English or Spanish and the speed of it.
The results were that those children that didn’t have enough learning environment support were more likely to have poor critical language learning skills (Marchman et al. . Taking away their native language will only complicate the process of learning, instead an alternative could have been done to raise benchmark scores. Children are usually hit the hardest when they have someone close to them get deported and in situations like this, lack of integration in school develops. Among the Latino community, everyone at least knows or heard of someone who had to be sent back to their home country due to not having the right documents to be in the US.
Often at times children who are born in the US fear losing their parents, something that is shown multiple times in Osorio’s article, many times this can result in children shutting down from everyone. When Osorio first started teaching these students, they were not very open and the school they were attending was making them feel left out by giving them culture free books. Juliana, was asked a question in which the question was if she knew anyone who had been deported. “She fidgeted with her hands, staring at the table, before looking up and saying mi papa” (Osorio).
When Juliana was asked this question, her fidgeting seemed to tell that she wasn’t comfortable sharing this and the description where she was staring at the table tells that she was sad saying this. When Osorio first introduced the book “Del Norte al Sur” translated from the North to the South, many of her students seemed to grab interest to read the book. This book was about a little boy who lived in California with his father and his mother had gotten deported to Tijuana Mexico because she didn’t have the right papers to be in the United States (Osorio).
It makes sense that these kids can relate to this book for they grabbed interest in reading it. Usually children from undocumented immigrant parents grow to have behavioral issues, reasons that bring about this behavior are internal feelings such as sadness (Daniel). Bringing about a kid to school with this much emotion makes school hard to follow through with. In conclusion to this, the original thesis statement made by Osorio is the importance of not grouping all Latina/o narratives into one stereotypical box.
In another perspective, this thesis statement was not very well supported by the information she provided. Because in the article there were so many connections to school and her students’ ethnicity, a better purpose for this writing could have been, many Latino students face difficulties at school due to their ethnicity. Children often carry their parents worries, a loved one’s deportation hits a kid the hardest, and schools can sometimes make Latino students ability to succeed harder. All particular challenges these kids faced in school were due to the students background.