This isn’t a pitch for bilingual education or English immersion. It’s just a snapshot of the life I’ve lived having come from a tri-lingual home. My mother is from Brazil and my father from the West Bank of Israel — Palestine.

Born in Oakland, I grew up speaking Portuguese until I was 5. Even my father spoke to us only in my mother’s native tongue.

But when I turned 5, I started kindergarten at Lincoln Elementary School in Lodi, Calif. I can’t remember much except that before long, I was interacting well with all my peers. I believe “Ultra Man,” “Speed Racer” and “Marine Boy” helped to hone my English skills.

At home, we still spoke Portuguese.

But as my sister Fatima and I grew older we started speaking English to one another. We interacted well with our neighbors and our community.

Then in 1972, my parents divorced. My father took my sister and I to the West Bank. I was 9, she was 10. Neither of us spoke any Arabic but we were thrust into an Arabic school where we had to learn to speak, read and write a language that had a completely different alphabet, vocabulary and grammar from either of the languages we knew.

There was no Arabic as a Second Language curriculum. There was no special classes to bring us up to par with our peers. We just sat and learned. The teachers just taught everyone the same way with far less eloquence and compassion than I’ve ever found in an American classroom.

It’s true that we did have a framework to work from in that we had already learned principals of language in English. But we had to start from scratch. My father and stepmother were both illiterate, so they never read to us.

But both my sister and I soon excelled in our classes. I was never valedictorian material but I never sunk below C-level either. Often I got the Arabic equivalent of As.

There were no self-esteem classes. If I didn’t do the homework, I got in trouble. In Israel, they use corporeal punishment and I was hit a few times. But I struggled to learn and when I succeeded I felt good about myself.

This, in spite of the fact that my family had fallen apart and I was living in a culture that was in the dark ages compared to what I was accustomed to as an American student.

Not to say I didn’t struggle. I had many struggles later. Most of my struggles, however, were social and emotional. My family didn’t do their job right but my schools did. Their job was to teach me to read, write, add and subtract and I did that in whatever language needed in whatever country I was in.

I believe we would be surprised at how high children are able to rise to meet the standards we put before them. No one was worried about my feelings. They knew I had to learn Arabic to function. And when I was back in the U.S., I had to learn English to function.

Talking about America’s obsession with self-esteem, one British columnist wrote that Americans, unlike Brits, like to touch their feelings, which she said is akin to touching your feet — it’s smelly and corny.

We sing the praises of the indomitable human spirit, but then we pad it and protect it rather than kick it off the cliff so it would be forced to spread it’s wings and learn to fly. In turn, it never flies. Let the kids fly.

Husein Mashni covers education for the Daily Pilot.



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