IT’S THE FIRST WEEK of school and I’m reading a story to my third-grade class in Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighborhood in Upper Manhattan. Sylvester, a donkey, has discovered a magic pebble that grants his every request. When he encounters a fierce lion, Sylvester impulsively wishes he was a rock and — poof — turns into a boulder. But in the transformation, Sylvester has dropped the magic pebble and can’t turn himself back into a donkey.

At this point, my students are usually wide-eyed with wonder and empathy for poor Sylvester. And as I read, I’ll occasionally pause to ask my students what they think the donkey is feeling. But as it’s only the first week of classes, I’ll almost invariably get only one of two answers — “happy” or “sad.” The words, however, will be delivered with a peculiar inflection meant to indicate something more — fright, anxiety, excitement, distress. After all, my students are familiar with all of these emotions. But because most of them come from Spanish-speaking homes, they won’t always know the English words to go with these feelings. The words they do know — happy and sad — end up having to cover the whole range of human (and donkey) emotions, at least until Ms. Mosle can teach them some more.

My students are bilingual, but their class is not. They have either “tested out” of their bilingual class by passing an English-language exam, or their parents, often recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic who are eager for assimilation, have requested that their kids be in an English-only class.

No doubt many conservatives would applaud their parents’ decision. But when critics of bilingual education argue that students should be “immersed” in the English language, they usually conjure up the scene of a classroom full of English-speaking students dousing the few Spanish-speakers in the country’s official tongue. At my school, however, as at many inner-city public schools, nearly 90 percent of the students are recent immigrants. Because these schools are so segregated, there’s little opportunity for students to learn English from their classmates because their classmates often don’t know English that well themselves. To argue honestly for “immersion,” one would have to argue just as vehemently for “school integration” — something many conservatives don’t seem quite so eager to do.

Nearly the entire student body at my school has what in education-speak is known as “limited English proficiency” or LEP. It sounds like a dreadful disease. But LEP has nothing to do with intelligence, although sometimes people will suggest otherwise. (I once overheard a teacher remark that a particular student couldn’t possibly be “gifted” because he was “in the bilingual class” — as if knowing English, and only English, were somehow the sole determinant of intelligence.) But because LEP kids are still in the process of learning a new language, they often don’t perform as well on standardized tests, even though they may fully understand the concepts being tested. My students had to take a recent math test that had several word problems that referred to veal scallopini. Few of my students have ever heard of veal scallopini, much less had it for dinner. Had the problems been about fried plaintains, they might have done better.

EVEN KIDS from families that have spoken English for generations are occasionally turning up in elementary schools across the country with “limited English proficiency.” That’s because with mom and dad both working and the children plugged into the television, these kids — like their immigrant counterparts — simply haven’t had enough practice reading and conversing in English at home.

The real barrier for my students has less to do with language than with economics. What many middle-class suburban kids have over the kids in my inner-city classroom is experience, because experience is what leads to language acquisition. And experience usually costs money. There has been a revolution in many classrooms to introduce subjects through hands-on experiences. The reason isn’t solely that kids learn better by doing. Part of it, too, is that kids who can actually see an object, feel it, talk about it, are more likely to remember the words to describe it than they are if the teacher simply lectures to them about a particular subject. Yet in a school such as mine — where the students are predominantly poor and confined to a violent neighborhood which often makes them afraid to walk outdoors — even the most well-meaning teacher can have trouble teaching her students about certain experiences because her students have never had them.

In my first year of teaching, for instance, I was shocked that my fourth-grade students seemed to have so little understanding of the solar system. As I began to explain the workings of the sun, earth and moon, it became apparent that many of the students had never seen the stars, or watched the phases of the moon, or seen the sun setting or rising over the line of the horizon. (The lights of the city are too bright, and the buildings too tall, for that.) The words “Milky Way” weren’t evocative because they’d never seen how stars on a clear night can look “milky.” My students had never stared, as I had as a child, at all of those stars and simply imagined other worlds. Consequently, they weren’t all that curious about space. After all, they’d never seen it.

Of course, one can always take a field trip to the local planetarium — provided it doesn’t cost too much money. (My school is always short of funds, and poorer parents can’t always afford to supplement the cost of admission.) But even the planetarium is a little incomprehensible to a child who has never seen the sky it represents.

Many of my students have never been outside the city, never seen a neighborhood that isn’t dilapidated or rife with violence, much less a farm or a mountain or the nation’s capital or a suburban single-family home. (My students this year had difficulty remembering the meaning of the vocabulary word “yard.” No wonder. Most of them had never played in one.)

Yet far too many English-as-a-Second-Language, or ESL, programs — staples in schools like mine with large LEP populations — consist of little more than having kids fill out meaningless handouts or memorize grammatical rules. What these kids really need is a wider array of experiences — the kinds taken for granted by more fortunate children: playing in well-maintained playgrounds, going to a baseball game, taking a trip to a national monument, fishing in a mountain stream, riding a horse on a farm. One annual national, week-long field trip to the countryside (or some other exotic locale) for all kids confined to inner-city neighborhoods would probably do as much to teach children English and an appreciation of their adopted country as many year-long ESL programs. Kids might then see the “golden waves of grain” — or the nation’s capital — that they’ve heard so much about. Too many students where I teach live awfully circumscribed lives.

Recently I began taking Spanish lessons — in hope of learning the language well enough to converse with my students’ parents, who often speak far poorer English than their kids. It’s been a humbling experience, and it’s given me renewed sympathy for the difficulty faced by so many immigrants, who, unlike me, can’t always afford the lessons I’m taking. It’s also convinced me of the efficacy of some of the teaching methods I’ve employed in my own classroom. I took my first Spanish lessons as a child in Texas, and I was taught the old-fashioned way: with handouts and rote memorization of vocabulary and grammatical rules. The language never came alive and I never did really learn how to read, write, or speak it. But in my adult-language class now, the methodology is very different. It’s essentially conversational: The classroom is littered with visual and physical cues — actual objects — that we discuss in class. There are virtually no handouts, no rote memorization. Homework is very hands-on: for instance, putting up Post-its all over my apartment with the Spanish words for household items. The grammatical rules I’ve picked up as I’ve gone along. And now, well — yo hablo espanol — at least a little.

This year, my school planned an unusual field trip. Instead of sponsoring a visit to a museum, it simply allowed us to spend a day in Central Park with our students. There was no educational agenda, no lesson our kids had to learn. Far from being a waste of time, it was one of the most gloriously rich educational experiences of the year. Although many of my students live only 50 blocks away from the top of the park, many of them had never been there before. It was as if I had taken them to a candy store. Kids ran around unable to contain their joy: “Look, Ms. Mosle! Grass! Trees! A path! A brook!” (“Path” and “brook” until then had been particularly difficult vocabulary words.) At one point, when a student spotted a robin, she remarked, “Its breast really IS red.” But the most exciting moment of the day may have been when another student spotted the first squirrel. “Look!” he shouted. The entire class immediately circled the frightened creature. The kids pointed and murmured in hushed tones, “squirrel, squirrel, squirrel.” The word had finally come alive.

Sara Mosle has taught third and fourth grades in New York City public schools and writes frequently about education.



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