Aria

     In "Aria", Rodriguez talks about his transition from Speaking Spanish to English. Something that is touched on in his essay is the question of, is this important to teach in a public education setting. I think it is important to teach in a school system but not the way I've been seeing it done myself. While observing in my placement classroom I had multiple students come up to me and speak to me in Spanish and I did my best to talk back to them but I wasn't one hundred percent sure what they were really saying or even how to respond. Later on in the day I asked my teacher what I should do in those settings and she told me "Don't speak to them in Spanish that isn't allowed in my classroom". I think that is completely unfair.

    Many classrooms in America are trying to teach children that knowing English is right and any other  language is wrong. That is completely unjust and unfair and borderline discriminatory. I do not understand why these Spanish speaking kinder-gardeners are being told that they need to learn a different language to succeed in life but then I was told that I could possibly take French or Spanish in high school just so I could fulfill the language requirement of some fancy college. As Leah said in class the other day, "America doesn't have a national language". If that's the case why is it required that everyone only learns English.

    I do believe that it would be beneficial to have an understanding of English because there are certain settings that English will be spoken and another language will not. Having the ability to speak English along with speaking another language can get someone incredibly far in life. However, in the case of the school system I believe that if English is a requirement to non-English speakers, then English speakers must be held to the same expectation of fluency in another language.