Reflections on a Year of Immersion

"Who makes laws?" Jacob asked out of the blue yesterday.

"Congress," I said.

"Then I want to be in Congress.  I'm going to pass a law that says homework is illegal."

There was no point in arguing with him that by the time he made it to Congress, he would be done with homework or that no act of the U.S. Congress would affect his education in Mexico.  However, his decree did not surprise me.  We've all been counting down the days until the end of the school year.  Four more school days.  I must admit that I too will be relieved when he doesn't have any more homework.  He always has more than I think necessary for a second grader, and it's been a struggle for both of us to get through his assignments in Spanish.  Now that the end is in sight, dragging him out of bed each morning and forcing him to do his homework each evening has been a chore. 

"You're almost done, Jacob," Chris and I constantly reassure him.  "Just a little while longer.  You can do this."

He used to love school.

We knew this academic year was going to be hard when we started it, but we convinced ourselves that we were up for the challenge.  Jacob walked into school that first day with his head held high, confident in his prior knowledge and eager to learn more.  As the weeks passed and he realized that learning the Spanish language and learning all his other subjects in a foreign language was the hardest thing he'd ever faced, his attitude changed.  It wasn't long that we heard through a grapevine of parents that his Spanish teacher was concerned.  We scheduled a conference right away.

Jacob's Spanish teacher, who taught him half of his classes, spoke absolutely no English, and Jacob, at the beginning of the year, spoke absolutely no Spanish.  To communicate, they used one of his classmates who was fluent in both languages to translate, until Jacob learned some basic language skills, or could at least ask to go to the bathroom.  He basically sat next to an English speaker and copied her workbook every day, and she would whisper instructions to him as needed.  His attention waned, and it wasn't long before my eager student started laying his head on his desk and refusing to participate.  He wasn't acting out, necessarily; he just didn't care anymore.  He'd given up.

It was hard to watch him struggle.  It was hard to hear him call himself stupid.  It was hard to know how to help him.  Every day we told him how smart he was, but he was overwhelmed and lost in a world he didn't understand.  He wanted to give in to self-pity, and I wanted to sympathize with him.  I understood what it was like to not understand much of what was being said to you and around you, but I also knew that I couldn't let him give up.  Not being able to communicate effectively is demoralizing, but every study I had read about language immersion said that eventually he would learn to make sense of it.  I wanted to believe them.  I wanted to believe that we weren't making our eldest son suffer needlessly.

At the conference last October, Chris and the English teacher acted as interpreters for me and the Spanish teacher.  The teachers explained that they were seeing two totally different attitudes from Jacob.  In English, he was happy, eager and involved in the class discussions.  His enthusiasm was contagious, and his English teacher had recruited him right away to help his classmates master their grammar.  But in Spanish, he was sullen and discouraged.  She had assumed that was just his normal attitude until she'd observed him in his English classes.  That's when she'd grown concerned.  We assured her that we would work harder at home, and we encouraged her to let us know whenever he refused to do his work.  We gave her a pep talk, and then we went home to give Jacob one.

His attitude improved after that.  He started trying again, and slowly he began to understand more of what was going on in class and to fake it when he didn't.  He had a setback in December when his best friend from the consulate community left Tijuana, but he quickly recovered and began to develop new friendships.  We fell into the rhythm of school in Mexico, and mostly understood what was expected of us all.  The language became easier, but the cultural references and customs were still mostly beyond our comprehension.

There was the time that Jacob said he needed to bring ants to school, and I refused to let him thinking he'd misunderstood.  He hadn't.

Then there was the time that his homework was to bring in "un paquette de pinguinos y cuchallito."  I had no idea what a packet of penguins was, but I was most certainly not going to send a knife to school to murder them.  It turns out that "pinguinos" are black and white snack cakes. 

Between Expos and Encounters with Christ, I spent most of the year feeling like the mother that just couldn't get things right.  My ineptness certainly didn't help Jacob fit in, but he kept trying, even if he did rage against the pages and pages of homework he had to work through each night.  He excelled at math, which thank God, is the same in any language.  His confidence grew as he mastered multiplication and division, and slowly he began to improve in his other subjects as well.  Last week, he proudly read me a story he'd written in Spanish.  I cried.

It would probably take a few more years for him to be verbally fluent in Spanish, but every time I visit the school and see him in action, I am amazed by his comprehension.  At a recent open house, his Spanish teacher peppered the class the with science questions, and Jacob answered her in broken Spanish.  The other parent's watched my reaction and I beamed with pride and fought back tears again.  They congratulated me and him on his progress.

I've questioned our decision to put him in the local Tijuana school many, many times this year, but in the end, I think it was the right one.  To learn a foreign language through full immersion requires the development of critical thinking skills that will benefit him throughout the rest of his life.  He learned to listen closely to the words he recognized and to guess at the meanings of the others. Even if he forgets every word he painstakingly learned after we leave here in the fall, his brain will never forget the methods it developed to learn them.  More importantly, Jacob learned that hard work and determination do pay off.

I hope that he will look back on this year and forever feel empowered.  I want him to remember the friends that he made and the teachers that believed in him.  I want him to always appreciate the Mexican culture and to laugh at all our social blunders.  I hope that one day he will tell his own children how he survived a year in a school with a foreign culture and language and how it made him stronger.  And most importantly, I hope he remembers to dance like they taught him Tijuana.