Suspension for Spanish?Follow

One of my wife's friends is Cuban and she drives me crazy with this. Actually, she's never even been to Cuba but her parents are originally from Cuba and she can speak Spanish. She acts like if anyone is around that speaks Spanish she has to speak to them exclusively in Spanish. Even if both of them are primarily English speakers.

There is a Mexican restaurant in town where my wife and I frequently eat and we do just fine speaking English. "Diet Coke, chicken chimichanga, more chips please" -- all of these work fine.

When the friend is with us, she has to make the whole order in Spanish and half of the time they dont understand her. I don't know if the dialect is slightly different or what but she'll rattle on for a few minutes about what she wants and then he'll have to repeat it back to her in English to confirm the order. It usually ends up being something like "speedy gonzalez with no cheese?" and she's like "si"

It is even worse when the Puerto Rican friend shows up and we all ride somewhere together. Everyone in the car speaks English but for some reason these 2 think they have to speak Spanish only the whole time they are together. Drives me insane.

Yes and no. Speaking spanish is something that anyone with spare time can pick up, learn enough of it, and use. It's not that difficult of a language.

Even in Miami, most of my non-spanish speaking teachers prohibited talking in Spanish. It wasn't an intention to specifically target a group of individuals and discriminitate, it was, as _ythe_ said, to ensure school safty.

Any rule a school has usually has some sort of background behind it. No chewing gum to maintain sanitation in the school, no hello kitty t-shirts that might offend people with a strong beleif that cats are satanic, ect.

The only thing that school official would have to say to justify the prevention of speaking spanish in the school is anywhere along the lines of "the majority of our staff don't speak any other language other than english. We ask that our students pay us respect and maintain all conversations as english to preserve safty within the school." What if a group of spanish speakers were talking amongst themselves to beat the living snot ouf of some other kid and take his watch?

Granted, suspending them was a little harsh, but I see nothing wrong not allowing the speaking of other languages that isn't English. (As to not just subject this post to only Spanish)


It's like a cousin of mine always said, "You decided to come to America, least you could do is learn our language."

Que?

What a difference a few decades can make.

My mother sometimes told me stories about her time in Germany (dad was stationed there, Army, common story). She stated several times over that there were many Germans she encountered who would profess to have no knowledge whatsoever of the English language, until you made an effort to speak German.

She said this was particularly true of older people (keep in mind she was in her mid20s at the time). If you tried to ask them questions in English they'd smile at you as though they didn't even begin to comprehend the words coming out of your mouth. Switch to the native tongue, and they are suddenly much more bilingual than they appeared.

She never figured out if it was because she was being respectful in trying to learn and use the native language, or if she was doing such a bad job speaking it that they just had to stop her.

It seems like the teacher may have just had a general annoyance with people speaking random languages around her, possibly thinking they're talking about her rudely in front of her(it's not like she could ask them to translate what they're saying if it actually was an insult since she wouldn't be able to know if it was a true translation or something).

But it does seem like it would be akward to get into having bilingual schools, since then you'd also need to get into doing schools for the other languages of the other people in the area(maybe some Irish wanting Gaelic?). Then you could run into the issue of wether some schools want to go a bilingual route and others not, and have a sort of segregation of some people wanting their kids to just be learning english and math and such and not going into spanish.

I remember some areas near me that were into having basically a Thai speaking school(seemed a bit akward), and I wouldn't really see it as being that odd for such issues to arise of wanting more languages in the whole multi-lingual school systems(maybe some german/enlglish schools as well and such).

In the majority of schools in California, preference is given to teachers who are bilinqual. My sister became proficient in Spanish to give her an advantage when applying for teaching positions.

I assume you are asking why this bothers me. I simply find it rude. We go out as a group and it is inconsiderate when part of the people in the group start speaking a language that the rest of the group doesn't understand. Really kills conversations. If I'm in the vehicle with my wife and the 2 hispanic friends we often end up with 2 completely unrelated conversations going on in 2 different languages. It is extremely annoying.

And I don't really know what it is about the restaurant thing that irritates me. This is a place where I eat with my wife frequently -- enough that I don't even have to order my drink out loud. When the friend has to spend 5 minutes making a 3 second order because she insists on doing it in Spanish first and then having to repeat it in English so that the waiter can understand her its just damned annoying. She also claims to get better service because she speaks Spanish and she is convinced that us going there with her means we get better service during that visit. In fact, the opposite is probably true because everything is slower when she is there.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I just found out yesterday that my wife was talking to her and found out that the Cuban friend and her husband (American) had just paid off their car and were about to pay off their house. My wife was like "That's great, you have plenty of time to save that money for your kids' education." The children are 6 and 4 years old. The friend said "Oh we don't have to worry about that, they will get minority scholarships." I just can't understand that attitude at all.

No, but that's the part that just adds to my point.

I'm not going by the article exactly, my OP was mostly speaking in general. The two kids in question in this article weren't discussing nothing negative and hell, it was a quick Q&A to begin with.

The problem lies in the school they were in, where sadly, the staff isn't fully bilingual. They don't know that the two kids weren't discussing bombing the school in spanish. The problem is that they never know exactly WHAT these kids were talking about. It's only natural for a staff member to inquire the students to stick to a certain language that the staff that looks over them understands.

Now, as for the suspension? Extreme without proper backup. I would've just told the kid to knock it off and leave it at that. For suspension, though, I would beleive that maybe this particular child has been told to stick to english on numerous occations, where as the staff member that kept pleading with him to stick to english got fed up and suspended him. Course, the child isn't going to "like, say all of that, and like...stuff." He's only going to tell papa "I spoke spanish and they suspended me."



Now, on what is the main language of the US? If you would like to just refer to it as "common", by all means, more power to you. I could be wrong, of course, since what I'm posting here is JUST my opinion and nothing more, but everything goverment related is english. The original settlers of the US were english speakers (or well..the language speakers that ended up with the country after all the disputes. )

I don't consider USA like Canada, where I think if I remember right, are about three languages that is incredible common around the whole country. At least from what I gather, a good 90% of the US is english speakers. The 10% is a mix of a little bit of everything. Florida has it's spanish cities, but there's more of an english dominance in Florida than spanish. It's not like canada where one of their whole state (thingies...whatever they call them) is langage A, while the other is langage B.

Again, it's my opinion. You can't ask me to cite anything cause this is mostly out of the top of my head. Hell, prove me wrong if you can, I'm always up for the learning experience.

I only do it because I want to mock you without you knowing it. I like to talk to people in broken english because it shows that I'm better than everyone else, too. Also to mock people without them knowing it.

No fair.



Edit to add:

EGO amo caseus.

Online translations ftw! Though, it couldn't translate what you wrote. All I got out of it was the last word which could either be "anew" or "again", and modo, which is either "now" or "just now".


Unless google has failed me.

Edited, Mon Dec 12 10:10:49 2005 by Exodus

Considering that Horace Mann's stated purpose (and model) for the public education system in the US was a factory that took in a random assortment of parts (kids from different backrounds) and spit out the finished good "Americans" out the other end, this isn't really that surprising, either back then or today. The public school system in the US has a lot more to do with indoctrination then it has to do with education. Always has.