Ever since I have taken the path towards being an educator, the oath of writing an essay a day and the willingness to teach English, I have been criticised. People question my motives. People wonder why I sacrifice so much time. Some people wonder why I even bother, especially considering that it is English that I adore.
Today, I have answered all of those questions in one simple gesture: the act of kindness and understanding. Today, I have liberated myself from self-labelling as a 'future educator'. Today, despite needing one more year of essay writing and group work, I have granted myself the label 'educator'.
Today, I witnessed yet another student who has fallen into the cracks of our education system, and that student is one of a Chinese descent. Chan* has been in Australia for around two months now. She is not at all fluent in English, and she had always been sitting around doing nothing when I taught her class. Two lessons ago, I found out about her origins and took her onto my wing. Ever since I found out, I have been describing instructions to her in a simplistic manner so as to ensure her understanding.
There was something special about today, though. Having set homework tasks based on Romeo and Juliet in the last class, I had not expected Fiona to even comprehend any of the task choices. I was proven wrong. Upon asking the students as a whole in today's class if anyone had completed their homework, not one person had responded. They all either looked down, looked up or looked sideways. "Well," I said, "that's very interesting because Chan, who knows hardly any words in English, managed to write an alternate ending for Romeo and Juliet with the help of a translator." the entire class was dumbfounded.
Having volunteered to help Chan fix up her internet account in the IT department, whilst waiting for the IT people to return to their workstations, I stood with Chan in the hallway and spoke to her about her life in China compared to life in Australia. "I have so many options here," she told me. "In China we have boring subjects. We don't have cooking classes even." It occurred to me that we take our education system for granted here. We indeed do have many options. After that brief discussion, Chan said, "homework?" and proceeded to open up her English folder. She pulled out a tidy sheet with handwriting on it, which was the alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet.
I asked if she could read it to me just so that I could check whether or not she had written it, at least f she could read it out she would have some sort of understanding of it. And she did. She even laughed at all of the funny parts, marvelling at how humorous her writing was. She was glowing. I asked her if she wanted to read it to the rest of the class when before we finished from the IT department. She looked down, and said "maybe they laugh. Maybe they make me embarrassed." I told her "if anything, they should feel embarrassed that you can write something in another language!"
She did not end up reading it. But I did guilt trip the rest of the students by mentioning her completion of a task. And in the entire delivery of my lesson, she was smiling. She was fully attentive, trying everything that I asked of the class. All it takes is consideration. I imagined myself in another country, that speaks a language foreign to me and I cringed. Chan is so brave. It is not fair for those who are not familiar with English to be left behind. English is an important means of communication, and students born here that are fluent in it should grant themselves lucky, because out there, there are students who have no idea about what is going on, and they are looking for somebody, anybody, to assist them in learning.
It just takes that extra effort. Not at all strenuous, and all the while extremely rewarding. For the rest of my stay at my placement school, I will continue to ensure that Chan is receiving every bit of help that I can offer because she is one of the students who has a care for what I have to say - why would I not want to hear what she has to say as well?
*name changed to protect privacy of the student
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
What the F*ck? Melbournians are Fined for Public Swearing?
Oh? So a new law just came in today stating that if one swore in a public place, they would be fined $500? And people are now swearing at that law because it oppresses their sense of public freedom?
Let me bring in a little anecdote of something that happens all too regularly on an ordinary trip to a local shopping centre - I witness teenagers in their little groups of 'cool,' using derogatory terms about homosexuals, filthy words to replace the act fornication, and even more horrid words against people of varied races and skin colours. I hear older boys swearing around younger children, deteriorating one of their aspects of innocence by the simple act of cussing. I hear the not-so-classy people wearing torn pants and a stained singlet walking around swearing at kiosks for not letting them purchase a drink which costs five cents more than they can afford.
I still remember the first time I heard the word 'f*ck'. I was in the courtyard at my primary school, in a brick-cylinder, playing with a tennis ball, slamming it against the wall and talking to my friends about our latest Pok'emon catches. All of the sudden, the 'cool' boy in year six and his gang of followers walked in. They all gathered around him as my friends and I took a step back, and we, not knowing about the greatest spectacle that was to come from this boy's mouth, eavesdropped at the very moment he said it, and we all gasped. He gave a 'cool' smile and then walked out of the brick cylinder. We just stood there, unable to accept what had just happened. Did we just hear that? Did he really just say that? Yes, yes he did. I know that from that moment, at the age of just nine, an aspect of my innocence was taken from me.
I know that things are far different now than they were in the year 2001. I know that a lot of children nine and under have access to the internet and are exposed to things that they were never meant to know until they had neared the middle of puberty, and I know that some of these kids even use those words themselves because they hear it all too often in their households. Nevertheless, if the government imposes such a fine upon filthy public vocabulary, then the hearing of these terms would be sprawled around our public sphere less, and it will slowly but surely turn into a social norm that words such as 'f*ck' and 'c*nt' are not acceptable to use in sentences to describe things in negative or positive ways, nor are they acceptable to replace words like those that describe the act of fornication, those that come before a feeling to emphasise the feeling of that feeling, nor to replace 'heck' in exclamations like 'what the heck!'
I believe that swear words have their places, such as if one was speaking to their peers in a private room in the library about an assignment that they loathe, or if someone is in a lot of traffic on their way to a meeting that had started without them thirty minutes ago, but I do not believe that it should be used around the general public where innocent ears lurk, nor towards authoritative figures like police officers when the user of those words has clearly committed an offence: police are people too, they are just far more caring about the safety of others to ignore that man who is running off with a new television from Harvey Norman, or to ignore that drunk indecent man flashing his private parts to a group of year 7 girls exiting from their highschool and taking the shortcut home through an alleyway around the corner, or that crazy woman who pressed her lit cigarette onto a young man's forearm and as he came to hit her began yelling about how he is sexually assaulting her. There are far too many problems occurring in the world for us to just stop and complain about the stripping of our freedom because of the taking away of our indecency to use words of vulgarity around others in public.
I mean, think about it, really - do you really need words of profanity in your everyday discourse? Recently, I have excluded most of my vulgar language use in my conversations due to the fact that I now work with adolescents and children, and I have found myself using varied adjectives rather than that monotonous 'f*ck' word. I have found that my sense of description is far more expansive, and that instead of saying "what the f*ck?!", "why did that just happen, I don't quite feel comfortable about how that person responded to that and I particularly don't enjoy how that saucepan had almost his me right in the head had I not ducked in time!" works far more better. It states what happened, and it states my opinion about what happened, so that a three-dimensional form of reasoning emanates from my mouth, rather than an unpretentious, overrated word.
Challenge yourself, before a $500 fine does. The world is much more three-dimensional with artistic conversation. Try to use descriptive words rather than the bland words Samuel L. Jackson uses in his film Snakes on a Plane. I mean, he says the word "motherf*cker" so much that the viewer forgets the movie is about snakes on a plane rather than a mother who keeps on fornicating. Language is beautiful, do not kill it with profanity.
Let me bring in a little anecdote of something that happens all too regularly on an ordinary trip to a local shopping centre - I witness teenagers in their little groups of 'cool,' using derogatory terms about homosexuals, filthy words to replace the act fornication, and even more horrid words against people of varied races and skin colours. I hear older boys swearing around younger children, deteriorating one of their aspects of innocence by the simple act of cussing. I hear the not-so-classy people wearing torn pants and a stained singlet walking around swearing at kiosks for not letting them purchase a drink which costs five cents more than they can afford.
I still remember the first time I heard the word 'f*ck'. I was in the courtyard at my primary school, in a brick-cylinder, playing with a tennis ball, slamming it against the wall and talking to my friends about our latest Pok'emon catches. All of the sudden, the 'cool' boy in year six and his gang of followers walked in. They all gathered around him as my friends and I took a step back, and we, not knowing about the greatest spectacle that was to come from this boy's mouth, eavesdropped at the very moment he said it, and we all gasped. He gave a 'cool' smile and then walked out of the brick cylinder. We just stood there, unable to accept what had just happened. Did we just hear that? Did he really just say that? Yes, yes he did. I know that from that moment, at the age of just nine, an aspect of my innocence was taken from me.
I know that things are far different now than they were in the year 2001. I know that a lot of children nine and under have access to the internet and are exposed to things that they were never meant to know until they had neared the middle of puberty, and I know that some of these kids even use those words themselves because they hear it all too often in their households. Nevertheless, if the government imposes such a fine upon filthy public vocabulary, then the hearing of these terms would be sprawled around our public sphere less, and it will slowly but surely turn into a social norm that words such as 'f*ck' and 'c*nt' are not acceptable to use in sentences to describe things in negative or positive ways, nor are they acceptable to replace words like those that describe the act of fornication, those that come before a feeling to emphasise the feeling of that feeling, nor to replace 'heck' in exclamations like 'what the heck!'
I believe that swear words have their places, such as if one was speaking to their peers in a private room in the library about an assignment that they loathe, or if someone is in a lot of traffic on their way to a meeting that had started without them thirty minutes ago, but I do not believe that it should be used around the general public where innocent ears lurk, nor towards authoritative figures like police officers when the user of those words has clearly committed an offence: police are people too, they are just far more caring about the safety of others to ignore that man who is running off with a new television from Harvey Norman, or to ignore that drunk indecent man flashing his private parts to a group of year 7 girls exiting from their highschool and taking the shortcut home through an alleyway around the corner, or that crazy woman who pressed her lit cigarette onto a young man's forearm and as he came to hit her began yelling about how he is sexually assaulting her. There are far too many problems occurring in the world for us to just stop and complain about the stripping of our freedom because of the taking away of our indecency to use words of vulgarity around others in public.
I mean, think about it, really - do you really need words of profanity in your everyday discourse? Recently, I have excluded most of my vulgar language use in my conversations due to the fact that I now work with adolescents and children, and I have found myself using varied adjectives rather than that monotonous 'f*ck' word. I have found that my sense of description is far more expansive, and that instead of saying "what the f*ck?!", "why did that just happen, I don't quite feel comfortable about how that person responded to that and I particularly don't enjoy how that saucepan had almost his me right in the head had I not ducked in time!" works far more better. It states what happened, and it states my opinion about what happened, so that a three-dimensional form of reasoning emanates from my mouth, rather than an unpretentious, overrated word.
Challenge yourself, before a $500 fine does. The world is much more three-dimensional with artistic conversation. Try to use descriptive words rather than the bland words Samuel L. Jackson uses in his film Snakes on a Plane. I mean, he says the word "motherf*cker" so much that the viewer forgets the movie is about snakes on a plane rather than a mother who keeps on fornicating. Language is beautiful, do not kill it with profanity.
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