Every year I have multiple languages represented in my classroom, and this year is no exception. Among my girls there are currently three languages: Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic. After the first week of school my girls got over being intimidated by each other and started using what little English they knew to communicate. Last week they got the brilliant idea to use Google translate to help them deepen the conversation (side note: Google translate is great for simple every-day sentences but please don't trust it for anything more than that, it's not an actual translator). They got out ChromeBooks and iPads and soon were typing away, switching languages and passing things around. The sound of middle school girls giggling was music to my ears and I pretended not to notice that very little (ok, no) science and math was getting accomplished. They've been "talking" ever since using this crazy mish-mash of translated languages and English.
This morning my students (including the boys this time) kept yelling, "Kon'nichiwa!" (hello in Japanese) at K, my Chinese student. I finally stopped them and said, "That's Japanese, K is from China." It seems my students are worse at geography than I am because they were all convinced Japan is in China. OK, end of lesson on English question words, time for geography. That lead to lessons in how to say hello in Chinese and Arabic and Spanish. Not great for our English acquisition, but good for class moral and maybe (hopefully) they at least learned that Japan and China are two different countries. This newfound geographical knowledge had them all at the world map during passing time finding all of their countries and comparing geographical locations. I'm not sure what language we were all speaking by the end of it--it seemed to be some new language that combined Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic and English, but it sparked conversation and served to start tearing down barriers caused by unfamiliarity and a little fear.
During advisory (glorified study hall) my girls continued talking and I continued pretending they were working on their math homework. Eventually they called me over with a question (the last time that happened I had to explain to them that for the translator to work you actually had to type out que {what in Spanish}, a simple k wouldn't work). It seems they had asked R why her family came to the USA from Syria and she'd told them that they came because of the war. When the translator translated war into Spanish it came out as "fight", which they knew didn't make sense, but they'd never heard this English word war before. I explained to them what a war was and once they understood they wanted to know more about it. I sent them back to R and she told them about some of her experiences and her brothers who had been killed. The next time I checked on them they were looking at pictures on Google images and had tears in their eyes. Then they started asking R about her hijab and discussing the differences between Islamic mosques and Catholic churches. By the time lunch was over they were back to giggling and talking about important topics (which boy in our class is the cutest) and I decided it was time to drag them back to schoolwork, but not before they all got their names written in English, Chinese and Arabic in their planners.
Needless to say my girls learned a lot today. My girls from Mexico have seen their share of violence too, coming from small towns where the drug cartels rule without compassion, but K lived a very peaceful life in China, and none of them had any idea of what has been happening in Syria or around the globe. After their conversation this afternoon they have a bigger view of the world and a new understanding of how people can have very different backgrounds/languages/religions/everything but still be friends. Today was definitely one of those days that made remember why I chose the specialty I did and made me proud to be a teacher---even when I'm not the one doing the teaching.