kangaroo2010:unity-will:THISSomething similar actually happened to my wife. She got hired to a teach
kangaroo2010:unity-will:THISSomething similar actually happened to my wife. She got hired to a teaching position and was told that a big part of it was that she speaks Spanish (my wife is first generation Mexican-American and absolutely does speak Spanish fluently). Now, my wife doesn’t mind this - a job is a job and being the teacher SHE needed for students like her is part of why she got into teaching - but she is wary of one thing: Will she be the only Spanish speaker in the department? That had happened to her before and being the only Spanish speaker in staff at a school that’s almost 50% Hispanic gets tiresome (open house nights are nightmares for her). “Oh no!” she’s told. “We just hired another Spanish speaker! We take diversifying our staff seriously.”My wife doubts the last sentence (turns out the district had just been sued for not providing adequate services for ESL students), but hey, she won’t be alone.First day of new hire orientation hits, and my wife meets her fellow new hire. Girl has a Hispanic name, looks Latina, so my wife goes up to her and speaks Spanish to her, something along the lines of, “Thank God I’m not the only Latina here, we gotta stock together!”Girl stares at my wife blankly, then says something back.My wife stares back. It’s not Spanish.It’s Portuguese. Girl is a first generation BRAZILIAN-American. The only Spanish she speaks is the same mishmash that everyone who grew up in Texas speaks. Turns out the school had seen her looks, looked at her name, asked if she was. bilingual, and just assumed she wa bilingual in Spanish, because of COURSE they did.My wife is still the only Spanish in the entire English department, at major urban school where a third of students speak only Spanish at home and where one-fourth have only been in the country for 3 years or less. -- source link