Lost in Translation

Sitting through a three-hour parent meeting in French I contemplate my options:

1. Listen intensely in hopes that I might catch the gist of what is happening.

2. Tune out and daydream.

3. Try to remember what it was like to have an IQ.

4. Walk out.

5. Find a sympathetic person to translate every now and then.

I, trying to be responsible, chose #1 & #5. OK, so I might have hit on #2 & #3 too. And I did almost slip out. You see, there is something terribly humiliating about being the only one in the room that needs translation. The director never stops to leave time for my trusty translator, Karen, to tell me what is going on. In another long meeting, I make a passionate request to get the teacher some more help (she has three grade levels and kids with an overall low level of French). Then I find out they had just addressed this problem. Oops.

Another time Katrina got an assignment wrong and cried about it in class. Later, as the kids pranced out of school they announced to me, "Katrina didn't know what to do because YOU don't know French!" Then I found out the Arabic teacher doesn't give Katrina any homework because I can't read Arabic. I informed them I jolly well do (well, at a first-grade level - maybe) and promptly got all Katrina's back homework for the year. Of course, it's in classical Arabic and not in Moroccan Arabic, so I guess I'm not much help after all.

Every day for the first few weeks Katrina and I spent hours over her homework. Me, with my French dictionary - and Katrina with her glasses and little pencils which break continually from trying desperately to write everything in cursive (they are expected to write in cursive by age 6). From the beginning I understood over half of the instructions - and still homework time is intense and hard. What if I didn't know any French at all? Just a few weeks ago, I misunderstood an assignment and had Katrina memorize 16 lines of a poem in French - a painful, tear-filled process. She finally got it and then we found out she had memorized the wrong poem. Sigh.

Monday Katrina proudly brought home her very first library book - and I couldn't read it to her. So I worked for over an hour with Karen getting the pronunciation and translation correct and am now ready to read three of the four little chapters to her.

All this has given me a whole new perspective on immigrants. How must it feel to be in a brand-new country in full culture shock and then have to help children get through school - at much higher grades? Personally, this whole experience has made me feel just plain stupid. So how would it feel to be a PhD and have no clue what your 6-year-old has to do? No one knows (or cares) how smart you may be. All of a sudden the facts are clear - you can't do first grade.

And that reminds me of what one of my special ed students said several years back. For some reason I wowed him with my "amazing" knowledge on something. His awed response was, "Wow! Mrs. Reimary - did you went to first grade???"

Ah, just remembering his comment makes me feel better already!