Seeing in Another Language
Everybody else worked on dairy farms. There were three guys from the Hutterian Bretheren commune. They spoke English and German. The other three were Latinos. By after noon the first day, I was adopted by the Latino side of the room and spent breaks trying to help unravel English and Spanish veterinary terms as my classmates absorbed what the trainers' were saying. Select Sires gave out English and Spanish reference material but conducted the class in English. Still, it wasn't until I taught English language learners—and renewed my study of Spanish—that I started to appreciate how another language can change a life story. Those are the stories Tom Miller collected and edited in “How I LearnedEnglish.” Congressman Jose Serrano remembers learning English first from Frank Sinatra records. Author and essayist Richard Rodriguez describes the dichotomy between the “private” Spanish his family spoke during his childhood and the “public” English his parents spoke to strangers. When t...