Aria, Richard Rodriguez

Aria-Richard Rodriguez

Quotes

While reading “Aria” by Richard Rodriguez I started to realize how much language means to an individual. Our language is a way of communicating, learning, escaping, and a plethora of other things. Rodriguez really put this into perspective for me, especially with his choice of words. There were a couple of quotes within his writing that really stood out to me and I will discuss them below.

“Without question, it would have pleased me to hear my teachers address me in Spanish when I entered the classroom. I would have felt much less afraid, I would have trusted them and responded with ease. “

This quote really hit and made me think about going into teaching. How do you greet someone who is just learning English? Do you say “Good Morning” to a Spanish student or “Hola”? Rodriguez thinks that he would have felt more comfortable if a teacher greeted him in Spanish, acknowledging his culture. He was scared, scared of English, scared of leaving his culture-a safety zone. I think that we need to acknowledge cultures but I really don’t know whether I’d greet a Spanish student with English or Spanish.  It made me really think.

“But the special feeling of closeness at home was diminished by then. Gone was the desperate, urgent, intense feeling of being at home; rare was the experience of feeling myself individualized by family intimates. We remained a loving family, but one greatly changed. No longer so close; no longer bound tight by the pleasing and troubling knowledge of our public separateness.”

When the nuns asked Rodriguez’s family to only use English at home his family lost a huge part of them. There was nothing to bring them together. As the children got more educated in English and less in Spanish the parents remained at the same level of brokenness and it became hard for communication. I thought this was a big point. No one should ever ask a family to give up their native language, that’s the entire concept of the ‘melting pot’. I could only imagine being a family and losing all ties together. It came to the point where Rodriquez and his siblings could barely talk to their parents, or where they would just get annoyed with all the “What’s” I thought this was really terrible for a family to go through.

The last quote I want to discuss really ties the whole piece together and it is something I hope to remember when going into my own classroom.

”I would have been happier about my public success had I not sometimes recalled what it had been like earlier, when my family had conveyed its intimacy through a set of conveniently private sounds. “

Rodriquez wished that he still had learned English and was very proud that he did but he wanted his Spanish culture too. I think it’s really important to have two cultures and be proud of it. He lost a lot of communication with his parents, which to me is a huge thing. I think family is the most important thing in a person’s life and Rodriquez, because of English, lost a great deal of family ties. When I go into teaching I want to embrace the different cultures and encourage the use of both and this article really opened my eyes towards that.

Searching online about "Aria" I came across an interview with Richard Rodriquez that i thought was interesting! It actually answered a lot if question i think to be helpful, so check it out!

In class I want to discuss what you would do if you had Spanish or any other language speaking students. How would you greet them?  I still don’t know what to do and I’d like other opinions.