Teachers Lounge: Different Minds, Different Ways of Seeing

Ah, the joys of Saturday morning and waking long after sunrise, despite my best intentions. But I’m on my second cup now, albeit the sleep’s still in my eyes, and I got a topic I’m hankering to talk about.

Someday I’ll really make a go of this topic, too. For now, though, maybe I’ll think of this as my first rough draft.

Here’s the thing: one of the challenges of my job is working with so many people whose first language isn’t English, Spanish, French or any of the other Indo-European languages. Because, you see, I don’t care what anyone says or what any study’s found — your first language *does* shape the way you think, and once you work with people outside of the Indo-European pantheon of noun noun noun object object object thing thing thing, it becomes painfully obvious what a difference it makes.

And it becomes apparent that English is the language of commerce, while so many others really are encapsulations of the laws of physics and chemistry, commerce be damned.

Take the case of my native speaking Cherokee student who couldn’t understand the directions on a package of Emergen-C.  It wasn’t a matter of her lack of English skills — it was her head, her deepest most intuitive understanding of the location of objects in relationship to one another, not to mention, the respect or disrespect paid to those objects and to the actions to which those objects are subjected, and whether it’s morning, noon, evening, night or sometime in between, and is this a serial action or one that occurs once and is then repeated using the same objects and materials over and over and over again?

In other words “do you mean I take the same glass and drink it four times or do I take the package and keep putting more packages in it or do I … ”

This went on and on until the lightbulb suddenly went off over my head, and I belted out “Your first language is Cherokee, isn’t it?” There was a puzzled nod, to which I responded by banging my head on the desk.

Of course. We English – or Spanish – speakers are much too vague and “commercial” for a mind that’s grown up with the specificities carefully spelled out, down to the exact time of year and whether the seasons are behaving correctly and even whether that guy over there who really has nothing to do with anything at all, whether he quite approves of what’s going on.

So I grubbed around until I found four glasses and explained that it’s four glasses, although you can r-use the same glass, no problem, filled at separate time of the day, but one at a time, and a packet added each time.

This is what I do all day.

So much more to say about this. But breakfast is done.