Aria

For my second blog post, I chose Aria by Richard Rodriguez. I thought the reading was very easy to understand. I did not agree with most of the story though. I think that when students are bilingual it is very postive and no one should take their home language away from them. While I was reading I kept thinking why can't Richard teach his classmates some words in Spanish and the classmates can help him with his English, this way communicating will become easier and it this would be a great way for him to make new friends. I also think that students should learn a second language at a young age because then it wouldn't be so different to them when they reached middle or high school.

1. "The odd truth is that my first-grade classmates could have ecome bilingual, in the conventional sense of that word, more easily than I. Had they been taught (as upper-middle-class children are often taught early) a second language like Spanish or French, they could have regarded it simply as that: another public language." This quote is bascially saying what I said earlier that if the teacher let Richard show his classmates his culture and his language then his classmates would have learned something new. Also if students start to learn a foreign lanuage at a young age, it would become a language that they get used to and will get to know more about how to speak the language.

2. "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." I disagree with the parents making Richard only speak English when he was at home, even though the Nunes came to the house and asked the parents to do that. I think that maybe they could have practiced English at home but I think that its important to keep the home language at home because that is something that keeps the family together.

3. "Hearing Spanish then, I continued to be a careful, if sad, listener to sounds. Hearing a Spanish-speaking family walking behind me, I turned to look. I smiled for an instant, before my glance found the Hispanic looking faces of strangers in the crowd going by." This quote made me feel sad for the boy because I think its horrible that when he heard others speaking Spanish he got sad because he missed speaking the language and he missed the family closeness.