Lost in Translation

Remember that scene in "Titanic"? You know, the one where Rose and Jack are running through the ship once everyone knows it's sinking?

Hold on...

Okay, I had to remove my manhood temporarily and place it in its cage while I use a "Titanic" analogy. It was trying to get away.

Anyway, Rose and Jack are running through the ship trying find a lifeboat or something, but the part I'm talking about is when they pass an immigrant family trying to read a sign with the evacuation map printed on it. They are frantically flipping through an English-to-Russian dictionary in order to decipher the words and escape to safety.

We only see them for a couple of seconds, but that family made an impression on me. Learning a new language is difficult and frustrating on its own. I tried to imagine compressing the stress of an entire year's worth of learning into 30 seconds, and adding to that the stress and panic of a life-or-death situation. It must be a terrifying and disheartening feeling. To empathize, I opened my new baby's dresser, and assembled it using the German directions. I'm proud to say the dresser works just fine, as long as you have a pick axe handy with which to open it.

I've been thinking about this more lately, after receiving the latest statistics regarding my school's ethnic composition. 15% of our students are of Hispanic origin, most of them classified ESL or ELL or LEP or whatever the most current acronym is for not having grown up in an English-speaking home. I have about 10 of these students spread over my three classes, and from my conversations with Hoek, he has an even greater percentage.

Most high school students have little love for math in the first place. I wonder how much more frustrating it is trying to learn math in a foreign language. Using what broken Spanish I know (I want to buy some butter, where is the airport, etc.), I've tried desperately to help my ELL students grasp the new concepts of geometry. Despite my own shortcomings, I see the relief in their faces when they are able to digest congruent angles and isosceles triangles by using familiar words.

More and more, God has been growing my heart for these students. Someone once said to me that, in the United States, you can be a missionary to the nations without leaving home... How true. I pray that God would give me not only linguistic skill, but a heart of compassion and availability to help meet their needs.