October 15, 2019, Virginia
Switching languages is changing identity
First, the date…the month has to come first…then I have to adjust the dictionary or the spell checker…a real pain sometimes…then something has to happen in my brain…
When I taught French and Spanish classes back to back and had hardly 5 minutes between one and the other…I felt like I wanted to change clothes in between…I was not the same person when I was speaking French as when I was speaking Spanish (let alone English) and actually my students did not see me the same way either… It was interesting…
When I taught Intermediate Spanish which I did as an adjunct, since I did it all in Spanish (it actually was easier for me, a native French speaker rather than adding English in the mix) they assumed I was a “latina” and therefore I did not receive as much respect…Some students would argue with me about the correct way to write a or say a sentence assuming they knew better than I…Since I did not speak English during classes, some might have thought that I did not know English, was uneducated and was hired because I spoke Spanish and not because I knew how to teach…(ok..may be I am exaggerating a little bit…and it is not fair to the very good and nice students I had but…they were some indeed)
When I taught French, it was a different story…French is more sophisticated and French people don’t come to the US to work picking apples or because they think that American cuisine is so much better…I definitely got more respect …and being true to my French identity whenever anybody questioned my knowledge about the French language … I had a fit…( I am exxagerating again, of course)
But having to communicate in different languages on a daily basis, made me realise how much who you are depends on how people look at you…and how switching languages is having to switch world view and use a whole different array of settings in your mind in order to communicate with the person you are talking to so you can be heard and understood… Even when you write a journal,a typ e of text where self expression is at its core, you always have in mind who you are writing for… but it only becomes evident when you are bilingual or trilingual; only when you express yourself in one language can you keep the illusion that you are writing for yourself and don’t care who you are writing for..
Anyway it makes me smile when I read about writers who only wrote for themselves (I argue that they did it at least for their alter ego)
Well, I think I lost the thread of my original thinking..oh I remember now, I decided to write an entry in English rather than in French today…as I am trying this new webbsite and figuring out how it works…
(Enough for today…I still have to run the spell checker in English and a few other things…It is lunch time and I need to get ready to teach…)
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