I am very proud of how during the peer review I was told that my what I wrote flowed well. I am proud of this because I was very skeptical about the way I wrote things and if they correlated in some way and that it was easy to read and understand and not just jumping from one topic to the next.

I would like the person that I wrote about to read it so they can see how I viewed them from the small interview that we had and from just by reading her narrative, and if I captured her in the correct light. I believe that people who have had similar experiences like her need to read this because it could give some sort of comfort that they aren’t alone in feeling the way that they feel or that they aren’t alone with their experiences. I also believe that teachers especially those who know that they have a student who has trouble understanding English and whose parents also have trouble understanding as well, to empathize with them and adjust to their need by just incorporating some translation underneath the questions that they have.

This essay helped me really understand the layers and complexities that there are in language and not just the common or relatable parts of not being able to understand how to speak/write in any language.

Allison Andrade

10/14/23

Peer Profile

Jason Lobell

            Jennifer Galindo, whose heritage goes all the way back to Mexico, from her mother who immigrated from there to America. Now living in America, she and her mother faced many challenges, one of those challenges was language. Since, Jennifer’s mother was born in Mexico it meant that she was a non-English speaker so she could only speak Spanish, unlike her daughter who is growing up in a mixed English and Spanish environment. She was encountering English whenever she would go outside and to school and when she would go back home, she would be encountering Spanish. That mixture between Spanish and English was so predominant that she felt like she “constantly had a on and off switch with [her] Spanish and English”. This switching and having to translate everything in her head would become difficult when her mother who only was a non-English speaker was the only one capable of helping her with her homework. She recalls that she used to hate doing her homework because she would have to “remember everything [she] learned in English and translate it back to Spanish for [her] mom to understand”. She even gives more examples of how her mother would tell her English problems to solve but she would say them in Spanish so Jennifer would have to translate what she heard and write it in English and translate it to Spanish for her mother to understand what she wrote. This became difficult when she didn’t understand a word in Spanish or when there were extra words and lettering in a Spanish sentence that made a worded math problem extremely difficult when she had learned an easier way to solve worded math problems in school. The constant switching and not being able to understand each other and different learning strategies for her and her mother clashed at times and the mother’s teaching methods would become very aggressive. She stated that her mother would just repeat the question but raising her voice louder after every time she would repeat the question. She would also become verbally aggressive by saying (translated) “how would you not know? do you not pay attention in school or what?” and (translated) “pay attention, you aren’t leaving until you finish your homework”. However, near the end of one of her paragraphs she expresses that she felt like those experiences and challenges were necessary for both to get better.

            In the interview she explained that while it was a little difficult at first to figure out a moment to talk about in her narrative after thinking deeply about the topic, she felt like that moment was the best to talk about because not only was it memorable for her but because she felt like it played a very important role in her life and shaped her into who she is today. She states “Its something I always struggled with to till middle school […] doing homework with my mom was a bit traumatizing. Its what I hated and struggled the most as a kid growing up. I dread doing homework b/c of the challenges and endless hours of homework. Also growing up and seeing my siblings go through the exact same thing with my mom but a little less extreme reminded me of my childhood and I thought it would be perfect to write about”. This ties into how she feels her language affects others around her, she believes that it affects her siblings the most because they are going or went through similar experiences as her and she feels that because she has had experience she can help her mother and to lessen the stress and be able to help her siblings in any ways that her mother can’t or couldn’t when she was a kid. In her essay she even gives an example of her helping her little sister, where her sister was having an issue understanding a math problem and Jennifer instead of repeating the question and getting louder every time, she instructed her sister and showed her techniques and systems on how to solve the problem. She says, “these are things that I would have wanted my mom to do for me but because of her language barrier it was not possible”.

            While all of this was stressful to her as a child, in the interview I asked her if her perspective changed as she was writing her essay and so it would seem it did. The reason being was because while she was writing her essay, she was recalling her memories of the event and while that was happening, she was seeing those memories as if from a third person point of view. She was able to see her memories in a wider frame rather than her past perspective when she was a kid. She stated, “I’m glad it changed my perspective because I could see now the different emotions and challenges my mom faces as well as mine”. She was able to see her parents, aunts, and especially her mothers’ perspectives on the matter more clearly and saw their own struggles. She felt that her mother’s teaching methods weren’t bad, and they really did help her in some ways. She even expressed that writing the dialogue was the best part of her writing, that without it, it wouldn’t have been as relatable to other Spanish kids and wouldn’t have tied the whole thing together. She also just enjoyed being able to recall the memory as accurately as she did because she felt like she was brought back to that moment and could hear her mother talking to her. It made her look at how things could’ve gone differently or what they could’ve done differently.

            Now that she is older, she feels like she is glad in her standing is the English language even though she does feel like she had to sacrifice her Spanish to be able to understand English. She is willing and wants to get back in touch with her Spanish because while she knows she can carry conversations she has to “dumb down” some words because she can’t speak it proficiently enough to use more sophisticated words to sounds professional. She states that she knows how important it is to know how to speak Spanish in her family because most of them don’t speak English, she states that she “would feel pretty bad if [she] [wasn’t] able to communicate with them mainly b/c [she’s] lazy or don’t care to learn the language”.

            Jennifer Galindo grew up with immigrant Spanish speaking parents and had to face many challenges with language along with her mother who was the one to help her with her homework. Homework that was the main root and cause of a lot of the challenges with her mother having to teach herself how to solve English problems and learn the correct pronunciations and grammar to then teach her own daughter something she had no prior knowledge on how to. Not to mention the struggle Jennifer had to understand what she heard her teacher say in class and remember it well enough to be able to translate it back to her mother so she could teach her and help her with homework problems. Through Jennifers experiences she felt like it made her build character and impacted who she is today as a person. It is noticeable that she is a very resilient person and through her experience she tries to make a difference for her siblings, so they don’t have to face what she faced.

I found that being able to see someone’s writing and actively interview them questions about them was very interesting. This not only allowed me to get to know someone that I’ve never known before on a deeper level, and I also let them know me on a deeper level. This was probably more sociably connecting for students because this connected them emotionally and they got to see each other differently than just a student/stranger in their class. This probably sparked many new friendships that could probably last till the end of college and after. The task was a little confusing for me at first because I had never written a peer profile before and it was very hard to find a way to start the essay when I had no blueprint or previous experience writing a peer profile. I am glad that even though I was struggling with the start of the essay, when my essay was reviewed it got good comments and felt like I did a decent enough job for my first time writing a peer profile. I do wish that if I had more experience, I would have written it more about who she is as a person rather than just stating things she said and tying it back to her narrative. Overall, I am glad that I was given this opportunity to connect with my peers and get to know them a little more.

I believe that writing is very important. It’s important because it has been used throughout history for many different reasons. One of the reasons writing is important is because it can capture history of events. One of the earliest forms of this was when people would write down transactions between each other, for example it would show that person A gave person B 5 sheep in exchange for 2 pigs. Writing has then been further used to precisely write down historical events rather than just transactions. Another reason writing is also used to help alleviate some sort of burden or to express emotion. That is why poetry and theater have been around for so long because people have found the use of writing as liberating and expressive. It gives them a medium in which they can say what they feel without telling other people. The idea had grown so big that psychologists and other professionals have done studies on whether writing can improve your mental health and it has been shown that it does. That is why not only therapists but people on social media have recommended writing in some sort of way. Even in media like television and movies show people having diaries, it shows that writing is very important and widely done by anyone in any sense. Writing can also reveal something about yourself that you haven’t seen before. Just like the saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul” I believe that writing is like that. It highlights stuff about yourself because when writing you are actively processing your thoughts to write it down on paper and to process your thoughts you have to have some sort of understanding. This is why everyone should at least give free writing a try, it could help you in more ways than one.

I found this phase really emotion and thought provoking. This is because while watching the videos and doing the readings provided, it really struck me personally because I related a lot to the topics and subtopics discussed in them. With the constant struggle with language and how people view others for the way they speak English specifically. I really liked these parts the most because it let me know that my experiences weren’t just my own and people have felt this way and experienced something similar, and it gave me some sort of comfort. I also liked being able to talk about my own experiences with my own issues and struggles with the English language that I had hardly ever talked about before with others. I also liked hearing other people’s experiences with language because even though they weren’t the same experiences that I went through I was still able to relate to them. This phase also really had me thinking of topics I had never really gave much thought to, like how it has been determined that if you don’t speak standard English then it is called “broken”. I had never really investigated the history or implications about just a simple label as “broken”. As well as its connection to how people perceive the “correct” way to speak English is, because while it has been right in front of my face the entire time, I never really paid attention to it. That there were these subtle underlining issues that are rarely addressed or shrouded by larger language issues. This course has been really helpful and made me actively think on a topic I probably never would have encountered had I been in a different English class.