http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/us/in-arizona-complaints-that-an-accent-can-hinder-a-teachers-career.html?sort=newest&offset=2
It says that comments are generally moderated and will be published if they are not abusive which mine is not so I hope that you can see it. I am going to post it here as well just incase you can't access it:
We have seen many flaws in the No Child Left Behind Act, but one thing we haven’t seen is discrimination because of someone’s accent. This teacher is a fluent English speaker and there is no reason that this should be a public problem. We are discriminating against Ms. Aguayo because she is a Mexican woman who dedicated herself to learn English so that she could do something valuable with her life by teaching children and relaying her knowledge to them. Something is wrong with this picture. We are lucky that she is trying her best and standing up at the front of the classroom being a role model for her students by saying our pledge of allegiance. In some public schools, they don’t even attempt to say the pledge of allegiance anymore because of personal opinions behind the meaning and idea of pledging to our flag. People around the United States have accents whether you go from Boston to New York to Georgia. It is funny Ms. Aguayo’s principal was the first one to question her accent. If anything was in question, then why did he hire her in the first place? What happened to thinking that she was highly qualified to teach the children and a fluent English speaker when he hired her? What caused him to think otherwise now? Is he pinpointing this accent to deal with another issue?
I think that this topic is something that should not even be public or blown way out of porportion as it has happened her. I agree that the teacher should work on her accent, but that it should not be up for a national discussion. I am sure that we have thousands of teachers around the United States with this same problem, but they are not being investigated. I personally think that something else has started this issue and this is now what we are focusing on instead of what the real problem is. I will be keeping up to date on this topic and send my best wishes to this teacher and any other teacher that could possibly be facing the same issue. I congratulate all of you for dedicating your time and life to learning English as a second language, and your energy and knowledge to become fantastic teachers in our wonderful school systems!
2 comments:
I think that the administrators in Arizona need to learn more about language learning and accents. The key is comprehensibility, not accents. There is probably more going on there than a simple problem of "accents." I wonder how many administrators speak an L2 "fluently"?
I commented on another blog that was talking about the same thing. We have tons of teachers with Chinese, French, German, etc. accents in our schools, but it is the Spanish accents that are getting called out as "wrong." I wrote last week about linguistic injustice in the US against Spanish, and I think this story just illustrates it even more!
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