Crucian or English?

Like it or not communication is one of the most profound activities we practice on a daily basis. How we communicate is intimately connected with the language we first learned to speak at home.

Heidegger claims language is the “House of Being” but if i were to try and talk Crucian i would not be at home. If i were to write in Crucian i would not be at home…granted i have learned to understand it but i’m useless trying to communicate in it and i’m definitely not at home speaking or writing it.
 

i’ve been thinking about this a lot because i tutor young adults whose first language is Crucian or Spanish and not English. They, unlike me, are not at home using English to study, learn or even speak. They speak to me in Crucian, they ask questions in Crucian, they look for direction in Crucian but then i have the audacity to ask them to write their essays in English.

One of my devoted students yesterday asked me why i didn’t speak Crucian. i told her i felt silly trying to speak Crucian, i wasn’t comfortable etc. She first asked me how long i had lived here then she dared me by saying, “But you understand it why don’t you speak?” i admitted i did understand and had no problem listening.  But them to give her an example of how awful i sound i asked her to say a sentence and i would repeat it. She did, i mimicked her, she cracked up and i said see…i’m terrible.

i'm a terrible Crucian speaker in the same way that she struggles with writing and speaking English. It doesn’t come naturally, she wants to write the way she talks but she can’t if she wants to get a high school diploma. i'd like to talk Crucian but its a real risk for me to even open my mouth and try...i'd feel like a fraud.

Students on St. Croix are required to write standard English, read in standard English, express themselves in standard English and excel doing it even though their daily discourse at home and school occurs in standard Crucian.

So think about it, most students on St. Croix are actually doing all their studying in a foreign language. In fact teachers that are from the islands teach in Crucian but expect the work to be done in English. How confusing is this?
 

i’ve been grappling with this for a long while because i believe that an entire student population is at a real disadvantage when it comes to learning. English is not their first language. They don’t speak it at all if they are not required to interact with someone who does and even then they don’t speak it. Why should they? Their language is Crucian not English.

There are no books written in Crucian except for a dictionary that i know of…but i bet if there were they would blow us all out of the water.
 
i wonder, and maybe some of you do too, if the low scores we continue to witness island wide are more connected to learning in a foreign language?

See ya next week