Eliza Skoler is in the 9th grade at Great River School. Her interests are art, running, cooking, photography, guitar, baking, eating, Judaism, travel, fun!
PROSE - 2010
Grades 7 - 9
First Place - Eliza Skoler
Second Place - Hannah Bernstein
Third Place - Lana Rubinstein
Grades 10 - 12
First Place - Nicole Zelickson
Second Place - By Asher Mintzer
Prose, Grades 7 - 9: First Place
From Spanish to Oaxaca - Eliza Skoler
My mom drove me to school on that first day. I was petrified. We walked into my new first grade classroom where most of the other kids were gathered, also with their parents. It was noisy and chaotic; excitement and nervousness filled the air. We found a desk with my name on it. And all too soon school was beginning and parents had to leave. As soon as my mom left the room and the students quieted down, I walked up to the teacher’s desk.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” I told her.
“Vamos a aprender,” she replied.
I shook my head. She repeated her words.
“I don’t understand.”
“We will learn,” she translated.
That was my first day of school in Minnesota.
From that day on I was completely immersed in Spanish and Latino culture. I was beginning first grade at Adams Spanish Immersion, and all the other kids had been there since kindergarten. So I was a newbie and spoke zero Spanish.
The beginning was rough. I hated school. I didn’t understand anything. I would come home asking my mom, “Can’t I please just go to an English immersion school?” But I had to stick it out.
One day we went on a field trip to Dodge Nature Center. While there we took a walk through the prairie. Upon returning to school we were asked to journal and draw a picture. Since I didn’t understand Spanish, I thought we were supposed to draw the prairie, so that’s what I drew. I enjoyed myself, trying to incorporate grasses blowing in the wind, birds chirping, and cloudy skies. When I had almost finished my drawing the boy across from me said, “That’s not a backyard. Backyards don’t look like that.”
I was pretty embarrassed at misunderstanding the assignment, but I shot back, “That is my backyard. You’ve never seen prairie grasses growing in a backyard?
” * * *
On a beautiful and sunny day around mid-October, with bright fall leaves floating in the air, our parents came to school to join us for lunch and talk with our teachers. My dad was coming from work and I was thrilled. After we ate on the playground I went with him to talk to my teacher. My dad told her that at home my mom had said, “Eliza, you are floating on top of a pot of Spanish language soup. At some point you will begin to sink lower into the soup and you will start to speak more Spanish.”
When my dad said this I replied, “but I don’t want to float at the top, I want to sink to the bottom and float out a hole in the bottom of the pot.” I wanted out.
My teacher replied, “but if you sink deeper into the pot you will learn Spanish.”
And so I began. As we went through the year learning first grade things in Spanish, we also learned about Latino countries and their cultures. My teacher was from Puerto Rico, and brought in Puerto Rican snacks and treats. We had interns from many Spanish-speaking countries that taught us songs, games and stories, and dances from their home countries.
I stayed at Adams through fourth grade. During those years I shot to one of the top students in my class; I won the school’s bilingual spelling bee; I read many, many books in both English and Spanish; I attended colorful and happy Cinco de Mayo celebrations and school celebrations-- filled with music, noise and smiles-- for countries all over Latin America. I was comfortable with Spanish and I began to feel that I understood a bit about Latino culture.
After the sixth grade we moved to southern Mexico for a year-long sabbatical. That’s when my four years at Adams paid off. I was the person in the family who spoke the most Spanish. So I was the one helping my parents with everything: currency exchange, the three-page single-spaced rental contract, finding schools, ordering meals at restaurants, asking directions around Oaxaca, and basically interacting with wonderfully nice and fast-speaking Oaxaqueños. I was extremely proud. My younger brother had also been at Adams (and still is) and spoke less Spanish but he helped my parents a lot, too.
Oaxaca was extraordinary. Color and noise everywhere, spontaneous dance groups performing in the streets, amazingly flavorful food, children playing, vendors calling, smiles everywhere, spicy and sweet and delicious smells wafting around, music filling street corners. Oaxaca was exactly what one thinks of as the heart of Mexico. It was all so different, so wonderful, so incredible, so unbelievable that a place like this actually existed, that what I had learned in school could come true like this!
We had our adventures: ordering odd meals, getting on wrong buses, walking into a tequila fair one night as a family. In Oaxaca the sewage pipes are really small so you can’t throw your toilet paper in the toilet; instead, you throw it into a garbage can next to the toilet. We found this out the hard way. But most of all, Oaxaca lacked organization. There were always cultural programs that had been advertised where the audience would show up but not the performers. Or random performances would just happen all over town. There were always people and confusion. And yet my Spanish took flight.
One morning I woke up and decided, “I want to read Harry Potter.” I’d never read the seventh book and the only copy in the house was in Spanish. So I read it. My mom was astonished. That’s how much I loved the language.
Soon school started, my first-ever private school, uniforms, and a 7:10am start-time. We were charged for everything: handouts, paper clips, school letters and forms, sheets of homework, and more. In Mexico the kids didn’t speak up if something wasn’t fair (the boys got more soccer time in PE than the girls) or if there was a logical question (why we were learning ancient Mayan numeration in math class). Plus everyone spoke fast Spanish. Because I wasn’t used to Mexican ways, after about four months in school, kids stopped liking me. I was just too different culturally. Some kids were nice but I didn’t make any real friends.
Once again I reached the top of my class, which the smartest (machista) boy didn’t like. Sometimes I got better grades than he did, I was used as a class example, and in the spring I was our class representative at a regional “Spanish Day” filled with language activities. None of this made me popular in school.
Oaxaca really pulled my family closer together. We had lots of bonding time, conversation, games, hugs, walks, smiles, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. We all felt much calmer and more relaxed. It was a wonderful year.
* * * *
Before we knew it, it was time to return home. For the first six months back, people continually asked about our year. We willingly told them all about it, reliving it for ourselves. We recalled Oaxaca often as we re-adjusted to our lives. Soon the culture shock, excitement, and confusion wore off. My level of Spanish has now definitely decreased but it’s still inside. My family still talks about and remembers Oaxaca, but it feels so far away. Yet Oaxaca was my first introduction to another culture and language after years of learning about it. And what an amazing introduction it was.