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I didn't say that only children can learn a language.
I said that it is more difficult for an adult to learn a language, and adults must learn differently than children do. Children pick up their language from their environment. Adults must study.
Combine that with jobs that take long hours and the academic defeatism in many of the campesino communities, and that explains how many campesinos have poor English even while staying in the U.S. for a long time.
What's wrong with studying? In fact I think it can be easier for an adult to learn a language because we already have the concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. To learn Spanish for example, you just have to learn that the adjective can be after the noun - or before it in that language.
I also think it's a myth about the long work hours. Many don't work much at all - in the housing projects here where you hear only Spanish spoken, people aren't working much if at all but they still aren't learning English. Some of the farm workers might work from dawn till dusk but they don't work much at all in the winter months. I think it's lack of motivation most of all. They see no need at all to bother learning English so they don't learn it.
CBS news tonight interviewed a woman in Phoenix, who is an admitted "Undocumented Alien". This person had been living in Phoenix for 15 years, and had 10 children who are United States Citizens, but she needed an interpreter to talk to the reporter! She stated she did not consider herself or her husband to be "criminals" because "criminals" kill people. She and her husband were now unemployed, so they loaded up their vehicle and headed for Colorado.
Then the news team interviewed a "slumlord" (my term, for lack of a better one) who was complaining about the fact that 7 of his rentals were empty because the illegals who were renting from him packed up and went to California. He is a natural born U.S. citizen, and the new law was hurting HIM! It just isn't fair!
Riiiiigghhtttt!
I have read through the law, and it repeatedly refers to EXISTING Federal laws, and mostly just gives Arizona Law Enforcement Officers the duty to enforce FEDERAL law!
Basicly, it seems to be saying the Feds have not enforced their own laws, so we will do it for them.
With regard to the woman in the first part of the story...plenty of other crimnals are seperated from their children due to their crimes, when they end up in jail. It's an emotional and financial hardship for the family. Why should this criminal be any different? Why is the paper trying to stir up so much sympathy? Of course, if federal law enforcement had been doing their jobs this criminal would have been deported long ago. And states wouldn't need to step in and correct this monumental failure of the feds.
With regard to the second (slumlord)...you are knowingly providing a product to criminals-no different than a drug dealer. Cry me a river that enforcement is hurting you.
.... and had 10 children who are United States Citizens, but she needed an interpreter to talk to the reporter! .......
1) Living in the US for 15yrs and have 10 children almost 1 per year. Obviously they are using the anchor babies to make a living. This do more harm to the society than good. I would not have children if I cannot take care of them.
2) this is so clear. We, the tax payer, has been supporting these 10 kids from housing, healthcare to food stamps to college funds. She will get at least 2k-3k a month and other benefit to raise these kids.
3) the CBS failed to mention what these 10 kids become. You know, in the environment where parents cannot speak English after 15 years, they arent encourage/pushing their kid to do be better. My guess at least half of them are not finishing school. I will not mention 1-3 of these 10 will end up in jail because that's racist. OMFG I'm so angry at these GOP
What's wrong with studying? In fact I think it can be easier for an adult to learn a language because we already have the concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. To learn Spanish for example, you just have to learn that the adjective can be after the noun - or before it in that language.
I also think it's a myth about the long work hours. Many don't work much at all - in the housing projects here where you hear only Spanish spoken, people aren't working much if at all but they still aren't learning English. Some of the farm workers might work from dawn till dusk but they don't work much at all in the winter months. I think it's lack of motivation most of all. They see no need at all to bother learning English so they don't learn it.
I've seen many Asian, French, German, Indian adults learn to speak English at age 40 and they still manage to speak properly. SO screwed the excuses of getting old or work hours.
Read the 13th Ad. of the United States Constitution about States Rights!
You will find that you views on this issue are legally flawed.
This issue is based on "rule of law"!
Not emotions!
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Originally Posted by Vicman
Apparently many blue collar immigrants, legal or not, don't become good with the native language. That is what their children do.
Yeah, he's a slumlord - But slumlords have cheap housing, and people are willing to put up with slummish conditions to have a cheap place to live.
But the question is whether it is Arizona's place to take the initiative. If the federal government doesn't do a good job with, say, its navy, does this mean Arizona should form its own navy and try to keep it to federal law?
It doesn't matter how good or bad the feds are; the state can't try to do it better, because then it usurps the authority of the federal government. The state has to accept its role.
This was the reality: most Berendo parents (working long hours as house cleaners, janitors, security guards, mechanics, parking lot attendants, maids, or factory workers just to pay the rent and put food on the table with little chance of ever getting a better job) unfortunately did not actively involve themselves in the education of their children or come to see their children's teachers. All too often the family lives in a tiny apartment with eight or twelve other people with children having no place in which to study or do their homework - in a household where nobody reads for pleasure and hardly a book can be found on the premises. I remember staying in during lunch once to teach a child how to wash his clothes in a sink because his family lived in a cheap hotel and rarely did laundry. I knew that many of my students would not have eaten if the school did not provide free breakfasts and lunches every school day. I knew that some of my student's parents hardly even checked their children's report cards. This was the reality.
and
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For many poor people, ideas and thought are ephemeral, dollars and cents concrete. It might be true that knowledge is power and power results in wealth, but it is hard for poor people to see it. And in a family or community which tolerates academic mediocrity or worse, an ambitious student with pretensions towards higher education often swims against the tide.
And as seen in the news article, many campesinos have an ingrained belief that they will never accomplish much beyond their "caste" - They know English is important, but they personally believe that they will never rise beyond their social ranking, so studying in general is a waste of time to them.
Now, in regards to housing projects,
what state are you in? In Texas most campesinos are in privately-run, out of state managed complexes. Are you sure there were significant numbers of people who were not working at all to make a living?
Quote:
Originally Posted by malamute
What's wrong with studying? In fact I think it can be easier for an adult to learn a language because we already have the concept of nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on. To learn Spanish for example, you just have to learn that the adjective can be after the noun - or before it in that language.
I also think it's a myth about the long work hours. Many don't work much at all - in the housing projects here where you hear only Spanish spoken, people aren't working much if at all but they still aren't learning English. Some of the farm workers might work from dawn till dusk but they don't work much at all in the winter months. I think it's lack of motivation most of all. They see no need at all to bother learning English so they don't learn it.
They are socioeconomically better off and take the time to study the language.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ph0ngvu
I've seen many Asian, French, German, Indian adults learn to speak English at age 40 and they still manage to speak properly. SO screwed the excuses of getting old or work hours.
You said: "You will find that you views on this issue are legally flawed." You mean the U.S. Civil War and the supremacy of the federal government is flawed?
You said "Not emotions!"
Quite honestly I have understood that point for years, but I will argue that many posters (so far I have no names in mind) should follow that advice. Muz154, my post was correct and justified.
Quote:
Originally Posted by muz14599
Read the 13th Ad. of the United States Constitution about States Rights!
You will find that you views on this issue are legally flawed.
This was the reality: most Berendo parents (working long hours as house cleaners, janitors, security guards, mechanics, parking lot attendants, maids, or factory workers just to pay the rent and put food on the table with little chance of ever getting a better job) unfortunately did not actively involve themselves in the education of their children or come to see their children's teachers. All too often the family lives in a tiny apartment with eight or twelve other people with children having no place in which to study or do their homework - in a household where nobody reads for pleasure and hardly a book can be found on the premises. I remember staying in during lunch once to teach a child how to wash his clothes in a sink because his family lived in a cheap hotel and rarely did laundry. I knew that many of my students would not have eaten if the school did not provide free breakfasts and lunches every school day. I knew that some of my student's parents hardly even checked their children's report cards. This was the reality.
That is the reality? That is the reality, as paid for by US tax payers, in supporting the irresponsible reproduction habits of people who cannot plan their families according to their means. And since when is working hard and long hours an excuse for not being involved with the upbringing and education of your children? How should one feel sympathy for people who are the architects of their own misfortune and who are looking to the charity of a foreign nation to support their bad decisions? Well, at least they are ensuring we have a steady stream of future dropouts, felons and gangbangers to look forward to for decades to come - amen!
DontH8, that's a perspective from the first world, where we have social security, decent health care, etc.
In the third world, poor families deliberately have lots of children because:
* Death from childbirth and/or disease
* The more children, the more money can be made from working
* When parents grow old, who cares for them?
Also campesinos may come from very religious families (particularly Roman Catholic) where having many kids is encouraged.
As for more quotes from the same page:
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The education of every young person starts in the home and parents are always their children's first and foremost teachers. In the Pico-Union and Westlake areas of Los Angeles - despite the love these parents had and their desire for their children to succeed - the vast majority of immigrant parents from Latin America lacked the wherewithal both financially and intellectually to help academically. The United States Department of Education has discovered the single most important factor influencing a child's achievement in the first and second grade is whether the child has been read to at home before beginning school, and whether he has seen his parents reading; and I suspect this does not change so very much in later grades. If this be true, it tokens ill for so many Latino immigrant students who grow up in households barren of books and regular readers. Many of my students at the middle school level already had more education than their parents - any kind of help with homework would have to come from an older brother or sister whose own education was far from complete. I remember talking to even the most enthusiastic and involved immigrant parents who eagerly involved themselves with their children's homework until the middle grades when they literally could not understand the material themselves. Academically speaking, my students all too often were on their own.
and...
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In retrospect, I am much more philosophical about the whole experience. The Los Angeles Unified District was mostly doing the best it could; most teachers were doing their job as best they could; most parents truly loved their children and wanted the best for them. There was room for improvement, but everyone (especially Principal Esther Rivera) was already working pretty hard. Yet still most kids were not learning, or at least not learning very much - neither in Spanish nor in English.
also:
Quote:
The problem was not that my students didn't want to learn the language. The vast majority knew it was important and enjoyed speaking English, as they did Spanish. The problem was that very few of them were on the road to learning the kind of academic English they would need to succeed at the university (after all, many native English-speakers failed to master that level of literacy!). How we expect these Latino immigrant children to ever acquire an educated English when they live in neighborhoods so totally isolated from any English-speaking or middle class influences is beyond me! I clearly could see that too many immigrant children were proving unable to move from a culture of the rural Mexican or Central American poverty of their parents to that of the Information Age of the future United States where they would live and work as adults. Or worse, they embraced the "homeboy" culture of the inner-city, fraught with values and behaviors inimical to success in life. And it is difficult to teach literature and writing to students who, according to a local poll, watched per average 4.5 hours of television a day while spending only 37 minutes reading, a trend which promotes passive spectating rather than active learning.
Quote:
To think in terms of education and hard work as a way to make it out of the immigrant ghetto is, in fact, to buy into America. Relatively few of my students appeared to have bought into such an America. For most of these prepubescent Los Angeles teenagers, the United States was Nike athletic shoes, television sitcoms, basketball stars, pop music, glamour magazines, urban "hip hop" culture, and the ironical skepticism of "outlaw" street culture. It reminded me of Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire" where the fifth-century Goths purportedly "imbibed the vices, without imitating the arts and institutions, of civilised [Roman] society." I reminded myself I was seeing my students in the throes of adolescence - rarely the most graceful or polished time in a person's life. But it was still so profoundly troubling and depressing!
Quote:
Originally Posted by DontH8Me
That is the reality? That is the reality, as paid for by US tax payers, in supporting the irresponsible reproduction habits of people who cannot plan their families according to their means. And since when is working hard and long hours an excuse for not being involved with the upbringing and education of your children? How should one feel sympathy for people who are the architects of their own misfortune and who are looking to the charity of a foreign nation to support their bad decisions? Well, at least they are ensuring we have a steady stream of future dropouts, felons and gangbangers to look forward to for decades to come - amen!
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