1

Hanging with the bad boys "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember.

Involve me and I learn." -Benjamin Franklin

By Analisa Benavent Díaz

Linguistics II

Professor Ramón Guerra

Universidad Latina de Panamá

For me, teaching requires bravery. To teach is to reach; reach for other people, to try

and interest them, engage their mind, tickle their curiosity. And for me that requires

bravery, because most of the times that's easier said than done.

It's not easy to create rapport1 with a single student, much less a full classroom but

we still try, we still go and prepare as best we can to not only give information but for

them to create relationships with knowledge. Because, after all teaching is a calling,

not a profession you choose to become rich and famous; one has to have the interest

and will to help others.

And today it's my turn to share with you my favorite story on bravery. Happened

around seven years ago. I was working in an ESL Institute for adults and I was loving

1 Definition: relation; connection, especially harmonious or sympathetic relation. Dictionary.com

2

it. There, I found my calling and I felt like I was truly making a difference in the lives

of my students.

Until one day two new pupils arrived. They were from a town called Colón, the ghetto

province. They were tall, athletically built and dressed themselves like rappers; with

heavy clothes, and flashing jewelry. They were intimidating; talked really loudly and

with no regard to others; didn't have patience and wanted to be attended

immediately. They used their looks and the way they talked to push people away, and

were successful, not only with their classmates but with the teachers also. They

expressed themselves with no respect to them, like they would treat a close friend.

They didn't filter their language and sometimes were even offensive and for that

became the ones no one wanted to work with.

Not all it's what it seems I've always thought that one should not judge before at least trying to know a person.

So when the issue of these two guys arose at work I volunteered to tutor them. After

all, they had had the will to enroll and assist to class so I knew they had motivation.

I just need it to find it.

After a week of working with

them I realized that as I

thought, they were really

sweet young men. The only

real issue was how they

expressed themselves. They

talked like they were at

home or at a party. Full of

bad and misspelled words;

talked in slangs and as they

told me once, "ghetto talk". It

was really difficult to

understand them in Spanish,

their native language, and

because of that it was even more difficult to teach them English. They had a base of

English though, that is why it was easy for them to catch the pronunciation of words

but the tone was another thing. They didn't know how to make a conversation fluid

depending on the setting; it was like they didn't know that you must change gears

depending on who you're talking to.

by Nerijus Strumila Colón City. Main Street Panama

3

A sociolinguistics case It is clear to me now that I was in front of a sociolinguistics case. Back then I didn't

know the theory of what I was living but now I can say that it was a clear case of

competence vs. performance. They had competence, they knew the required Spanish

grammar but didn't know how to use it. Years upon years of misusing the language

made them have a very poor performance. Although, I have to say that within their

speech community they were very successful. Probably, if the case had been the other

way around I would have failed miserably; just like Noam Chomsky said,

performance it’s “the actual use of language in concrete situations”2 and they were

good in their own environment, the problem was they were no longer in theirs and it

showed. They didn’t know how to perform in a classroom environment or with higher

hierarchy figures.

They talked almost strictly in slangs, coined and even backward spelled words. And

that translated as well to the limited knowledge they had on English. They listened

to rap music and most of their vocabulary was drawn from there, they knew a lot of

rap slangs and that was what they used to communicate with until then. Derek

Smith3 explains this very well, through speech errors one can easily infer where a

person is from or his/her ethnic origins; occasionally it can lead to embarrassment

but like he said, sometimes these speech errors become embedded in popular culture,

turning into linguistic flavoring.

Without knowing it I was conducting an ethnographic observation of my students.

Trying to figure out what they were saying and why, where do all those slangs came

from and how they used them. And although they gave me great insight and

explained a lot of their sayings, I can’t remember any of them; I guess seven years it’s

too long for me.

But they were there to polish and improve another language. My time with them was

limited and I had to focus on the target language. So I worked with them on tone,

stress, intonation, and how to apply their competences on different settings. And

slowly but surely they started changing in Spanish as well. They were very good

students and they worked really hard to improve.

2 Noam Chomsky. (2006). Language and Mind. Third Edition. Cambridge University Press. 3 Derek J. Smith. (2003). Speech Errors, Speech Production Models, and Speech Pathology. Human Information

Processing.

4

Connections Somehow we connected, and I like to believe it was because of the attitude I took from

the start. I didn’t let appearances deter me from my duty to teach them and at the

end was gifted with two great students. We worked on practical scenarios, real life

situations like interviews and customer service calls; they were interested in the

maritime business so we worked on vocabulary and on improving their linguistic

performance. Thanks to that they also improved their performance in Spanish and

became much more approachable and well mannered.

Their stay at the institute came to an end when they both got jobs at a call center.

That was one of my most gratifying moments as a teacher. They expressed how

grateful they were and how much they appreciated all that I had done. To see how

much those guys had changed was astonishing and I couldn’t be happier for them.

At the beginning, I talked about bravery and how teaching was about being brave

enough to connect with others. Well, I think this story proves just that, not only I was

brave but they were brave also. We worked together towards the same goal and

succeeded because we became a team. We all improved our performance and because

of them, now I believe I’m a better teacher.

"An investment in knowledge

always pays the best interest." -Benjamin Franklin