"Do you want to help Dada with the doo-doos?"

Sometimes when I'm talking to Ben and speaking his language, I often stop and giggle to myself at the words that come out of my mouth. Like, "Do you want to help Dada with the doo-doos?" (Translation: "Do you want to help Daddy with the dishes?")

Ben's language has been a treat to watch develop, especially over the last couple of months. It really amazes me at how young children pick up so many new sounds and learn the meaning of words in such a short amount of time. It's a real bummer that your peak learning time for languages is from birth through age 7 (or something like that). There are those people who learn languages really easily (like Marc), and those that don't (like me).

When I was teaching in DC, over half of my students parents spoke Spanish and very little English. Where they were with their English, was where I was with Spanish. HA! Oh, the "conversations" we'd have! When we were getting to know each other and I would speak a little Spanish, they would think that I was fluent and they'd start telling me stories and Lordy-knows-what since I really couldn't understand. I concentrated so hard, trying to understand, nodding as if I was really understanding and only able to identify a few words in their whole story. Oh. My. Gosh. I felt foolish telling them after their long story, "Lo siento, pero hablo un POCO Espanol!" ("I'm sorry, but I speak a little Spanish!"). We would always laugh and then ask their child to help translate for us both.

This system worked most of the time. Every now and then, with the more challenging students, I never knew if they were REALLY telling their parents (or grandparents) what I was really saying. I totally relied on their reactions. I had a student from Albania, who lived with his grandmother, aunt and uncle. To his credit, he came to the school in kindergarten and didn't know any English. He was pretty much fluent and thriving in all subjects by the time I had him in third grade. However, he was a nix-noox, always getting under other kids' skin, bragging about his good grades, needing to always be first in whatever we were doing, and always making up stories (and being the gullible teacher I was, had a hard time with this). He was a real piece of work! His grandmother came to pick him up every day and we had to have a "conversation" about how his behavior was during the day. She spoke NO English and only understood the daily color behavior chart that the school implemented. I just hoped every day that this boy would get all greens so that his grandmother would be happy and I didn't have to exhaust myself trying to explain, with this boy's "translating" to boot. It totally didn't help matters that Albanian was a pretty rare language spoken in DC. Oh, he was a piece of work!

Well anyway... back to the original story... Here is Ben doing the doo-doos with his Dada.