I’m not doing all that well with my Spanish-speaking students, to be honest. I mean, it’s great to have real Spanish-speakers in the classroom but I don’t feel like I’m doing anything to advance their learning.
For one, they don’t recognize my authority in the classroom. I understand that as a non-native speaker I have to dedicate the first 2-3 week of each course proving that I do know the language and have the right to teach it. But usually after a couple of weeks I’m done displaying my skills and proving my worth and can just have students trust me when I say something is incorrect. With the native speakers (NS), I have to engage in a constant battle until the very end of the semester over pretty trivial things. This disorients the non-native speakers who don’t know whether to trust me or the NS, and it all eats up tons of valuable time.
Another problem is that the NS don’t have the same degree of excitement over the language as the people who learn it in adulthood. They are immigrants and they see their parents constantly thwarted because of the language and the culture I’m asking them to love.
My NS are obviously not Anglo-Saxon, which means that the determined patient plodding that is the Anglos’ best and most valuable characteristic is not something they tend to possess. They are a lot more given to flashes of brilliance but a lot less interested in constancy and hard-work, and we all know it’s the hard-working plodders who will inherit the world.
Yet another issue is that they are not very much into discipline and silence, and constant loud outbursts tire me.
When I wasn’t hired at Pomona, I was told it was because the hiring department didn’t think I’d be successful teaching their numerous heritage speakers. I was upset to hear this at the time, but now I see they were right.
Clarissa's Blog 
Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat??
On the other hand, I myself probably could have benefited from more teachers telling me plodding counts for more than brilliance, but still…I always thought of Clarissa’s blog as the ultimate stereotype-free zone.
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Whether we want it or not, cultural differences exist. My sister, for instance, just told me of the curious discovery she made. She always thought she was so uncomfortable at parties because she was bad at small talk. And now she realized that it’s simply a cultural difference. In our culture, there is no small talk at parties. People plunge straight into the heavy stuff and only talk about it: politics, religion, money, everything that Anglos consider too heavy for a party.
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