Opinion Column

How My Parents Indirectly Caused Me to Get Bullied

Zina Kaissi

  My little problem started when I was in 4^th grade. To be frank, I was bullied; no, not the ‘I was beat-up’ bullying or the ‘I got called names’ bullying, mine was worse. I was the ‘You can’t speak English’ bullied. Now, you have to remember that I am this 10 year-old kid who has no idea why this is happening to her. I spoke great English (as great as a 4^th grader’s could be), I read and wrote in English and I even had the best scores when it came to spelling tests. So what was wrong with me? Well, it wasn’t me that was ‘wrong’, it was my parents.

  Both of my parents were immigrants who couldn’t speak what others would call ‘perfect’ English. But they were just perfect to me. They disregarded grammar and found it easier to simply speak what’s on their minds, even if it’d sound like gibberish to others. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean they were dumb. My mother is a nurse who works the day shift in the emergency section of a hospital while my father works in I.T. They both watch the news, read about changes in the economic industry and even talk about political news so you couldn’t call them uneducated, but yet, they were still labeled as so.

  All because they couldn’t speak ‘perfect’ English, it was assumed I couldn’t either. So, in class, I was shunned and found that, when it was group work time, I had to tell my teacher that I preferred working alone rather than force others to work with me. But I’ll always remember the time when we were forced to work in partners in 6^th grade.

  It was our school’s annual science fair and my partner and I, another girl who preferred nail-work over school work, was forced to be my partner. I say forced because, after she outright refused, the teacher told her it was either partner up with me or get an F, you can see which she begrudgingly chose. So, our project was to see which liquids would cause a pea plant to grow the fastest. Throughout the experiment, I was the one doing the work while my partner went off with her friends. I was a science nerd who just couldn’t fail, so, I made an A+ project. But, when it was time to present, I was never asked what the project was, never asked of how it was done, only she was. Even when she didn’t know anything, she was seen as smarter, better and much more reliable than me. Even then, I still didn’t know why. I thought I did something wrong or that I really was dumb, so I didn’t fight it. Not until years later.

  Fast-forward to 10^th grade. I’m still bullied and I’m still blaming myself. It’s parent-teacher conferences and both my parents have come to meet my homeroom teacher, who’s also my English teacher. Immediately I know something’s wrong. My teacher looks at my parents in their work clothes, my mom in her nurse outfit and my dad in his suit, and seems to have a double-take. When we sit, he starts off with, “What do you work as?”. No hellos, no ‘how are you?’ or even a handshake.

  That’s when my mom starts with “I a nurse and he is work in I.T.” I never felt more embarrassed in my life when my teacher replied with “Really?”, like he couldn’t actually believe my parents had the capability to be such things. And it only got worse there, when my parents asked how I was in class, my grades or how I could improve, my teacher gave sharp replies and only told me that, to improve, I had to take ELL classes as I needed more time in an environment that exposed me to ‘perfect’ English. My parents were insulted and when they took it to the principal, they were met with “He has done nothing wrong, he has simply given your child a chance to improve.” The next week, I was in a new school. But, unlike my last schools, this one had a larger population of immigrant children. I still remember what my now-best friend said to me on my first day at lunchtime, “How bad was it?” And, wow, I cried. I cried so bad and when I finally stopped for breath, everyone at the table started telling me their stories. A Hispanic boy had told me that, because he needed the help at ELL, he was ridiculed and even his teachers punished him for speaking Spanish with his younger sister at lunch. Another Asian girl told me that her English teacher made sure that she never was able to ‘spread her wings’ in creative writing and instead was forced to do exercises from the textbook of the younger grades to ‘give her extra help’. I couldn’t stop laughing at that, especially since, in the school, she was known as the best script writer. She even modernized Hamlet somehow! (I didn’t get to see I but I was told that it had wizards.)

  It was then that I realized that I wasn’t the problem, but these people’s ideas were. Of course English is an important language, but what they thought was that it was the only important language. And I smiled at how, now, I knew that the problem was never me. It was like a weight was lifted off of me.

  After that, I went on in my life and ignored those who thought otherwise of my abilities. My mother and father both continued to support me and now, over a decade later, I am now an English professor who teaches people of every nationality. But I always slip into my ‘broken’ English at home, not caring who’s there to listen. Even in my classroom I’m more casual as I find that using ‘perfect’ English makes it harder for me to build relationships with my students.

  It is from my story that I realized that so many children of immigrant parents are labeled as ‘dumb’ regarding English due to their parents speaking ‘broken’ English. Which is why, years later, I help kids who’ve thought otherwise of their abilities and help them to see what they really can do.