Myriam Marquez, The Miami Herald

March 15, 2009

Myriam Marquez
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: If Tony Montana could learn English why can’t these kids? A solution to “lowering the bar for ESOL teachers” that is a bit different from the one you offered in your column this morning in the Miami Herald.

Ms. Marquez,

First, an update on my annual appeal to the Miami Herald.

If it isn’t Global Cooling it’s Global Warming. Then it morphed into Climate Change. Who cares what it’s called as long as we do something about it. Since 1997 I have been pleading, cajoling, begging, imploring, maunding, - Thank God for Roget! – to have the Miami Herald show us the way.

Turn off the air conditioners at World HQ by the bay.

Besides being on the moral high ground you would save a lot of money. Since the bond market values your debt just above Zimbabwe it could be a good thing. Just think how many would follow your lead. If you need to have phased in plan how about banning all air conditioning from coal powered or nuclear powered plants? Ideally, only the borborygymous eructations from organically fed sheep would keep the elevators running. Alas, that may be a hope too far.

Back to “lowering the bar for ESOL teachers”.

There is one answer before any others.

English must become the official language.

By that I mean that all contracts, all laws, all traffic signs, all of everything that can become a public record is written in English.

History and Logic demand this.

It doesn’t mean that foreign languages are banned. On the contrary, merchants serving a foreign tongued clientele would be wise to serve their markets. When it comes time to sign the credit card slip it is Ingles solamente. [I personally think French should be banned because of odious nature of les merdes du Quebec but that’s something else.]

I was raised in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was known as the City of Churches. It was also the pot in which many tongues were used. My father worked on a produce wagon. Until his death he was able to call out the names and prices of any frit or vegetable that he saw in 3 languages.

I mention the churches because until the 1960s 3 of them [Saint Joseph’s, Mount Carmel, and Assumption] taught Slavish, Polish, and Italian in their grammar schools. Saint Michael’s offered Lithuanian on Sunday. Parents who chose to send their children there wanted them to remember where they were from. They focused on where they were and what they wanted them to be.

ESOL [English as a Second Language] is like a “woman preaching”. Doctor Johnson compared it to a “dog walking on its hind legs”. He said it “wasn’t a question of how well it was done but why was it done at all”?

My wife’s grandfather arrived here with zero knowledge of English. His son earned two degrees from Harvard. ESOL never entered into it. The total immersion of the streets of Bayonne shaped it.

Since Spanish is the dominant language here I’ll end it in that language. Absent English as the official language we risk a generation lamenting “He arado en el mar”.

Meanwhile see if you get the air conditioning shut off. Regardless of the language we owe it to the drowning polar bears.