Author Archives: tmedlock

Being a non-heritage speaker in the Portuguese major

In almost all of my Portuguese classes, I am either the only one or one of two or three students who is not a heritage speaker. When I first transferred to UMass this was difficult; at my old school there had been more new learners than heritage speakers. I was immediately very intimidated by the overwhelming percentage of people who already spoke fluent Portuguese in almost every one of my classes. And I don’t expect this will change soon, since the majority of people who major in Portuguese are, understandably, people who want to learn more about their heritage and/or want their degree to show that they speak another language. Continue reading →

Learning how to teach kids

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I’m sure a lot of you are interested in teaching and probably already have lots of experience. But for me I don’t have a lot of experience and this was a great learning moment for me!

Last semester I took a class that was about teaching theory, but was also a service learning class. Every week we spent one hour studying different philosophies about teaching and the next hour was spent making lesson plans for Saturday. On Saturday mornings we would go to a Brazilian church in Springfield and give Portuguese lessons to kids of the congregation (who were all heritage speakers). By far, one of the most difficult obstacles to overcome was motivating the kids. They were all wonderful kids, kind, well behaved, but they just did not want to be there. They would tell us bluntly that they did not want to be there and they did not want to do any work. As a teacher, I had no idea how to respond to that. I understood their sentiments and I felt bad for them–there I was, standing there in front of these tired 12 year olds on a Saturday morning, looking foolish with these worksheets and vocabulary lists in my hands. Of course they wouldn’t want to do them. What kid would? Continue reading →

Are Brazilians Latinx?

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When I was in one of my Portuguese classes at my first year at UMass, there were a lot of native and heritage speakers. Many of these students identified as American, Brazilian, or both. One day the debate came up on whether or not Brazilians are considered Latinx, Hispanic, both or neither.

The origins of the words “Latinx” and “Hispanic” are debatable. It’s generally accepted that Latino/a comes from Latin, which is the language from which Spanish is derived. Therefore, logic would go that all Spanish speakers are Latino and English speakers are not. This coincides with the definition of Hispanic, since the derivation of Hispanic is from the word Hispania, the Old World name for Spain. Continue reading →