The Chart

 

My experience as a student in 9^th grade Spanish 1 informed how I would teach 9^th grade English over a decade later.

I first learned the mechanics of verb conjugation in Spanish class, when we charted the six subject pronoun varieties alongside the appropriate “-ar”, “-er”, or “-ir” endings. It is a chart I would recreate for my ninth graders in my Grammar Boot Camp. We would explicitly unpack some of the foundational regulations that formed basic sentences. So the chart inspired by Spanish conjugation would clarify what made “you is” a little cringy and highlight where the “y’all” from the Southern U.S. dialect fit into the pattern:

This was me as a teacher pup, sniffing at the edges of culturally responsive pedagogy, trying to build stepping stones so that students with less at-home experience with English can navigate some if its intricacies.  I refused to assume that every student knew the rules of language engagement, and I saw the explicit teaching of grammar as a vital channel for equity that could also inspire students to start thinking of the language as dynamic, stretching and adapting to different communities and contexts.

A quarter-century after my first Grammar Boot Camp and a dozen years after my last lesson plan, I found myself back in the classroom, teaching a Basic ESL night class through the local adult school. The students I saw were exclusively Spanish-speaking though they hailed from a wide range of North, Central, and South American countries. Despite some high aspirations that I could model an immersion environment and teach exclusively in English, employing a wealth of visual aides and physical theatrics to make my meanings clear, I limped through lessons on Spanish crutches. I leaned heavily on translation, which made the experience far messier than that first year putting students through Grammar Boot Camp. I tried to provide a few basic rules that my students could latch onto, but English flouts consistency so much that I regularly struggled to find the Spanish vocabulary that could adequately explain these shifts and nuances and variations.  At times, I felt like I was the one floundering in an immersion Spanish class.

When I tried to introduce basic family terms back in December, I struggled to explain the way the vocabulary shifted depending on the persons involved – I may be Linda’s son, but I’m also Dina’s brother. So a lesson in family also required a lesson on pronouns. Fast forward to April after students had been introduced to subjects and objects, and finally, we could revisit the vocabulary of family AND synthesize all that pronoun knowledge. The handy chart emerges, once again, and I map out the rows of I, you, he/she/it, and we, this time replacing the verb forms with the subjective, possessive, and objective pronouns. Everything falls neatly into place in each row.

Until the last row. That’s when the train screeched to a halt.

they    their    them

This trio sat at the bottom of the chart. Resting underneath the other plural pronouns. 

But these are not exclusively plural pronouns. In truth, these have often been used colloquially to refer vaguely to a single individual. And though that may have been deemed improper when I taught high school English; I now have students, colleagues, and friends who use they and them to define their individual identity.

This chart that had been a staple of my own education and a cornerstone of my English pedagogy cried out for an update. I was called to learn my own lesson about finding beauty in a language’s flexibility. I can curse American English because it can’t seem to organize its terms around any consistent framework. Or more generously, I can admire the way it borrows and invents new vocabulary, allowing new understandings to easily claim old terms and plant themselves in the fertile ground of discourse. The rules and definitions of English are expanded and revised all the time. And this example – wherein transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming persons have adapted and adopted they and them – needed to be taught. Nonetheless, I feared that this lesson may push up against some intransigent beliefs among my students. I believed, at the time, that Spanish didn’t bend as much or as easily as English. I wondered if my students’ beliefs around gender might be just as stubborn.

We started the lesson by reviewing the terms for familial relationships. This chart plotted family vocabulary along gendered categories, with an emphasis on the terms in English that were already gender-neutral:

Already, discussion started percolating. A student was quick to ask for a term that could be used for a romantic, long-term partner outside of marriage. That’s when the term “partner” entered the chart. And yet again, we noted English’s maddening inconsistency when the aunt and uncle were left without a general, non-gendered term.

Finally, when laying out the pronouns so that students could practice constructing sentences describing their own relationships, my new chart made its debut with its conspicuous floating row:

We soon realized that even the English pronoun it bucks the trend of Spanish, which assigns a gender to even third-person items via the pronoun lo or la. So I began by highlighting how they and them can be singular, personal pronouns, but when used in the plural, both words can refer to groups of objects or people with no regard to any gender whatsoever.

Suffice it to say, students were puzzled. But I’m very grateful that they stayed with me, actively listening and wanting to understand. My Spanish remained broken and halted, but it was also determined to make this as clear as possible.

“Por el cuerpo, es típico que las personas son masculinos o femininos. Con huevos o sin huevos.”

Translation: In terms of their body, people are typically masculine or feminine. They either have balls or they don’t.

That got a big laugh, and I admit, it was a crass and cheap gag. I want to acknowledge here that intersex people do exist, and even as I wobbled through my clumsy and painfully limited Spanish, I really tried not to erase them in my remarks. I certainly did not want to say “todos personas” or “all people”; I didn’t even want to present the notion that “many” or “the majority” of bodies fit this description. So I didn’t say “muchos” or “la mayoría” either. The best, least harmful option I had at the time was to say it was “typical” to see one set of genitalia or another. Though I’m still reflecting and trying to grow from it, I am grateful that the joke, however crude, cut through the collective tension – that haze of confusion on the brink of frustration – in order to navigate to the most important point.

“Pero, la sociedad se habla muchas reglas para los hombres y los mujeres, verdad? Los hombres deben ser fuerte y enojado, y nunca siente triste. Pero los mujeres son…”

Translation: But society talks about many rules for men and women, right? The men should be strong and angry, and never feel sad. But the women are….

The women in class knew right away and finished my sentence for me: “débil (weak), emocionales (emotional)”.

“Sí, claro. Entonces, en inglés, cuando una persona usa las palabras “they,” o “them”, es para expresarse que no quiere seguir las reglas de mujeres o hombres. Dice que su identidad es diferente de las reglas que la sociedad se habla a los mujeres y a los hombres.”

Translation: Yes, no doubt. Then, in English, when a person uses the words “they” or “them”, it’s to express that they don’t want to follow the rules of men or women. They are saying that their identity is different than the rules society has for women and men.

Pause. A couple of nods. One student repeated to clarify – these pronouns referred to identity, not necessarily their body. Yes. Pause. No outcry. No protest. More nods.

And then I got my lesson in the flexibility of Spanish.

A woman spoke up and let me know that Spanish-speakers use the pronoun elle as an alternative to él or ella. Now I was the one gob-smacked, and delightedly so. I made a questioning sound – I don’t even think it counted as a word in either of our languages – and she confirmed again, that for non-gendered identities, some people will use the pronoun elle in Spanish.

My heart leapt in celebration, shattering the story I had told myself about Spanish and its allegiance to dogma. They had a singular, personal, non-gendered pronoun. In fact, there is an emerging advocacy around replacing gendered -o and -a endings with a neutral -e; some corners of the Spanish-speaking community prefer the term Latine as an alternative to Latinx. There are advocates in the English sphere as well who would like to see singular neopronouns like “xe” and “zir” (pronounced “zee” and “zeer”, respectively) in that third-person row of the chart. They are quick to point out the insertion of “he” into the spellings of “she” and “their”, and they are continuing a centuries-old crusade to remove that grammatical patriarchy. It may be a stretch to say any of these terms, including elle, is widely used, but the argument is hardly settled. This simple lesson – taught by a night school English learner to the Dean of Language Arts at Chabot College – inspired me to ask more questions, and to point some of them at my own assumptions.

This moment gives me hope. It feeds me as an example of what Paul wrote to the Romans: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2). For me, this is the divine call of education. Understanding the patterns of our world’s languages requires a deep humility, not a dogmatic fealty. Words and meanings are the subjects of countless experiments; what do we gain by judging some of these as poetry and others as blasphemy? Can’t they all be part of the same search – our curious quest to find just the right phrase to express our deepest beliefs, our innermost truth, and the feelings we feel at each moment? We may want language to be precise but the meaning we want to convey is so often shifting, amorphous, and messy. We renew our mind by embracing the ideas that sit outside of our previous patterns. Rather than insisting on conformity, we acknowledge that there’s a meaning that isn’t quite captured by the words we have. We may need to borrow a term from somewhere else in order for the image to come into clearer focus.

The primos and primas in Spanish can all be “cousins” in English.   

Those who are neither “he” nor “she” in English can be elle in Spanish.

There is a space in between the words we know and use that the grammar doesn’t quite reach. Yet.

But we can reach each other if we have the ganas to step into that space with courage, curiosity, and above all, compassion. That’s another favorite Spanish term of mine: ganas. It signifies courage, determination, persistence, and it also plays on a conjugated verb that I learned in Spanish 1.

Tú ganas. You win.