Raising Boys

English as a second language August 22, 2005

My 7-year-old son and I were watching Dreamcatcher (a screen adaptation of a book by Stephen King with the same title) on cable when, during a really scary scene, his hand clutched at his chest and he exclaimed “Gracious!”

I looked at him and he looked at me and we burst out laughing.

Dylan has been using English in most ordinary conversations now, an offshoot I’m sure of a policy in his first grade class that sets a penalty of a few pesos on anyone using the Cebuano dialect in the classroom.

But I did not realize how pervasive the effect of this policy was in my son’s life until last night, when he preferred to express his surprise in English, in our home, where it won’t cost him anything to speak Cebuano.

I don’t think Dylan’s school is responsible for his mastery of the language in the same way that I don’t believe his classmates speak it as well as he does; STEC at best is fair to middling and one of my bad decisions.

Rather, it’s all because of the toon shows he follows religiously every day. Well, it helps that he reads a lot, too. When he laughingly sang “world domination” and “world annihilation”, I did not for one moment think that it was a class song. Or when he phrased his question like this: “Do you suppose Lennon (his younger brother) will ever talk?”, it did not occur to me at all that he learned to ask that way in English class.