# First Day of School



## Duvodas (Apr 12, 2008)

I have been working on this piece for a week now—school work and such is always keeping me busy—and I would like to see what you guys think about it. Suggestions are more than welcome, and if you find any grammar mistake, please correct it. As you will see, English is my second language, and sometimes errors just slip away from sight 




_OF MY FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE THINGS THAT TRANSPIRED DURING THAT DAY_​ 


I MIGRATED to Miami at the age of fourteen with the hopes of having the future I could not possibly have had back in my country of origin, and because giving people the chance to be what they wanted to be was not exactly anywhere in the to-do list of the Cuban government—or at least it wasn’t when I left. The little English I knew, I had learned through private lessons in Cuba; and it was just enough to ask someone’s name and ask for the time, among other trivialities such as “You suck” and “Shut up, bitch.” Not that is was too much, but I thought it was a great deal of progress from just nodding and quickly walking away when someone at the supermarket would speak to me in English. 
On that rainy morning of my first day of classes—about a month after coming to this country—I settled on the back seats of the school bus and watched, through the soaked window, the morning traffic. To someone such as me, whose means of going to middle school in Cuba had, for three years, consisted of a bicycle and two-sometimes unwilling legs, getting to school on a bus was definitely fancy; and so I sat with my legs crossed, leaning back like an old man smoking a tobacco while resting under the shade of a tree, and enjoyed the ride.
The bus arrived to the high school ten minutes early, and I took that time to look around and try to get familiarized with the massive building I had in front of me. Back in Cuba, the school I attended had been much smaller and simpler than this one, and the student population there had barely reached a thousand; this mammoth before me, however, could have easily sheltered five grand. The school’s courtyard was full of students, some of them greeting one another, and others already engaged in deep conversation. I only understood little of whatever bits I managed to hear, and added to this, the confidence that everybody displayed while speaking, intimidated me to the bone. In all honesty, and as someone who was trying to somehow fit in, I felt devastated.
When I finally got to my first class, I had for a long time been thinking of how pleasant it would have been to be back in my country, speaking a language I knew, and being around people I had known since I learned to distinguish poop from food. The teacher had a Hispanic look about her and for a moment that gave me some comfort; but then I remembered that every Hispanic-looking student I had seen today had been speaking English, so I inevitably went back to feeling miserable. Short, with shoulder-length black hair and a mild-tanned skin, the teacher stood up from her seat when the bell rang, wrote the date on the board, and turned around.
“_Buenos d_í_as_,” she said in Spanish, “today we’re going to be talking about the cycle of Carbon.”
I could care less about Biology, but in that moment she had my complete attention. As she kept talking in Spanish, my mind tried to make sense of the whole situation. The United States was an English-speaking country as far as I knew—or else I wouldn’t have taken private English lessons in Cuba. The fact that I was being taught Biology in my mother language just didn’t quite fit the picture I had had in my mind. It’s not like I wasn’t glad of it, but I found it rather odd. 
I gradually began to become aware of the people around me, of how the seemed to understand everything the teacher said, just as I did. I noticed the _Biolog_í_a-_labeled notebook from the guy next seat, the pair behind me who secretly whispered to each other in Spanish, and the gorgeous brunette who raised her hand and asked, “Miss, can you eat Carbon? Because I think I did one day.” Yet I clearly did not see the guy in front of me turning around until he tapped my arm, startled me, and said, “Brother, _la Miss_ wants to know your name.”
Forty minutes later, I was walking out of the class accompanied by two new-found friends; both of them were Cuban who had recently arrived, too, and they had offered to take me to my next class (some sort of intermediate English). When I mentioned the room number, they both laughed. “That teacher’s totally nuts,” one of them said. “Wait till you see.”
As soon I stepped into the classroom, I saw the craziness: the room was pandemonium. It consisted of two dozen chairs, most of them occupied by students who were earnestly trying to be heard above the others, creating a most distressing cacophony, and a working desk was on which a disarray of sheets and textbooks were laid out. Sitting behind the desk was the freak in question, seemingly unmindful of his surroundings and lost in his own little world of paperwork. Sighing, I made my way to him. When I realized that he had not noticed me, I cleared my throat and said “Hello.”
I must have surprised him, for he jolted on his seat and as quickly stood up to face me. He was about five feet tall—a hobbit escapee from Middle Earth—and uglier than the 1931 version of the monster in _Frankenstein, _the only difference being the  little Central American touch to his face. “Oh, hi there,” he said, looking up, saliva bullets firing from his mouth as he spoke. I thought of dodging those bullets just as Keanu Reeves had done in _The Matrix_, but it was too late for that. The saliva was already on my face. Wiping it slowly and methodically in the hopes that my body language would tell him to cover his mouth before showering me again, I handed in to him my schedule, and he signed it. He spat something else which didn’t I get to understand but that I took as a “Take a seat.” 
I sat down on one of the chairs somewhere in the middle of the classroom, recognizing and greeting some familiar faces from the previous class, and doing a couple of handshakes as I introduced myself to others. In the process, I had forgotten about the teacher, and it wasn’t until I turned around on my seat after a brief self-introduction, that I saw him standing next to me, a textbook in his hands. “This is your _book for the class_,” he said, looming over me. I had never been in need of an umbrella so desperately in my life. I nodded and took the textbook. 
The noise in the room was getting louder, and the teacher looked up. “Quiet, quiet now,” he yelled, perhaps in an effort to save some face in front of his new student, to show me that he could be in charge of the situation if he wanted to. For all I know, he could have been talking to a wall and it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference. Everybody kept on screaming at each other like a horde of Huns in full-charge, oblivious his tiny voice. And so all I got from the teacher’s pitiable attempt to demand some respect was more saliva raining down on me—and my desire for an umbrella rising to cosmic heights. 
And then I saw it.
It came out of nowhere, flying over my shoulder, just as the little guy was turning around and heading back to his desk. The fist-sized paper ball hit him in the back of the head with a soft _tuck_ and fell to the floor where, after rolling for a couple of seconds, it finally came to a halt before my feet. I momentarily stared at it in disbelief, my mouth almost open, before shifting my gaze to the teacher, who stood still, his back turned to me. I realized that the voices had faded away, and that everybody’s attention was now centered on him. For a moment, nothing happened. The teacher just stood there, motionless, and everybody stared at him. And just when I thought he was going to turn around and truly unleash his frustration on us, the little man simply shrugged and continued on his way to his desk, submerging himself on paperwork as soon as he sat down again. 
“Right o’ his bal’ hed,” I heard someone say in broken English from behind, and everyone in the room burst out in laughter. Everyone but me. My eyes were fixed on the teacher. He did not try to deny the fact that he was the laughing stock of the classroom, and I thought that apparently he was not bothered by it; but even from where I sat, I could see the growing reddish color on his cheeks and how his hand shook as he wrote something down on a sheet of paper. I wondered what life for this man must be like, being constantly subject to humiliation and disrespect and not able to change anything because the self-esteem is literally on the floor, or just because there is no desire left to change anything. One can only be so cruel to a human being. 
Glancing at the assignment written on the board, I opened my textbook and began working amidst laughs and screams.


I had some trouble finding my way to my third class, and so I wandered aimlessly through the hallways until I finally got there about ten minutes late when the lecture was well under way. When I saw my Geometry teacher, my legs buckled and I almost tripped. The guy was a _gringo_—a term used by Hispanics to refer to Caucasians—and gringos is what I had been hoping I wouldn’t have to deal with—although I knew that was an empty hope because, well, I lived in the United States. It wasn't that I had anything against them; my problem was the language. Their English was so flawless and perfect that just the mere act of listening to them speak it was a reminder of who I really was: an immigrant.
I walked up to him and gave him my schedule. He took it, examined it for a moment, and told me something, but I was so nervous I wasn’t able to understand a word of what he said. So I just looked at him, not knowing what to do.
He said something else, this time pointing to an unoccupied first-row seat and handing me back my schedule. I still couldn’t understand him, but I could understand well enough that he wanted me to sit down. He, too, gave me a textbook; then he proceeded with the lecture.
I didn’t comprehend everything he said at first, but eventually I found myself understanding this and that. Numbers, I noticed, remain unaffected by any language. They still were the same numbers I had seen all my life, only I had to pronounce them differently. Sure, it might be ‘three’ in Miami and ‘tres’ in Havana, but on paper 3 reads just the same. Besides, I had been taking Geometry since I was in sixth grade, and so most of the material he was teaching, I already knew. Depicted on the board, was a right triangle; one leg had the value of twelve and the other that of fifteen, while the hypotenuse had an 'x' on it. The Pythagorean Theorem was definitively no newbie to me, and I began to grow comfortable.
“So how can we solve this?” the teacher asked.
I raised my hand, surprising myself.
“Yes.”
“Twelve two times addition fifteen two times,” I said.
The teacher stared at me with a deep frown, and I noticed through my peripheral vision the guy next to me slowly turning his head my way. Maybe I should have thought twice about it before showing off.
“Right,” the teacher finally said and wrote the formula down on the board. “And so the square root of three hundred and sixty nine is...”
“Ninety!” 
Another deadly stare.
What can I say? Ninety and nineteen sounded a lot alike back then.
My next class met outside the school building. Alas, I did not know that. I went in circles for quite a while and gave myself a free tour of the school a couple of times before I finally gathered enough courage to ask a security guard for directions in my fluent Spanglish. The first thing I noticed when I stepped outside of the main building and into the glaring sun was a group of students dressed in shorts and sleeveless shirts, and another gringo—this one dressed in boot-camp style—speaking to them as he sauntered left and right. I was in pants and a sweater and already thinking I wasn't in the best attire for Physical Education.
I went to him and simply showed him my schedule. He looked at it and then regarded me with his green, steady eyes. For some reason, I got the feeling that my Spanglish wasn't going to really help this time. He told me something, and as with the math teacher, I just stood there, frozen and unable to utter a word. Turning around, the guy called over a fat kid who had been sitting nearby. He spoke to the kid, and the kid, after nodding several times, translated to me, "The teacher says that you're not fit to work out today along with the rest of the class, but that you're going to need to bring shorts and a shirt from now on." 
The teacher spoke again, and the fat kid stared at me for a moment before translating. 
"He just said you're a bitch."
I gaped at the teacher.
"I was kidding!"


By the time the bell announcing the end of the school day rang, I was completely exhausted. Everybody was making their way out of their classrooms and heading somewhere, and I didn't have any idea where I was supposed to go. Finally, I recalled that a bus had brought me here, so logically, I thought, I was supposed to get into one to go back home. That seemed like a very good idea; an excellent idea, in fact. I even thought myself a genius for coming up with it—only there was one small shortcoming in my flawless thinking: I had forgotten the bus number. 
Well, it never occurred to me that this number could have been printed somewhere on the schedule I was holding in my hands. So much for being a genius anyway.
I decided to follow the mob and try to see if I could recognize any of the faces I had seen on the bus that morning. I walked by an endless row of buses, searching for any known face hiding past the semi-transparent grey windows. It turned out to be a fruitless quest which outcome was I helplessly watching every single one of those yellow buses take off. Feeling totally defeated, I headed to the school’s lobby and called my mom using one of the public phones there, promptly informing her of the situation.
"Oh, I'm sorry, honey," she said when I was done. "Listen, your dad is working in an apartment at Miami Beach, and you know I can't drive because I don't have a license. But I'll try to talk to the neighbor lady and see if she can go and pick you up. Just hang on in there, okay?”
After I hung up, I went back to the courtyard at the front of the school. I sat down on the steps and for a long time watched as cars passed by the front of the school. Once in a while, one of them would stop, and the guy who had been huddling in a corner beneath the shade of a palm tree not too far away from me, or the girl who had been sitting under the sun, avidly reading a book, would get on the car; and just as quickly the car would leave. As the time went by, I soon became the only one left in the courtyard, with the wind that blew on my face as my only company. 
Surrounded by desolation, I let my mind wander back to Cuba, to the times where I had been young and my mother had walked me to my first day of school, her hands tightly gripping mine as we strolled down the blocks of my hometown. I remembered how I had looked everywhere in search of my childhood hero, Batman, expecting him to come at any moment on his Batwing and rescue me from my first day of classes, just like he had rescued Vicki from the claws of the Joker. But he had never appeared, the bastard, and his unexpected absence had most utterly crushed my dreams.
I beamed a big smile, coming back to reality. The sun was setting on the horizon, right over the roof of the houses, and in that moment my face was bathed in crimson light. 
Shifting position every now and then to alleviate the pain I had on my butt from sitting too much, I waited for the neighbor lady to come and pick me up. And since I had nothing else to do, I amused myself with some of the latest additions to my vocabulary, “Kiss my balls. Holy shit. Screw you. Go to hell! Kiss my balls. Holy shit. Screw you. Go to hell!”


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## Olly Buckle (Apr 15, 2008)

Before I start in on destroying your piece I would like to say how good it is, it is easy to point out all the little glitches when you have spoken a language all your life, I can just about get by in Spanish, I can't imagine speaking it this well.



Duvodas said:


> I have been working on this piece for a week now—school work and such is always keeping me busy—and I would like to see what you guys think about it. Suggestions are more than welcome, and if you find any grammar mistake, please correct it. As you will see, English is my second language, and sometimes errors just slip away from sight  *slip in unnoticed*
> (Slip away from sight would be something you were watching that then moved out of your range of vision)
> 
> 
> ...



This must have been some time ago, a lot of the things I have noted are the sort of errors English speaking people make all the time.


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## Olly Buckle (Apr 15, 2008)

I have chopped out a couple of bits I didn't change as my additions made it too long to be accepted as it stood


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## Duvodas (Apr 15, 2008)

Thank you, Olly Buckle, for taking your time to read my essay and provide a must helpful revision. I'm a sucker for good critiques, and the suggestions you gave were pretty much what I had been needing. :grin:

For the record: this wasn't _that_ long ago. September 1st, 2004 if my memory doesn't fail me. 

Well, I'm glad you liked the essay. And again, thank you for your time.

Cheers,

Duvo.


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## Kurosaki_Ichigo (Apr 26, 2008)

I haven't much to say, but this was a great retelling. I'm sorry that your first day in an English speaking school was so rough.


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## Duvodas (Apr 27, 2008)

Thanks, Kurosaki, for taking your time to read my essay. It is really appreciated. And don't be sorry; I'm pretty sure the same things happen to every non-English speaker who comes to this country.

Well, sort of.


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## Dr. Malone (Apr 27, 2008)

That was really, really good.  Muy bueno.
What really impressed me here was how layered the piece was - isolation, the realization that you weren't really alone due to all your fellow espanol speakers, the sad little teacher, the humor.
So again, you impressed me.  This was a great read.  I rarely read anything by professional journalists who's first language is english that is this good.


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## Duvodas (May 3, 2008)

I'm really glad you enjoyed my essay, Malone. I thank you for the time you took to read it and write your thoughts about it.

Now I feel flattered...:-&


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## Chessrogue (May 10, 2008)

I enjoyed your essay as well... It brings me back to the time when I went to school. I can relate and feel your anxieties as I read... Nice work!!


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## Duvodas (May 17, 2008)

Thanks


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## Damian_Rucci (May 19, 2008)

Nice, this was very entertaining.


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## Duvodas (May 19, 2008)

I'm very glad you liked it.


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## claire_conroy (May 21, 2008)

I won't make any corrections in the body since all the typos were already mentioned above. Your title is a bit annoying for me. I wouldn't have noticed it as the title if it wasn't italicized and placed on top. It's too long, in fact, it can be an introduction of your essay. I suggest you make it short and try to be more specific.


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## Duvodas (May 22, 2008)

Thanks for the suggestion.


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