An Alternate Witness

There are those really amazing days in teaching when you can see a student finally get it, make that breakthrough that just makes your day....
And then there are days like this....

Bulqiis was one of my brightest first graders. She had learned every word in her vocabulary, she had learned at home to identify all the words and letters in the English alphabet, and she never gave me any trouble in a class that was often quite unruly. Like the Queen of Sheba whose name she shared, Bulqiis was already well on her way to being a very capable, admirable woman.

One day, as I was starting class, Bulqiis raised her hand. "Miss Maryah," she asked, "do you speak Arabic?"

"Of course. We're speaking Arabic right now. You hear me use it a lot in class." Too much, perhaps, though I needed the least amount of Arabic to get the lessons across to my first graders, who had not yet formed the habit of learning English through Arabic. But maybe, I was thinking, I didn't use as much Arabic as I thought, if Bulqiis wasn't sure I spoke the language at all.

Then she asked the question that burst my bubble. "Then why do you always speak to us in English?"