The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Qupperneq 6

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #2
Editorial
“Uma, 1 lov U”
- Tom
by Sheryl Hoshizaki
My mother could be described as a lib-
eral parent, but as an Amma, she probably
would be defined as “parenting without
borders.”
It was about fourteen years ago when
my life became one big commute from
Dryden to Toronto every weekend. My
Mom was having her place rebuilt, so she
found herself staying with us, which is
using the term loosely, as I was often in
Toronto.
The few times she was left in charge of
my six year old son, she and Tom synchro-
nized their activities with ease. Take out
meals, realms of reading materials, both
with lego for Tom and crossword puzzles
for my Mom, things fell into place without
much of an effort.
That is, until Tom came home from
grade one, on a Wednesday, and
announced that he would be going to the
movie theatre that evening, with a friend
from school. I don’t think my Mom even
looked up, she said what she had been say-
ing to all of her six kids for the last twenty
years and that is, “Not on a school night.”
Well, Tom had rarely heard the word,
“no”, let alone from his Amma. He went
into a rant with all the theatrics of a mon-
key on steroids. My Mom just kept read-
ing. He finally went upstairs, commenting
loudly on his opinion of her, her status and
authority, and his lack of feelings for her.
Stomping to his room, he slammed the
door. My Mom, like she had for the many
years before, just kept on reading. I
remember how irritated I was when my
tantrums did not have an audience with
her. It wasn’t long after that my Mom
ambled upstairs to check on Tom to make
sure he hadn’t tied the bed sheets together
and scampered out his window. It was at
this time that she found a lone scrap of
paper with a remorseful yet incorrectly
spelled, “Uma, I lov U, Tom.”
This story illustrates to me a parenting
style that was conducive to Icelandic cul-
ture, and my mother epitomized it.
“Parenting,” she would say, “is another
word for patience.”
I have never been able to separate my
mother’s uniqueness, and some would say,
quirkiness, from her personality and her
heritage. When I listen to the conversations
she has with my aunts, I assign it to both.
As an educator, I have searched for the
answer in terms of why children read, why
they want to read, and what makes them
successful readers. I explored these ques-
tions more deeply in the past few years,
since I served a community of predomi-
nately English Language Learners whose
parents’ first language was not English.
Our school’s student achievement lev-
els in the area of reading and comprehen-
sions fell well below the provincial average.
In fact, 52% of the students were reading
well below a competence level. With this
startling statistic, I knew, as a leader in the
system, that it would translate into the
more tragic number and that is: 1 in 3
English Language Learners drops out of
secondary school, compared to 1 in 4
English speaking counterparts. Before
embarking on any deep research in lan-
guage acquisition, I simply asked the teach-
ers why they thought their students did so
poorly. Overwhelmingly, the teachers said
that their parent’s didn’t speak English.
Secondly, the excuse was that the socio-
economic level of parents, who were facto-
ry workers, who didn’t have a literacy rich
environment at home, and therefore, didn’t
support what was happening at school.