Accenting Commonalities

A while ago my children had an audition for a voice over for an Irish child in a cartoon. (Yes, they go for auditions now. Well we do live in the theater district so why not?) Neither of them got the part. They don't sound Irish enough. Apparently living here for four years has given them mid-Atlantic accents. They no longer sound Irish but they don't sound American either. They sound the same as they always did to me but of course, I hear them speak everyday. It was only when we were recording the samples that I noticed a hardening of the soft Irish 't' and a definite pronunciation of the fricative 'th' that used to be pronounced as a stop. Slowly but surely, words like 'awesome' and 'vacation' have crept into their vocabulary and words like 'buggy' and 'jumper' have been lost. A British tourist asked me was I in a queue one day and my youngest asked me what she meant. Obviously confused, I could practically see the cogs of his mind trying to figure out how to contort his body into the letter of the same name. We don't queue anymore, we're New Yorkers, if we deign to, we wait on line.

Watching them navigate the American school system can be interesting.  Particularly in NYC, there is a great push towards cultural inclusion. They came home one day informing me they were to wear their national dress and bring an item of traditional Irish food for International Day. I toyed with the ideas of providing them with tweed flat caps or perhaps even Celtic robes but they ultimately decided on a couple of Irish rugby shirts. I also made a Shepherd's Pie which I suspect is British traditional but I wasn't stretching to a whole salmon and at least it features potatoes.

The kids do pretty well academically here. Math is no problem to them and they both excel at science. The notorious Common Core English Language Arts curriculum drives me nuts though. I find that they are taught to be very formulaic in their responses to questions. As a special education teacher, I can see the benefits of a repertoire of sentence starters to students who may struggle to formulate their own answers but I think always being forced to constrict opinions into pre-written paragraph structures limits imagination and creativity. We've settled on a compromise. They answer questions for school in the prescribed format but if they are writing for any other reason, they can use the format initially if they want but then they have to go back and find ways to remove all the 'Furthermore,...'s and 'In addition,...'s that they have been taught. The eldest won a coveted scholarship to a  Film Critic Bootcamp in this manner. I also have to admit to utilizing their formulated essay technique in an unexpectedly writing-heavy extra college course I squeezed in recently at a particularly busy time in my year. To my chagrin, I got an A.

Coderdojo NYC

I can't help but wonder how different would their lives be had we stayed in Ireland. I think, at the age they're at now, not that much. We recently had a visit from friends from Ireland with boys the same age. They still have almost identical interests. Lego, origami, Minecraft and a new obsession with Pokemon Go. The post-millennial online generation (Generation i?) seem to be mostly influenced by the same bewildering handful of You Tube stars. Their reach is global and seems to surmount cultural differences. Although their appeal is mystifying to me, I find it kind of comforting that my children seem to have shared experience with their peers from all around the world. Could it be that we are actually raising the first true global citizens?