About this project

My Story

When teachers say, "Let's pair up the new student with someone who speaks their language!" it sounds like a perfect solution. Classrooms are crowded, and educators are incredibly busy. Peer pairing is often done out of the new students' survival and a lack of alternative resources. However, I believe that it may not be the best solution to introduce a non-English speaking student into American schools.

In elementary school, I was fluent in Japanese, Chinese, and English, and as a trilingual student, I was frequently tasked with translating for new classmates. Sometimes,  was also assigned to translate for two students from Japan and China simultaneously while listening to class, and I had to translate three-hour lectures and presentations. Additionally, some students were frustrated that they could not communicate with others and used derogatory terms in Japanese and Chinese, and I became a target of their frustration. When the new students came, I saw the teachers were unable to communicate with them.

Some of the students that I have helped appreciated my help, but others were not; they took it for granted and didn't think they needed my help or felt embarrassed that they needed a translator to get by. It tested my enthusiasm for school, and balancing my own education with the responsibility of keeping my peers caught up was not easy.

Reflecting back, these early challenges inspired me to look at the bigger picture and find a solution to this problem. I wondered what could have been done to make students', as well as teachers' experiences better. I realized that if he had been given basic language resources during their first couple of days, and the teacher gave them some words of encouragement, they could have communicated basic phrases to peers and authoritative figures, made friends more naturally, and avoided bullying incidences. This realization drove me to work on this problem. By providing survival tools that would serve them the first couple days of school, we can ease the transition for newcomers, protect the well-being of multilingual student leaders, and build a more supportive school community from day one.