Alan Hidalgo Raw Video Series: Student Testimony on the BTW Anthology Novel 4

For more information on the Alan Hidalgo Team for educational consulting or to know more about the Between Two Worlds series for ELA and ESL students at the high school and college/university level, please visit our website Alanhidalgo.com or contact the Alan Hidalgo Team directly at [email protected]

The student in this video is referring to the novel entitled "If They Only Knew." Below is a synopsis from the Table of Contents of Between Two Worlds: A Multicultural and Multilingual Anthology.

"Diane Davis is a poor white girl who grows up in a predominantly Hispanic community. Misjudged by her peers and abused by her family, she revels in her independence and freedom upon being accepted by New Mexico University. But after experiencing popularity for the first time in her life, she struggles to find inner peace. Not finding what she is looking for in alcohol and drugs, a chance encounter causes Diane to reflect on her life and remember two of her friends: one, a Christian, and the other, a Muslim. Slowly, Diane finds her way…"

Many students at the high school and college level have found the ten novels that comprise the Between Two Worlds: A Multicultural and Multilingual Anthology to have had a deep and lasting positive impact on their lives. This is due to the life skills taught via the many high interest themes found in each novel (difficult family upbringing, navigating relationships as a young adult, gang violence, drugs, personal identity, MMA, culture, immigration, bullying, etc.) as well as the diverse cast of characters found in each novel (with settings ranging from California to Massachusetts to New Mexico to Texas to Indiana and origins ranging from immigration to the United States from Italy to Brazil and the Philippines to Nigeria and Mexico to Argentina and South Korea to Puerto Rico) and South America to the Middle East.

Students have also found the BTW Student Workbook to have greatly impacted their education as they have improved their ELA skills; namely, their ability to think critically and enter into higher order thinking, to apply moral reasoning, to cognitively analyze literature, and to write strong academic essay responses. This, in turn, naturally leads to improved grades in the classroom and increased test scores on standardized assessments.