Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Where is the Spanish Course?
It has been a week that we are discussing a point that should be obvious: any high school, public or private, must have a real foreign language course. Not an online course, but a serious instructor course with live interaction, feedback, exams, and peer learning. Online courses are not what private schools are all about. They can be taken at home, without paying a school tuition, or even going to school.
The mark of a good school is not how much money in scholarships it collects or gives, but in the quality and the achievements of its students. In the 24 years of being parents of Beren Academy students, the question of having or not having a foreign language course never came up, and we never needed to discuss the merit and importance of it with the previous administrations. To deprive the students of this important part of curriculum is to diminish their chances of getting into good universities, and excelling in their future careers.
Our four older children excelled in foreign languages in high school. It was a powerful factor in their receiving scholarships at Brandeis, Yale, and other universities. Our older daughters teach Jewish children from many countries and talk to them in their native tongues. On many occasions they expressed deep gratitude to us and the school for their multi-language education. They touched lives of many Jews from around the world and continue to do so.
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1. You ignore that our children receive 10 years of mandatory foreign language instruction - Hebrew. It's NOT obvious to me that a SECOND foreign language track is an absolute necessity.
ReplyDelete2. I can't speak from personal experience of my children's acceptance, as you can, but if you look at the quality and achievements of our students in the last few years, I doubt you can draw much correlation between having a SECOND foreign language and student quality.
3. No one is arguing that having Spanish, or French, or Chinese isn't a good idea, in theory. You are constructing a Straw Man. The fundamental argument is that if there are only a few students that want to take a class, the school can't do everything. Choices must be made. Your well-worn example, Calculus, can be taught by an existing teacher. Spanish apparently cannot, which greatly changes the complexity of the problem. Any of your arguments could apply to Differential Equations, or AP Music, or any number of other courses that a few students are interested in, look good on a college application, and have life-long value.
4. I wouldn't dismiss online courses: My son completed Geometry Honors this summer online, and I was very impressed by the quality of the instruction. Don't knock it until you've seen it.