Immersion school parents
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Anonymous
 Congratulations, no one cares.
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Anonymous
Good thing you don't get to decide how this works. You have no data to back up your assertions, either. You are just big mad that other people live their lives differently. |
Anonymous
You clearly cared enough to "bet" me on it. And to keep commenting. |
Anonymous
| What I think is funny is all the handwringing about immersion schools and how your child will be "fluent." hahahah. funny. |
Anonymous
Immersion parent here: I wish you had gotten a spot. Exhausted seeing the multiple clueless parents who don’t try or push their kids to speak the target language. There is no school in dc that will teach your kids to speak another language without strong supports. And yes I constantly hear how “fluent” everyone’s kids are, and they are not. People are nice and the waiter at the Mexican restaurant/your Latinx neighbors/ the cruise director are just being polite and telling you that your kids speak great spanish. They actually are stumbling along and are somewhat comprehensible, but their grammar is atrocious and their pronunciation is not good. |
Anonymous
Yeah, not even close. There are a few Spanish immersion programs where that is true, but for most it's not at all true. And even at the programs where it is true, it will likely change over time (often it already has) because giving everyone equal access via the lottery means anyone can, and will, enroll. At Yu Ying and the French immersion programs, it's not at all true. |
Anonymous
Different poster here, and yes I’m also laughing at this. |
Anonymous
For data, look at the PARCC scores at immersion programs in the city, and in particular look at the scores for at risk kids at these schools. Now consider these kids are ALSO not actually learning the immersion language either-- they are being failed twice. It's not a good situation. Language immersion requires at home support to work. We are not serving children by offering immersion without ensuring they get the support they need for it to benefit them. |
Anonymous
I think people start out thinking it's going well because the novelty of a 4 or 5 year old speaking a foreign language delights them. It's not until 3rd or 4th grade where many parents realize their kid has a very rudimentary grasp on the language, and by then most of the immersion schools aren't actually doing immersion anymore anyway. |
Anonymous
Absolutely correct. Older students at our immersion school aren’t forced to speak spanish anymore because they can’t. My mother is a spanish tutor, and in her opinion almost all the children without a spanish background speak very rudimentary spanish at best. Please understand that a spanish nanny and access to a Netflix account with spanish dubbing won’t do anything for your child. |
Anonymous
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I love how the people commenting have no kids at an immersion school, but they “know” everything about immersion.
I have not seen this at our school. Most families have at least one parent that understands the language. Of course I don’t know every family at the school. However there are parents that even go to Latin America for extended period of time to enroll the kids in summer programs there or par for immersion summer camps here. |
Anonymous
This feels like an attempt to make sure the "right" parents/families are using the immersion programs, which is honestly kind of how it was 10 years ago. As a more diverse cross-section of parents access these programs, and as they are pressured to diversify their student bodies, we'll see more complaints like the folks above looking for any excuse to gatekeep their precious resources. |
Anonymous
There is no equal access when someone’s address determines whether they are in the school or not. These should all be DCPS citywide rather than neighborhood based. If they are based on neighborhood, at least put them in Columbia Heights or Brightwood where there are high concentrations of native speakers. |
Anonymous
That may be your experience and there are a few immersion programs in DC like this (all of which are Spanish immersion). But it's not common. At our program it's less than half of the families we know who have a family member with any level of fluency (forget native speaker, I'm talking about reasonably conversant). At programs like Yu Ying, where we know many families, it's way less than half. The thing is, you don't need to be fluent to support your kid in immersion. You just have to be committed. You need to be willing to reinforce at home and over the summer with books and television in the target language, maybe immersion camps or experiences, and just generally pushing your kid to keep practicing and engaging in the language. In fact, this is more important than having a parent who speaks the language if the parent does not actually speak the language WITH the child. I'd say only about 10% of the families at our school have this level of commitment. I mean, most parents aren't that committed to anything, much less language instruction. The only thing I consistently see parents committing time and energy and sacrifice to regarding their kids is freaking soccer, for mysterious reasons. |
Anonymous
Way less than half? Euphemism of the thread. In fact, the number of YY AND DCI Chinese track students speaking any dialect of Chinese at home still numbers in the single digits at any given time (according to longtime YY and DCI Chinese teachers with keep in touch with). There have been multiple long threads on the subject of weak commitment to immersion in DC immersion charters in the last decade, mainly YY focused. If you do a search OP, you can learn a few things. In a nutshell, many if not most DC charter immersion parents engage in magical thinking about kids becoming fluent in languages and the demands of the IB curriculum up the chain. The problem is endemic, and parents who point this out aren't appreciated in the school communities, other than by the like-minded. The reality is that it's very difficult for older teens to score high on IB Diploma Higher Level language exams DCI gives, even if they speak and understand languages quite well. There are some ambitious, realistic DCI feeder and DCI parents who knock themselves out, year in and year out, to ensure that kids can speak and understand immersion languages decently, but not many. We bailed on DCI for a suburban school with a test-in IBD program, after 25 years in the District, without regret. Good luck, OP. |