Foreign language at Jackson-Reed

[Anonymous]

It is shocking to communicate with the JR counselors about course schedules. Basicallly their approach is “I will get you the bare minimum of classes to graduate and beyond that everything is an elective.” For those of us with college bound kids, we have a different take on class selection in highs school.

You or your student is going to need to pursue this again with the counselor and escalate to the AP for the grade if necessary. they prefer the student do it, although for 9th graders they often do not have the confidence yet to navigate the school admini bureaucracy. Did your student complete the online class change form? If so and it was rejected, then I suggest a parent escalate to the grade AP.

There are ample foreign language classes. It is common for students from Deal to repeat a year of language at JR (starting again from 1 in the same language would be less common but I’m sure it is done).

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Foreign language is one area that confuses me in general.

Both my kids finished Spanish I and II at Deal and then went into III at JR. Neither seems to have much proficiency with the language and both received As in III.

Fast forward and the older kid received As in all Spanish including AP Spanish IV and scored a 5 on the AP test. Yet…still doesn’t seem to be able to speak or understand the language orally.

I guess you can be “book” smart with the language.

I have 4 kids who all attended Deal and then JR or private high school.
Those going on to private never received any credit for Deal Spanish--after placement testing (oral and written) they were placed in Spanish 101 again (despite getting high As in 3 years of Deal Spanish). When they graduated from private they actually had an excellent command of the language (written and oral). The DCPS kids do not get this by a long shot. Deal Spanish is crappy and JR is really no better in my experience. In general these kids do not do well on the Spanish AP exams either. I've talked to many parents about this. Your kid's 5 is an outlier! They must be a good test taker and good at foreign language.

Anyway--just my experience. I'm not too concerned about it and my youngest kid is attending DCPS for high school. But if mastery
of a foreign language is a priority then DCPS is not a good option period. It's crappy and mediocre at best.

+1. Deal kids, even with three years of language study, usually get placed in entry level languages in private HS. No bueno.

I guess put me in the category of who cares? Personally, I think FL should be purely elective so I am good with my kid not having to work too hard on their FL while they have literally 6 AP classes which are a decent amount of work.

Being strong or weak in a FL has absolutely no bearing on how well you will perform in English, history or STEM.

Forget about the Spanish. Americans are great at history and math. I'd add geography to it.

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