Bilingual Kids in Language Immersion ES Programs, Which Programs Have Many & Strive to Attract Them?
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Anonymous
It's a Chinese immersion school but nobody speaks the language at an open house and parents defend this? Reaching out to the local population speaking the language is seen as a waste of time and money. And YY parents wonder why they don't attract many bilingual families. Just incredible how clueless all this is. The Spanish immersion schools always run their open houses in both languages, and have native speakers at their table at the charter fair. I've been to open houses at four this year. YY parent. Not acceptable that nobody would speak Mandarin to parents at an open house but not surprising with these admins. Nothing parents can do. We don't hire and fire staff at the school. |
Anonymous
ITA. I think dual immersion would be great to have but this constant harping by someone who isn't at the school about how they SHOULD be running their lottery, recruiting more Chinese kids - dialect speaking or Mandarin or whatever, who they should have at their open house, etc. gets tiresome. We attended many open houses, private mostly and YY, and while I liked some more than others, I would not presume to tell them how they should be running their school or their open houses. If you don't like the school for whatever reason, move on. The Chinese poster seems to have a proprietary interest in Yu Ying although they do not send their kids there solely on the basis of their ethnicity. They are Chinese and YY teaches Mandarin therefore prospective CHINESE students should be preferred and catered too. Treated special in the lottery and otherwise. Leaves a bad taste... |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Cant speak for every parent of course, but I'm certainly in favor of creative solutions to bringing in the Spanish-speaking families we need for teachers to make the most of our curriculum. We must be worlds apart from yy on bilingual issues because you just don't hear many complaints about lottery practices internally. Parents joke that we're staging a non-violent resistance campaign, on principle. |
Anonymous
No sense of humor, PP! I thought it was funny that the immigrant grandparents concluded that they'd ended up at hte wrong school because nobody in the room spoke, ahem, CHINESE. |
Anonymous
| I am a YY parent and actually find it strange as well that the school doesn't have anyone Chinese speaking at the open houses. In contrast the Chinese New Year celebration to which parents were invited yesterday was entirely in Chinese...except when they asked parents to move outside for the lion dance. So they could certainly have Chinese teachers at the open houses. I think that would be a great idea. |
Anonymous
| I agree about the need for Chinese speakers to represent the school at open houses. It would make the school look more serious. As a non Chinese but long time student of Chinese I was disappointed that no one at the open house could answer a question about whether they taught Chinese concepts of math (like wan and yi) or if they only taught math in Chinese. No one seemed to understand the question. I can see how something like that could be a turn off to native speakers or serious students of Chinese. That said, I think I would be very grateful to get my kid in. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
| And besides the comparison of Mandarin to Classical Arabic is incorrect. They aren't akin at all. For many Chinese and Chinese Americans (even here in DC!), Mandarin is exactly what's spoken at home. It is a living, breathing, spoken language, full of colloquialism and slang, new words added all the time. |
Anonymous
OK, so why is it that, although I studied Mandarin for several years in college, sometimes when I travel in Mandarin-speaking parts of China, I sometimes have trouble understanding what's'said, even if it's just everyday conversation? If I say something in my college Mandarin, the listener adjusts and usually comes back with something I can understand. Friends who speak only classical Arabic report the same process, particularly in N. Africa and Egypt. Classical Arabic may not be adding slang, but it's not what people speak at home. I'm not a Chinese scholar but it doesn't sound like anybody much in China speaks Mandarin at home exactly the way it's taught at schools in this country. Subdialects of Mandarin, and other dialects of Chinese, are used at home. |
Anonymous
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Getting back to OP's question, I think it's fair to say that YY is making more of an effort to strive to attract bilingual kids than several years ago, at least according to parents we keep in touch with there. But noting like the Spanish immersion schools, where administrators tend to be native speakers themselves, and most non-ethnic parents have studied the language and know the culture somewhat.
We left YY for our IB school after AY 2011-2012, mainly because my spouse (we speak a dialect at home) was tired of walking on eggshells there as a bilingual immigrant parent. He didn't relate well to the many liberal white and AA parents, or even the highly assimilated Chinese parents, who felt that the school was super inclusive. It wasn't so much that he didn't feel welcome as that he didn't feel comfortable, or able to discuss our situation in the school community without opening himself to accusations of whining and wanting preferential treatment. He wasn't crazy about how parents tended to assume that the Asian kids spoke Chinese at home, when this was seldom the case. Different times when he suggested that the PA push to hire an ethnic, dialect-speaking administrator, he met with such an unpleasant reaction that he came home feeling low. So we bailed with him saying "If we're going to be token Chinese immigrants, let's do it IB and relax." We miss a few things about YY, mainly having a public school teach our children to write Chinese (now we rush off to private MoCo classes), but mostly we are grateful to feel at ease in a school community where we don't have to watch ourselves most the time, taking great care not to seem demanding or entitled. When PPs say, some parents just aren't going to like any school, you're missing the point. It's not a lot of fun to feel like a token, muzled bilingual in a school teaching your own language and culture. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
| Proofreading is obviously not my friend. I'll get my coffee and take a shower now. |
Anonymous
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The PA couldn't just hire an ethnic Chinese administrator. I think maybe your husband misunderstood the purpose of parent organization. It isn't like a public school's LSRT/advisory board that actually has input on staffing and resource allocations. Perhaps he received a cold reception at the PA meeting because it is a topic that has been discussed over and over and over again. It is a thorn in the side of everyone at YY that the head of school is AA and non-Chinese. But another aspect of the problem is that there have never been any strong native-speaking candidates for leadership roles. The complexities of navigating the system in DC are just so nuanced and difficult that I personally wouldn't want that entrusted to anyone who didn't have a great deal of experience with the AA community, DC and the politics of a charter.
So an AA admin isn't ideal for the Chinese community, but that is just one piece of a big puzzle. |
Anonymous
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I should have written that it *ISN'T a thorn in the side...*
wow, proofreading and coffee for me, too! |