Yu Ying - advice please
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
I'm a vegan. I count mushrooms. |
Anonymous
Everything smells "racist" in DC when jealousy rears its ugly head (in this case, ethnic children speaking good Chinese others can't!!). I've made this point before on a YY thread and I'll make it again. IF a group of charter founders decided to seek a charter for a Greek immersion school, sent advocates running to my Orthodox church/Greek cultural center in NW asking for help in securing the charter, then set it up without a Greek-speaking or ethnic admin (or more than a few Greek speaking kids), I'd be pissed, too. Really pissed. |
Anonymous
| I'd be crazy furious if they involved a CHURCH to form a public school. |
Anonymous
|
I feel like this thread has really gone off track from the OP's questions.
We are family who also just got lucky in the lottery and are deciding on whether to send our toddler to Yu Ying. Like the other parent, what we want to know is whether the school is intentional about teaching the kids how to be kind to each other, nurturing the whole student in terms of their social skills and emotional management, including in the pre-k classrooms. It is very valuable to us that the school teachers chinese, but I want to know about the fuller spectrum of teaching skills and curriculum that current parents have observed. Thanks in advance for additional perspectives on those topics. |
Anonymous
Wow the bitter native Mandarin speaking YY critical cabal is getting slow - it took all the way to page 4 before they brought up the non-"ethnic" admin! Usually that's in the 1st critical post, but maybe the YY trolls are catching on that that makes it even more obvious what their real issue with the school is (the non-Chinese admin and the lack of special path of admission for native speakers, especially Cantonese speakers). This "issue" is an oldie but a goodie. But we all know if there wasn't something good there that a lot of people want, there wouldn't be so many bitter folks out there who supposedly pulled their kids and moved on, but still lurk around DCUM for years just waiting to pounce on any YY thread and go on and on about how badly all the kids' Mandarin is and will always be. |
Anonymous
NP. If you expect a school with a waitlist a thousand names long to miss your snowflake, then you're doing parenting wrong. Your child isn't special, and you're not doing it any favors by pretending that it is. It's only special to you. Stop trying to teach it otherwise - that's why millennials are so insufferable. IOW, this isn't about YY, it's about your failure as a parent. Grow up and quit creating obnoxious entitled little bratlings. |
Anonymous
| Who refers to a child as "it"? |
Anonymous
People who don't know or care if it is a he or a she - because it's not a special snowflake after all. |
Anonymous
Teach it early |
Anonymous
Oh give it up, honestly. You're the one doing the pouncing, dismissing reasonable posts out of your own insecurity. Common sense dictates that a language immersion program needs native speaking administrators and students be serious and credible. That explains why every public Spanish immersion program in the city seems to have them. YY is in a poor position to attract native speakers because of the way federal/DC charter law is written, through little fault of its own, but that doesn't change what common sense dictates. Unfortunately, some YY upper grades students, and DCI Chinese track students, can barely speak Chinese. I know this from having lived within a few houses of a dozen for ten years, and having majored in Chinese in college (not because I'm a native speaker). OP might want to know this. Then again, she's probably just looking for a nurturing school environment with a path to 12th grade, like most DC gentrifiers on the language immersion trail. |
Anonymous
Agree in large part. But then when American kids apply to competitive colleges, they will need decent AP or IBD language scores to have a shot of being admitted, and it's much easier to learn languages as a little kid than a teen. I remember big stress trying to learn enough Spanish to pull a 4 or 5 on the Spanish AP exam as as teen, coming in with no background (because languages weren't taught in public schools in my town before 9th grade). If the DC immersion kids can continue with whatever language through HS to give them a boost in applying to college, the early work will pay off. But I don't see the point of any kind of language immersion without a cohort of native-speaking peers. I get what Oyster, Lamb, Mundo Verde etc. are doing, and why parents are on board, but not YY. |
Anonymous
| OP, YY isn't in high demand because it's a serious Chinese immersion program, as PPs love to claim on these boards. Look in California, MoCo, New York or the Carolinas for one of those. Not at all. The school's in high demand because the Mandarin requirement works brilliantly to deter most poor families from applying, enabling the rest to fall into place (nurturing environment, strong test scores for English and math, fundraising mechanisms in high gear, fun sleepover field trips, great playground, long WL etc.) They've got a FARMs rate on a par with JKLM and Brent, way down from their FARMs rate ten years ago. There are schools in Upper NW with a higher percentage of poor kids (Hearst, Stoddert). YY parents and admins don't want to admit how this works, but it's more than obvious. |
Anonymous
|
Anyone who continues to compare the cohorts at the Spanish immersion schools to the paltry number of Chinese speakers in DC is an idiot. They are not even in the same league. Particularly Oyster, which is allowed to run a dual lottery (LAMB did this for a number of years, and many of those kids are still at LAMB.)
In its ten years of existence, YY has found a beautiful permanent home, grown to over 500 students, achieved and maintained Tier 1 status, successfully implemented the PYP IB curriculum, and founded a middle and high school, ALSO with a beautiful, permanent home. All while teaching Chinese, one of the most difficult languages to learn, to randomly selected DC students. So, yeah, many parents aren't enraged at the administration for not (yet) producing perfect Chinese speakers. |
Anonymous
Hey PP! Have you given up on this thread yet? It's gotten pretty sad, and unfortunately this is how it always seems to go with YY threads. To bring it back to your question, though, we are a new PK3 family and never cease to be amazed at how great a school it is. YES, they absolutely nurture the whole student. The kids are really well taken care of. There is a lot of play and an emphasis on sharing, kindness, and cooperation. The teachers really know my DC and communicate with me about him daily (letting me know about days when he was grumpy/acting out, when he had to apologize to another student, when he had fun playing with a particular toy, and much more). It's been seven months and I'm still impressed with the school every single day. We put it at the top of our list for the Chinese, but now that I know the school better, I have to say I am mostly grateful not for the language (although it's cool!) but for all the other aspects of the school. I feel like I lucked into a private school that happens to be free. |
Anonymous
| Not OP, but don't agree that this thread has been sad. Good points are being made (and by idiots! gosh!). It isn't all rainbows and kittens at YY. The parents of the little kids tend to be happier than those of older ones. DCI isn't wowing all the upper grades parents and the Chinese program isn't serious enough for everybody. |