Reply to Inspired Teaching Parents -- what do you do about languages?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am an IT parent and honestly I'm not passionate about having language in school unless it's immersion.  My other top school choice was Haynes and I was not too concerned about the lack of language there either.  I know many parents feel strongly about it and that's a wonder of charters vs DCPS.  However, I know that IT does want to eventually hire a language teacher (maybe as early as next year).  I'm more of an "all or nothing" on this one.  I'd rather have a music teacher than an hour here or an hour there of language instruction.  If it were important to me, I would consider supplementing with summer/weekend programs.  Good luck.[/quote]

I could have written this myself.  I think if a second language is highly important to you then you should opt for a language immersion school. IT is a wonderful school, but language is not it's primary goal and spotty classes here or there are pretty useless.  I would say that most of us who willingly chose IT (as opposed to those families where this was the only spot available), did not see language as "make or break" in our decision process.  If language is super important to you I think you'll be frustrated.   [/quote]

Another parent to whom language isn't critical.  We chose IT for quality teaching, not for language instruction.  We turned down a language immersion school, in fact, because we were concerned about quality instruction (the hows of pedagogy and instruction) over a certain language (the what of curriculum).  We would much rather have a regular PE, music, art, or dance program (students currently have dance class with fabulous specials teachers 1x/week as well as art 1x/week, too) than 45 minutes once/week where students learn say basic words in Spanish or French (or whatever is decided upon in a forthcoming language survey).  Language seems to be a concern of parents of older students (1st - 3rd grade), especially, and I like how the administration is responsive to that.  The new influx of students (and therefore educational dollars) will open up some new possibilities this year.  But IT will never be a language-focused school.  Please don't accept your spot if that's what you want it to become.[/quote]

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