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[quote=Anonymous]DC, who is in early elementary, started a heritage language school this year. The curriculum is very rigorous and difficult to keep up with for any typical family, let alone one without a parent at home who is a strong native speaker. (I grew up speaking the language but have lost a lot of it over the years.) I am really struggling with the decision about whether to keep DC in this school. Unless a child really has an aptitude or passion for the language, it seems unlikely that they would really learn and retain it -- and I'm talking about just well enough to be able to converse casually with family members or navigate the country where the language is spoken, not even in a business or formal academic setting. I also am finding this whole experience resurrecting a lot of personal, longstanding sentiments (resentment?) based on having to attend weekend language school as a child, which I certainly pushed back on and that my parents eventually caved to. The musical performances that they make the kids do periodically are also a bit eyeroll-inducing, dated, and socially regressive. I know if it were me, I would despise doing them.

At the same time, my sense is that if we do not keep DC in this school, the chances that they will learn the language at all are practically zero, and our initial hope was that DC would maintain some connection to their heritage by interacting with similar kids and being around the language and culture, given the lack of nearby family members and friends who speak the language. I do not think this is the kind of language one can casually learn with a tutor.

I would welcome any perspectives here. Should we stick with it for at least another semester? Am I a hypocrite for making my kid do something I resisted as a child? It's so much work (for both DC and me as the parent who must do all of the homework with them in the evenings and on weekends) and I'm struggling with how to define the payoff. I think part of this effort is driven by guilt and a desire to "do better" by my kid than my parents, who have said in the past that they regret letting me quit the language when I was a kid. [/quote]

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