Reply to high school -- has anyone's kid skipped foreign languages in favor of technology classes?

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Reply to "high school -- has anyone's kid skipped foreign languages in favor of technology classes?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My rising 9th grader is doing fine in Spanish IB -- he's not a foreign language genius but it's easy and enjoyable for him. He is a math and science kid, probably eventually headed to a STEM college education. Is there any advantage or disadvantage in him going the route of taking technology courses instead of continuing high school Spanish in terms of college admission? I know foreign language education is great and all -- I did two years of full-time immersion language study in college and grad school and lived overseas for a number of years. And for what it's worth, he's also taking a different language class on weekends that we are committed to continuing. But the tech courses look pretty cool and are right up his alley.[/quote]

I have a HS junior who has really struggled with language classes due to LD, and so I've spent a lot of time looking at college requirements.  Many many colleges, including almost all of the most selective ones, require between 2 and 4 years of a world language that is taken during the HS years.  Some schools will waive it if you sub a tech requirement, but they're usually public schools in states that don't require a language (e.g. you can go to most of the MD public schools without a language), or they're schools that take a lot of kids with LD.  Some schools that don't usually waive the requirement will waive them for kids with a documented LD, but that doesn't sound like the case.

I wouldn't make this decision now.  In MCPS there are 7 classes a year, so even if he takes Spanish 2 and the other 4 core courses, there are still 2 more slots.  He could take Introduction to Engineering Design as a "semi-elective" (by which I mean a course that fulfills a requirement, in this case Tech, but isn't considered a core class) and the first level of Computer Programming as a true elective. I'd keep Spanish for one more year, at least, so that he can check that box, and so that he has more information before making the choice to stop.  [/quote]

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