Reply to Yu Ying - advice please

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Which Cantonese speakers?  They don't seem to have been on these boards for ages.

I'm a native Mandarin speaker who's lived in DC since long before Yu Ying opened. I've volunteered for this and that at the school over the years (but no longer do). I know a couple dozen YY and DCI families pretty well, including those who started in the original PreK4 group. I say with confidence that most of the families aren't very serious about the Chinese, and even if they are, not having a cohort of native-speaking kids in the school clobbers the language learning, unless a Chinese-speaking adult is in the home year after year.

The school doesn't try to expose the YY students to native Chinese-speaking young people in the Metro area (e.g. from the strongest Mandarin heritage programs in MoCo) when they could have started doing this long ago, even if they can't/don't want to recruit native speakers directly.  YY doesn't encourage the kids to hang out with native speakers their own age and it shows.  Parents love the program anyway, but from the perspective of those of us who speak only Chinese to our children, the arrangement is pretty silly. You hear the parents say, oh no problem, our kids will go live in China later to perfect their Chinese.  Maybe, but I doubt it, other than a few.  I doubt that my own kids will do this, and they have no trouble speaking Chinese all day, with the odd English word or phrase tossed in.  [/quote]

Why do you care so much. Seriously, give it up. So they will never learn Chinese to your standards. Big deal. Don't you have your own garden to tend?[/quote]

Sure, but I supported the creation of YY, and have volunteered there many times, making me a stakeholder.  I've grown disenchanted, mainly due to a persistent truth-in-advertising issue. Parents of 3 and 4 years olds are assured at open houses that their kids will become "fluent" in Chinese by MS by dint of hard work (no native speaking peers or their families needed).  At a recent open house, a friend noted that this was said a dozen times.  But the truth is that many kids who've been at YY all the way from PreK to 5th grade struggle to speak or understand basic everyday Chinese.  The arrangement makes me think of the Soviet "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us" approach. The immersion school I backed has not emerged as an immersion school.  This city can do better.

Why don't you care? Because your kid is behind the curve in two languages and you don't want to deal with that? [/quote]

Sorry, being a former volunteer does not make you a stakeholder.[/quote]

Not, it doesn't. I was asked to help circulate petitions among civil society groups in Chinatown to get YY's charter approved. I had my doubts, but helped. I regret the decision - a Chinese "immersion" school without close ties to an ethnic community doesn't feel right ten years on. The Chinatown community wouldn't have supported the initiative if we'd been told that the YY board planned to hire non Chinese-speaking admins. We believed that YY was serious about building ties with the local dialect-speaking immigrant community. Maybe under the next head. In the meantime, we head to MoCo for Higher Level IBD Chinese, 6s and 7s, hard work for the kids but within their grasp with a critical mass of native speakers in the classes.

Good luck to the rest of you at YY and DCI.  
[/quote]

It may well be that the Cantonese speakers haven't been on this board in ages but you sound exactly like the "ABC" posters from a few years ago. Everything you say drips of entitlement and frankly racism.

Seriously, you wouldn't have helped it "the YY board planned to hire non Chinese-speaking admins"? They hired the best and most qualified people who applied. They did not exclude anyone who was not in the "local dialect-speaking immigrant community."

I have visited Chinese immersion programs across the country, exploring places where we had the opportunity to move. There are lots of places that call themselves Chinese immersion but I have not seen a single one that is on Yu Ying's level. Pray, do tell us which immersion school is "real"? I've probably visited it. You appear to think that a school is only real Chines immersion if it is Chinese preference, but Yu Ying is a public charter school, and for the billionth time, IT IS NOT ALLOWED TO PREFERENCE NATIVE SPEAKERS. This is and was always going to be true.

Ten years later you can't get it through your head.

Your solution, I suppose, would have been to not open Yu Ying. Better nothing, no community interested in Chinese language & culture, no new families attending Chinese cultural events throughout the area, no parents learning Chinese themselves, no influx of Chinese au pairs and teachers, no families sharing Chinese culture and language with their own networks. Better nothing than something that doesn't give someone [b]exactly like you[/b] a preference over anyone who is different from you.

Get a life.

Move on.

Why would you even open this thread?[/quote]

I'm a NP and you're an arrogant ass. Something is clearly wrong with the ethnic community in a city rejects the one school celebrating its own culture and language. They must have had their reasons and the YY board and PA should have tried to sort this problem out long ago.You sound like the head case here. [/quote]

Also NP here.  I think the problem is that every time someone complains that ethnic Chinese students don't get preference they are willfully ignoring charter law.  There is not allowed to be a preference for language, period.  If there were, it would place the poorest students in the city at an even greater disadvantage.  It's a public school for students in DC first, and a Chinese immersion school second.

Another factor to be aware of, is that the Chinese community in DC (such as it is) is largely Taiwanese.  YY is pursuing relationships in mainland China.  The characters taught are modern, not traditional.  There's enough tension between the Taiwanese in DC and the Chinese Embassy that when they've made gifts to the school, they arrange to come at different times so that they don't interact.  YY students have been welcome at the Chinese Cultural Center downtown, but DC Chinatown is about a block long and mostly historical.  The ethnic community has long since moved to the suburbs.[/quote]

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