Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: They don't seem to know that most Chinese immigrants speak Cantonese, not Mandarin, or what Cantonese is.

There is no way this is true, so I don't really trust anything you say.

What I meant by this is not that most Chinese immigrants speak Cantonese. But that YY parents "don't know what Cantonese is" as Taiwan Dad asserted. That has to be bullshit.

Anonymous wrote:NP Here: I was a fluent mandarin speaker that lived in China for four years. No skin in the YY discussions with Taiwanese dad - we are at a spanish immersion feeder to DCI.

I did, however, want to comment on that discussion because I thnk Taiwanese dad has made some valid points and they are getting lost because of cultural differences. In 2004, I completed a year of graduate school entirely in Mandarin after living in China for four years. My Written and spoken mandarin rocked. When I came home for the summer and chatted at the Chinese restaurant, the waitresses oohed and aahed over my mandarin and said how fantastic it was. Fair point, it really was good and I had worked hard to earn that. Since then, I have barely used my mandarin and it has declined dramatically. Last night, we went to AJs restaurant in Rockville where I attempted poorly and briefly to say a few things to the waitresses in Mandarin. It was BAD, I kept mixing in Spanish, which is my current best foreign language because we speak it at home. The waitresses oohed and aaahed over my mandarin and said how fantastic it ws just like they did in 2004. Exact same reaction, separated by 15 years, and a LOT of language decline.

Chinese people compliment foreigners profusely on their mandarin skills - it is a cultural habit. This is particularly true for non-Asian foreigners, which impress Chinese people the most when they eek out a few words in Mandarin. My four year old says "Ni Hao!" and "Xie Xie" and you would think he has just given a discourse in Chinese by how they react.

I have no doubt that the YY kids are learning to speak mandarin and in particular, theatthey will have good accents by learning it at a a young age. But whenever a Chinese person tells you how impressed they are by your kids mandarin, I would recognize that there may be some exaggerating and that giving these types of compliments to mandarin speaking foreigners is customary. Testing would be a better reflection of the true learning going on and how good the mandarin is getting.....

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCI parents have self-selected and managed to weed most of the low performing and/or problematic students from their lower feeder schools.

They will replicate this model for later grades, with even more barriers to entry.

That is the charter way (at least, it's the the HRCS one).

Yes to self-selecting but bs to weeding out.

We are leaving a feeder and were literally told by the principal that we live in a city of choices and I was free to make a choice when I wanted them to address my challenging child's needs (read IEP). It is not BS. Yu Ying's scores for disadvantaged (economically or socially) populations are piss poor. The only school that is a feeder that is serving disadvantaged populations well is LAMB, which is impossible to get into, so who cares. And Yu Ying has a reputation for being racist/classist (don't know anyone there) and being the worst among them for weeding people out.

The post you were responding to was spot on. School choice my ass.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: They don't seem to know that most Chinese immigrants speak Cantonese, not Mandarin, or what Cantonese is.

There is no way this is true, so I don't really trust anything you say.

Anonymous wrote:NP Here: I was a fluent mandarin speaker that lived in China for four years. No skin in the YY discussions with Taiwanese dad - we are at a spanish immersion feeder to DCI.

I did, however, want to comment on that discussion because I thnk Taiwanese dad has made some valid points and they are getting lost because of cultural differences. In 2004, I completed a year of graduate school entirely in Mandarin after living in China for four years. My Written and spoken mandarin rocked. When I came home for the summer and chatted at the Chinese restaurant, the waitresses oohed and aahed over my mandarin and said how fantastic it was. Fair point, it really was good and I had worked hard to earn that. Since then, I have barely used my mandarin and it has declined dramatically. Last night, we went to AJs restaurant in Rockville where I attempted poorly and briefly to say a few things to the waitresses in Mandarin. It was BAD, I kept mixing in Spanish, which is my current best foreign language because we speak it at home. The waitresses oohed and aaahed over my mandarin and said how fantastic it ws just like they did in 2004. Exact same reaction, separated by 15 years, and a LOT of language decline.

Chinese people compliment foreigners profusely on their mandarin skills - it is a cultural habit. This is particularly true for non-Asian foreigners, which impress Chinese people the most when they eek out a few words in Mandarin. My four year old says "Ni Hao!" and "Xie Xie" and you would think he has just given a discourse in Chinese by how they react.

I have no doubt that the YY kids are learning to speak mandarin and in particular, theatthey will have good accents by learning it at a a young age. But whenever a Chinese person tells you how impressed they are by your kids mandarin, I would recognize that there may be some exaggerating and that giving these types of compliments to mandarin speaking foreigners is customary. Testing would be a better reflection of the true learning going on and how good the mandarin is getting.....

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCI parents have self-selected and managed to weed most of the low performing and/or problematic students from their lower feeder schools.

They will replicate this model for later grades, with even more barriers to entry.

That is the charter way (at least, it's the the HRCS one).

Yes to self-selecting but bs to weeding out.

We are leaving a feeder and were literally told by the principal that we live in a city of choices and I was free to make a choice when I wanted them to address my challenging child's needs (read IEP). It is not BS. Yu Ying's scores for disadvantaged (economically or socially) populations are piss poor. The only school that is a feeder that is serving disadvantaged populations well is LAMB, which is impossible to get into, so who cares. And Yu Ying has a reputation for being racist/classist (don't know anyone there) and being the worst among them for weeding people out.

The post you were responding to was spot on. School choice my ass.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCI parents have self-selected and managed to weed most of the low performing and/or problematic students from their lower feeder schools.

They will replicate this model for later grades, with even more barriers to entry.

That is the charter way (at least, it's the the HRCS one).

Yes to self-selecting but bs to weeding out.

Anonymous wrote:I just don't understand the attitude that you have to have parents who can speak, read, etc the immersion language for their kids to become proficient/bilingual. But maybe it's bc I'm an immigrant whose parents don't know English and I speak English just fine enough to get into an Ivy League college for undergrad.

You don't need native speaker parents to become bilingual in another language. You really don't. Only Americans seem to think this.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Many upper grades Yu Ying parents must believe in DCI because they don't speak Chinese. I'm a native speaker who, I kid you not, can hardly understand most of the YY kids I speak Mandarin to in my neighborhood, including upper grades kids. They don't seem able to understand me either, unless I speak as though I'm talking to a baby or toddler. Their parents seem to think that the kids are close to fluent for their ages. Also, when I talk to the families, they don't seem to know much at all about Chinese culture - they've never been to a Chinese-speaking country (other than perhaps on the recent YY 5th grade trip), aren't going, and don't have Chinese immigrant or ABC friends. They don't seem to know that most Chinese immigrants speak Cantonese, not Mandarin, or what Cantonese is.

I can't help but wonder how these kids are going to fare on those International Baccalaureate exams in six, seven or eight years. Having earned the full IB Diploma abroad years ago, I'm not convinced that DCPC has really thought the DCI program through. Those exams are killers, a good deal harder than AP language exams (which I also took), at least at the Higher Level.

I don't go looking for reasons to criticize DC public schools, but from where I sit, DCI's Chinese track doesn't sound like a serious thing. What makes you think it is?

Interesting that that's your experience. That has not been mine (I'm not a parent of older YY kids). But I have been in several situations with older YY students and non-YY affiliated Chinese native speakers, and I hear over and over that the students' Mandarin overall is actually very good. I listen for those opinions because obviously I'm interested in knowing how the students' proficiency (or lack thereof) is playing to a non-YY Mandarin-speaking audience. The majority of feedback I've gotten is very very positive, and does give me hope. Just to be clear, they're not people who have no reason not to speak the truth, and a few times I've specifically asked people I know who are native speakers to listen in and tell me what they really think.

And I absolutely have NOT had the experience you describe where the students can't understand what's being said to them and native Mandarin speakers can't understand what the students are saying. Even with the "less than stellar" students, I was told their comprehension was excellent.

Since I don't know anyone in real life whose had your experience, I continue to be very optimistic about what older YY students' proficiency will be in later years. I have no reason yet not to be optimistic, the feedback so far has been very positive. At some point testing will come in and we'll have actual data about their proficiency. Looking forward to that.

Taiwanese dad here again. Perhaps, but I'll say this, Chinese raise their kids to be polite, really polite. When YY families ask how their kids sound to me, I often find myself saying that a kid's comprehension seems good or excellent when it strikes me as mediocre or poor. We're non-confrontational as a group and insular; bilingual immigrant families aren't going to tangle with YY families. No point. We're already looking ahead to the testing, schlepping our kids to Rockville on weekends without complaint. We know that our children will need much higher standardized test scores than other groups to crack the same colleges. This helps explain why a coalition of 60 Asian-American groups recently filed suit against Harvard for discrimination in admissions.

Anonymous wrote:I earned the IB Diploma at an intl school in Europe in the 90s. I took French at the hl (higher level) and Spanish at the sl (standard level).

Banneker's IB Diploma pass rate is not more than one quarter, although candidates only need to wrack up 24 IB points (of a possible 45) to earn the Diploma. Eastern is graduating its first Diploma class this year, of 4 or 5 students with the IB exams coming up later this month (and scores out in Aug). Meanwhile, at Richard Montgomery in Bethesda, the pass rate is above 90%. In MoCo, elemntary immersion programs lead to 40-50% immersion ms programs, e.g. at Robert Frost in Rockville.

If DCI's IB Diploma pass rate is above 50% in 7 or 8 years, I'll be surprised. The DC charter immersion programs don't look robust enough to for kids to get on track to pass (with a score of 4 on a scale of 1-7), esp at the hl. They don't come along with public summer camp, or options for native speakers to test into the higher grades, like they do in the metro area burbs.