Thursday, July 24, 2014
Website to Learn Japanese
I have created a website to help English speakers learn Japanese. It is interactive and employs proven techniques to speed learning and aid in retention. Check it out and help me beta test it.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Inner City Immersion Language Education vs. an Affluent School Without Language
My dilemma
Although I live in an affluent school district and have two
kids who attend local schools I have a child who attends Post Oak Elementary in
Lansing, MI. It is an inner city Title I school, with inadequate funding and a
disadvantaged student population. I've been very happy with my choice to send
him there because they offer an immersion Chinese program, allowing him to
spend half of the day learning in Mandarin and half of the day learning in
English. However, I definitely give up a lot by sending him there and now I am
struggling with whether I should send him to fourth grade in Lansing or move
him back to Okemos. I will outline the pros and cons of leaving him in the
immersion program, in part because putting it on screen will help me think the
issues through and in part because I hope others will give me insights into
what I should do.
A bit of history
My wife and I both learned languages as children and have
become increasingly convinced that having children learn a foreign language
when they are young is the most opportune time. All three of my children are
learning a foreign language. My fifteen year old is reasonably fluent in
Japanese. My twelve year old takes Greek lessons twice a week. Often I get
asked why I bother doing something as difficult as teaching them languages.
While I don't expect that they will necessarily use the language they learn as
adults, they learn many skills that I don't expect them to use in their
professional lives, from playing sports to learning to read music and play an
instrument. Like these other activities, learning a language helps them develop
into smarter, more well-rounded individuals. There is research showing that
serious language study helps children improve their ability to discriminate
between sounds,
increase their vocabulary and do better in math, and even enhances
cognitive flexibility.
Zachary started learning Chinese in an immersion preschool
and moved to Post Oak in kindergarten. He can read and write hundreds of
Chinese characters. While it is difficult for me to independently assess his
ability to speak and understand Mandarin, the Chinese people he speaks to while
he is with me almost always compliment his pronunciation. He seems to
understand a lot of Chinese and on a few topics can speak so that he is clearly
understood. When we recently went to a Chinese New Year's celebration that
consisted of skits by MSU Chinese students he loved it, laughing in all the
right places and clearly understanding (at least at some level) the dialogue.
The Quality of the Teaching
In the four
years he's been at Post Oak he's had six 3 English and 3 Chinese teachers (the
kindergarten teachers moved up to first grade with him. Since I have
volunteered extensively over the last decade in both Okemos and Lansing Schools
I have had a great opportunity to observe many teachers at work and think I can
evaluate how they teach reasonably well. My assessment is that Zachary has had
3 excellent teachers, two that are average, and one below average (a similar
distribution to what I've seen in the wealthy district with my other children
though neither dataset is statistically significant).
The Results (Other than Chinese)
Zachary, though certainly not a prodigy, has consistently
been ahead of where his brothers were at the same point in their education in
math, though he is not as far ahead of grade level as he once was. Though he
was not ahead of his oldest brother in reading that is only because my oldest
was linguistically precocious (beginning to read at 18 months and correctly
spelling puerile in a first grade assignment). He seems basically happy and well adjusted, though at times
has minor social issues.
The Problems
I began rethinking leaving him in Lansing Schools last
summer when the district fired all of its elementary school art, music, and
physical education teachers due to lack of funds. In theory the regular
teachers picked up teaching those subjects, but from what we see coming home, hanging
on the school walls, and hear from our child, there has been a real drop in how
much they are getting. However, we supplement with Tae Kwon Do and twice weekly
piano lessons. After school resumed last fall I learned that they also gutted
the gifted and talented program, cutting the number of students drastically and
changing it from a year round program to one that is three months long.
In contrast, this year the Okemos School district has an
award winning music program and great art at all grade levels. My middle son
has been learning viola in school for two years. My oldest son is taking
photography in high school, using a nice dSLR and high-end computers with
Photoshop. Next year he'll take AP art. This year Okemos passed a bond proposal
that will fund a personal learning device (iPad) for every student.
I'm not a big believer in standardized test scores as a good
measure of school performance. Often, they only reflect the socioeconomic
status of the test takers. However, at my local elementary school, Bennett
Woods, scores are at the 93rd percentile and at Post Oak they are at the 14th.
There is clearly a real difference in how much a typical
student has learned by the third grade. The children in Post Oak are not less
smart. Part of the difference in achievement is because the children in the
school don't have the same enrichment opportunities that my children (and other
economically privileged children) have over the summer, so they experience a
bigger summer slide. As the children that he goes to school with fall behind,
it affects their attitudes toward academics and their interests. The influence
of a child's peer group may be as important as the influence of parents and
teachers and I fear that the effects of poverty on my son's peer group will
lead to a less enriching set of peers. My older sons often play with friends
who share their interests in foreign languages, chess, computer programming,
and rocks and minerals, incorporating those interests into their social lives.
I don't see that type of interaction with Zachary and his schoolmates.
Furthermore, falling behind because of the summer slide and less stable home
lives forces teachers to focus attention on remediation.
Other Issues
It is not just the academics that I worry about, I also
worry about my son's social development. It is much harder to get him together
with friends since we are about half an hour away by car. As he ages, the peer
group becomes less diverse economically and geographically as parents like us
who send our kids through the school of choice programs drop out to send our
kids to more economically privileged districts. They are not replaced by new
school of choice parents since few students begin an immersion language program
in later grades.
The School District
While the school has an amazing and highly dedicated
principal, the district itself is dysfunctional and underfunded. The immersion
language is supported by FLAP grants from the department of education with
assistance from MSU's Confucius Institute and the Chinese government. The
school district is less than committed to the program and as the grants expire,
may reduce or eliminate Chinese instruction.
Extracurricular Activities
Because of the lack of funds, the range of extracurriculars
available is smaller than in Okemos. For years, Zachary was jealous of his
brothers' after school chess club. Okemos parents who want their children to
participate pay a couple hundred dollars each to hire two of the top chess
players in Michigan. They go to tournaments, for which the parents gladly pay
USCF and MCA membership fees, the registration, and a markup that pays for the
coaches' time and a room rental.
Being a Good Citizen
Trying to be a good parent, I give to the PTA, donate school
supplies, donate money to the Okemos Education Foundation and the Lansing
Education Advancement Foundation, and I have volunteered to help in the schools
every year since my oldest son (who is now in tenth grade) was a first grader.
This year, in addition to doing math pullouts for the gifted kids I decided to
start a chess club for Zachary. I'm a mediocre chess player at best and I'm not
really qualified to perform classroom management on lots of kids at one time.
Nevertheless, I enrolled 26 kids in an after school chess club. Unlike in
Okemos, where there is a mandatory fee for the club and another for each
tournament I emphasize on every flier that no child will be turned away for
lack of resources. I've tried applying for grants, holding fundraisers, and
have asked for donations. I won't break even. There is no way, even doing much of the work myself that I
can give Zachary and his peers the same caliber of after school opportunities that
Okemos students have.
Differences in Curriculum
In an attempt to decide whether to move Zachary to Bennett
Woods next year, I visited Bennett Woods where the principal showed me anonymized
schoolwork of typical third and fourth graders. While there were differences
from what Zachary is bringing home, they were subtle. In math there was a
little less rote problem solving and a bit more synthesis and application (in
story problems, for example). In English, there was more emphasis on
proofreading, revision, correction, and polishing. Nonetheless, I am concerned
that the gap will widen and that eeven if I move him to a better district later
those small differences will become larger as those with a slight edge are
encouraged and given more opportunities (I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell).
Change to Pattengill
If I move Zachary into our home district I may want to do so
next fall. In a move designed to save money Lansing changed from k-5 schools to
k-3 and consolidated grades 4-6 at Pattengill Academy. The immersion program is
supposed to be a school within a school, but I have questions about how
separate the school within a school is. I hear complaints from Post Oak kids
who share busses with Pattengill students about the behavior of the students on
the bus. I have had parents tell me that their kids learn things (and language)
from those students that they would rather not have their kids exposed to.
Does it Apply to my Kid?
I am trying to balance the ability to learn a language well,
at an early age against the things that we'd give up in a poor school district.
I know that to some extent the enriching environment I can give my kids
ameliorates some of the problems with an inner city school, so perhaps those
drawbacks are less important. On the other hand, I have been able to successfully
provide language education to my other children through in-home tutors, online
courses, college courses, immersion language camps, computer software and trips
to Japan and Greece, so I should be able to do so with Zachary. Moreover, my
attempts to go above and beyond the Post Oak curriculum at home in math and
English have been extremely difficult and largely ineffective.
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