This woman points out some excellent reasons for learning another language. DP
By Sue Polinsky
news-record.com: Why do kids have to learn a second language? Isn't English enough? Is the United States in danger of becoming so bilingual that it will become linguistically watered down?
Learning Spanish in school has become a Greensboro area hot button. Perhaps some of the argument against students learning a second language has an anti-immigrant bias. Maybe the recent deluge of signs that Spanish is spoken here is rubbing longer-term immigrants the wrong way.
Back in the days when we walked to school in the snow (both uphill and down), I was forced into Hebrew school, ostensibly to learn the Hebrew language and the concomitant culture. We met every Tuesday and Thursday, from 4 to 6 p.m., in the downstairs of the neighborhood temple. My teacher, Mrs. Cutler, has deservedly climbed all 10 rungs of the ladder to heaven as a reward for putting up with us for five straight years.
Hebrew school was a horrid experience. It consumed all my free time after school. It required studying and test-taking and other forms of torture. I hated every minute.
It was, in a phrase, one of the most valuable things I've ever done.
What I gained wasn't so much knowledge of Hebrew or cultural identity, although I achieved both. It wasn't even that Jerry Seinfeld sat a couple of rows behind me at synagogue and horse-laughed through much of the holy experience. Instead, what I accomplished in the third grade of public school (the first year of Hebrew school) was mastery of the way the English language works. Through Hebrew school, I learned grammar and sentence structure. I learned to write a complete sentence, and through that skill I could diagram anything they put in front of me. Through the arduous foreign language learning experience, my English skills became superior to those of my classmates in public school.
I learned in Hebrew that verbs can be conjugated and that they have tenses, something they barely touched in public ninth grade. I learned that apostrophes matter.
The skill I have is being able to communicate in writing quickly and effectively. It saves time, which translates into money, every day in my online tech business.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.
2 comments:
I totally agree! Becoming multi-lingual is probably one of the most valuable things we can do and encourage for our children. We've been building something at eduFire with goal of making it easier for more people to learn a second (or third, fourth, etc.) language. We'll be launching soon so hopefully you'll check us out!
Hi Donna, I just saw your post and thanks for the link and kind words. I truly believe that learning a second language so early (I started in public school 3rd grade) helped me tremendously to understand English grammar, which we barely started learning in the 7th grade of public school. We seem afraid to teach children about nouns and verbs when they're young and now, no one knows where to put an apostrophe (so they put it everywhere).
Change in the South comes slowly. Including second languages, especially Spanish with the concomitant anti-immigrant bias so popular these days nationwide, is a hot button and speaks to a larger issue.
But language?
Having taught in HBCUs and public school "remedial" reading programs, I believe learning a second language would indeed make better English speakers and writers of our nation's young people. Call me old-fashioned, but I did, indeed, walk to school.
Best,
Sue Polinsky
Post a Comment