politics and lit again

[pynchonoid]

--- Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net> wrote:

> As a high school teacher who's here on the list, let
> me add a few notes:
> 
> Despite the continual feeling among older people
> that the younger  
> generation is going to hell [...]

Our son came out of high school thoroughly bilingual
in French and English (12 years in a school where
French was the primary langauge of instruction for all
subjects), fluent conversational Chinese (putonghua,
Beijing accent) thanks to Saturday school plus a
Chinese mother and grandparents nearby).  He graduated
(from a private school) with the International
Bacalaureate diploma, which required its own round of
written and oral exams (the French Bac is the model,
the IB is given in English.  He was also the school
champion pianist (was offered scholarships to two
colleges on the strength of his auditions, where he
played solid repertoire by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms,
Chopin, Gershwin), and played on the baseball team. 

He managed to cover  more territory than I did in high
school, because of the depth of language immersion.  I
did both French and Spanish in h.s., had a chance to
deepen my French with a year in France later, and had
a chance to study Chinese for a year in Beijing, but
that doesn't compare to the depth of his education. 

We tricked him, of course, my wife and I.  It wasn't
until about fifth grade, when he started swimming
every day with some kids from public school on the
local swim team, that he came home one day
complaining, "A lot of kids only have to do homework
in English." When the kids start off at age 4 immersed
in French all day at school, then speaking English at
home (plus Chinese in our case), they don't realize
they are doing anything special, until they bump up
against a comparison.  He was already bilingual before
he could put up any fuss. 

I've got several nieces and nephews who are enjoying
similar programs. The range of educational experiences
that are available for kids now is far greater than
when I was a kid, even for families with little money.

On that Pynchonian media tip, one of the goals of the
high school (International High School in SF, at the
French-American International School), expressed in
the school's mission statement, was to prepare
students to be intelligent and conscious consumers of
media, lots of focus on how to analyze and interpret
media.



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