Friday, August 10, 2007

Um, can you repeat that in english for me please....

हे लुक, ई कैन ब्लोग इन हिंदी।

No, it's not a secret code... it's a very strange option on Blogger that allows you to write in Hindi. This would be very helpful if I were blogging to my colleagues in India. It says... "Hey look, I can blog in Hindi !"

Which brings me to another topic that's been bothering me lately. My son's school sends a lot of the information that comes home to parents in English and Spanish. Now I have a problem with this. First, the school is spending money to pay for a translator (yes, there's a FULL TIME Spanish translator on staff at my son's elementary school) , to print things on 2 sides of a sheet, and then there's the whole pain of having to look to see which side of the page I can understand.

This is money that the school could be using to pay for the supplies the teachers need to run their classroom, so that I don't have to buy things like markers, paper, Kleenex, hand sanitizer, and the like.

Why do the schools, that are expected to prepare our students for the future, make it easier on the parents to not have to learn the English language?

My family came from Eastern Europe and had to learn English. My wife's family came from Finland and had to learn English, why are we making it easier for people to continue to function without learning English? There are grade school aged kids other countries that are learning English as a second language, yet we coddle people in the largest English speaking country in the world so that they don't have to learn.

What happens is the parents make no effort to learn English , because there's no need to, and they continue to speak Spanish in the house, making it more difficult for their children to learn English. A vicious cycle.

No comments: