When I met my husband, he was attending the same school as I. With eight years between us, it really was fortunate that this was the case. Otherwise, I’m really not sure where we would have met. At the time, aside from school and Star Trek: TNG, we really didn’t have a lot in common.
His interest in school was to teach ESL, or English as a Second Language. There was a need for it in our town, and state, and he probably would have had no trouble finding a job anywhere, had that been where he ultimately ended up.
I read an interesting article today titled, Can you read this?: US suffers foreign language weakness. I didn’t know that only 8% of U.S. college students are currently taking a foreign language? How is this possible, when there are 200 million Chinese students studying English?
Oh, wait, I remember.
In high school, my French teacher did not have enough passion for what she was teaching to distract the twenty-some kids in her class from rubber-band fights and note-passing. She may have been a great instructor, but she couldn’t get us interested.
In addition, my English education was (is) lacking so that terms used to describe things we have in English were foreign to me. I tried to look some up to give you examples, and since I don’t know what words to look for, I can’t even tell you what didn’t make sense. Genders for words was completely abstract. Hell, I was in junior high before I could tell you, without thinking, whether something was an adjective or an adverb. (Funny stuff for a writer, huh?)
Later, in high school number two, I didn’t even have French as a choice – I had German and Spanish. To switch was difficult. Instead of going with the similar language, though, and taking Spanish, I chose German. This was a hard switch, although I received extra tutoring and did well. Score one for the school.
A combination of lack of interest (mine, various instructors, and the school system’s) is probably to blame. As students, I can think of one classmate who thought that their foreign language skills would give them any kind of advantage. One. It’s been a while, but I don’t think I ever heard my teacher devote a lesson to why the language I chose would be helpful once I left school, and to be honest, my former language teacher parents probably never made the lecture either.
My kids haven’t heard it yet from me, but that will change tomorrow. Reading that article makes me want to force my kids into Spanish proficiency, so when they’re in high school and the system finally gets around to forcing them to take a second (third, hopefully, at that point) language, they’ll be ready for it.
The hardest part, I think, is helping a kid realize how helpful the things they learn right now are going to be in an abstract future they can’t envision. It’s completely foreign for my kids to think about jobs, or careers, or their future resume. My hardest job will be to get them interested in spite of that fact.