How’s your homeschooling going for Mandarin immersion?

Millions of parents across the United States find themselves effectively homeschooling their children during the shelter in place orders necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s doubly hard for parents whose native language isn’t English, of course, and much has been written on that.

But for parents with children in Mandarin immersion who don’t themselves speak Mandarin, it’s also a real confounder.

It’s even an issue for parents who do speak Mandarin but who grew up in the United States and don’t actually read and write Chinese, especially as written Mandarin becomes more complex in the higher grades.

I would like to run a series of looks at how this is going for families at home. What is your program doing? How do you keep up your child’s Mandarin? Can you? And how well can immersion work when students are no longer truly immersed?

Feel free to email me at weise at well dot com if you’d like to take part. Hopefully we can learn from one and other, or at least stop feeling so guilty that we’re not doing enough….

You’re for a vaccine-filled future!

Beth