If anyone in the DC or Maryland area wants to come, I’ll be talking at an event at the University of Maryland-College Park on Oct. 8th. The event is free and open to all. However the parent-specific portion will begin around 2:30. If you’re a parent and you can come, please come up afterwards and say…

Sometime last winter I conceived of a passion to send my kids to China for the summer. Okay, not the whole summer. We didn’t want to be rid of them. we just wanted to find some kind of a summer program where they’d spend a few weeks speaking only Chinese. The primary motivation was our oldest, whose…

UPDATE: I’ve gotten a lot of emails from parents at schools that offer Mandarin instruction around the country, asking about the distinction between immersion and Mandarin classes. First off, these are called FLES (Foreign Language in Elementary School) in education jargon, in case you run into the term. There are a couple of requirement for a…

Parents with kids in Mandarin immersion programs probably noticed that this week involved a lot of talk about the Moon Festival, moon cakes and probably some poetry. For folks who didn’t grow up in families that celebrated what’s properly called the Mid-Autumn Festival, here’s a little background on what your little darlings have been up to. The…

Normally I post positive stories about Mandarin immersion. But this is so heartbreaking. A young Mandarin immersion teacher in North Carolina was shot in during a robbery. The community is rallying to help bring her family from China to say good-bye to her before she’s taken off life support. My prayers go out to the…

Hint: Don’t have a theoretical “first come, first served” enrollment process but really let the principal pick and choose who gets to attend, resulting in almost entirely white classes while Black and Hispanic families mysteriously never get in. Selection process at Forest Hills saw lack of minorities in popular school program By Adam Wagner StarNews Staff WILMINGTON,…

As incoming Kinder parents begin to think about how this Mandarin immersion thing they’ve signed up for is actually going to work, many programs around the nation are getting them a copy of A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion as a one-stop reading guide to language immersion. Both schools and parent associations have purchased copies for their…