EUGENE, Ore. — In China, party hosts still have about two weeks to prepare for New Year celebrations, but students 9,000 miles across the globe in Eugene are already celebrating by singing a traditional New Year song in Mandarin.

Oak Hill School in Eugene offers Mandarin immersion courses beginning in Kindergarten and ending in 8th grade.

By the fifth grade, students like 10-year-old Maya Ordway can understand the building blocks of writing and speaking that will eventually allow them to become fluent.

“I think [the program] is going really well,” said Ordway. “Mandarin is so much different from English and so it’s just really fun.”

Ordway said she was adopted from China and that her  mother suggested she study Mandarin, but that’s not why Ordway likes it.

“It gives me a connection to China,” said Ordway. “But it’s really challenging. It’s really hard to memorize all the characters, but once you memorize it it’s really easy.”

Read more here.

So I’m pretty sure this article from the New York Times about over-the-top high school seniors is a joke. One hopes so. But clearly, Mandarin is now part of the national consciousness, if only as yet another “can you top this?” item to add to a kid’s resume. For those of us in immersion, of course, it’s not a joke, just part of daily life. But here’s what they’re saying about us….

The Most Emailed ‘New York Times’ Article Ever

Anna Williams first came to Yael Farms (yael is Hebrew for “Nubian ibex”) after her mother read an article by Dr. Walter Andersen, a clinical physician who specializes in adolescent health. Andersen thinks teenagers today are too focused on their minds, often at the expense of their physical well-being. “Their brains are getting plenty of exercise,” Dr. Andersen says. “It’s the rest of their bodies I’m worried about.”

At Yael Farms, Anna gets plenty of exercise. She spends the day herding ibex, drawing water from a well, and moving heavy stones. After a Deuteronomy-friendly dinner of figs, unleavened bread and honey-drizzled ibex, she practices her Mandarin. Like many of the ibex farms sprouting up across the northeastern United States, Yael offers an intensive Chinese-language immersion course.

“We speak Chinese here,” says Jones, the farm’s co-owner. “It’s just smart business.” Foreign policy analysts like Wilbur Jenkins, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, think entrepreneurs like Jones have the right idea. “In China, children are being taught English in utero,” Jenkins says. “American teenagers better start catching up.”

Read the full article here.

Seven-year-old Anna Ferrebee carefully printed the letters b-i-r-d as she practiced the spelling and vocabulary words that are typical in a first-grade class. Then she moved her pencil to a second column and began copying a symbol few other first-graders in South Carolina would understand — the Chinese character for “bird.”

Anna is a student in the Beaufort County School District’s new Mandarin immersion program offered at two International Baccalaureate elementary schools — Hilton Head Island IB and Broad River. It’s the first program of its kind at a public elementary school in the state, said Jill McAden, Hilton Head IB principal.

The district began the program with two first-grade classes this school year and hopes to expand each year so students can continue studying Mandarin through high school and graduate with the ability to speak and understand the language at an advanced level.

An institution affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education is paying the salaries for two teachers from China this year. The school district received a separate $1.3 million federal grant to use over five years to support teaching Mandarin in local schools.

read more here.

This is the annual Chinese literary arts contest in San Francisco. Many students in the Mandarin immersion programs participate, especially in the recitation of poems, translation and Chinese drawing.

Mandarin immersion: 90 percent of curriculum in Chinese

[My own op ed – the man has a point. But I figure it’s easier to learn Chinese as a little kid and then pick up Spanish in high school than the other way around – Beth]

Op-Ed Columnist

Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: December 29, 2010

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Nicholas D. Kristof

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Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

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Answer: an American.

Yet these days, we’re seeing Americans engaged in a headlong and ambitious rush to learn Chinese — or, more precisely, to get their kids to learn Chinese. Everywhere I turn, people are asking me the best way for their children to learn Chinese.

Partly that’s because Chinese classes have replaced violin classes as the latest in competitive parenting, and partly because my wife and I speak Chinese and I have tortured our three kids by trying to raise them bilingual. Chinese is still far less common in schools or universities than Spanish or French, but it is surging and has the “cool factor” behind it — so public and private schools alike are hastening to add Chinese to the curriculum.

In New York City alone, about 80 schools offer Chinese, with some programs beginning in kindergarten. And let’s be frank: If your child hasn’t started Mandarin classes by third grade, he or she will never amount to anything.

Just kidding. In fact, I think the rush to Chinese is missing something closer to home: the paramount importance for our children of learning Spanish.

Read more here.

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Weighing the public education options for his two children, El Cerrito doctor Michael Jugo felt the East Bay fell short. He wanted them to have an advantage he didn’t have growing up: learning Chinese at school.

“The writing was on the wall that there wasn’t going to be an option for us without moving or paying private tuition,” says Mr. Jugo, 38 years old, who learned Mandarin after college and speaks it at home with his kids, ages 2 and 5, and wife, who is Chinese-American.

Or so he thought. Instead, Mr. Jugo chose an even more difficult path—creating a Chinese-language public charter school in his own county.

After a year of planning, Mr. Jugo and a group of four other families in November received unanimous approval from Alameda County to launch a Mandarin Chinese immersion charter school, the first of its kind in the state.

The Yu Ming Charter School—the name roughly translates as “Nurturing Tomorrow”—is now hunting for a principal and hopes to begin classes in the fall for about 100 kindergarten and first-grade students, expanding over time to include up to the eighth grade. So far, about 120 families have expressed interest or attended meetings for the school.

Read more here.