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 family and the community at Kensington Elementary.

Elementary school teacher shot during attempted robbery

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has confirmed a mandarin-language immersion teacher at Kensington Elementary school was shot by a robber Friday night.

Police say the shooting took place on the 100 block of East Park Avenue in Charlotte’s busy SouthEnd neighborhood at 11:33 p.m. Friday after the victim was getting into a vehicle.

Upon arrival, officers located Ruijuan Guo, suffering from a gunshot wound. Guo was transported to Carolinas Medical Center with life-threatening injuries.

The police report states Guo, her boyfriend and friend were preparing to get into their car when they were approached by the suspect. The suspect pulled a gun on them and asked for the boyfriend’s wallet. The police report stated he could not get his wallet out of his pocket fast enough so the suspect shot his girlfriend in the head and then ran off.

The police reports states the robber got away with the man’s wallet, which contained his driver’s license, social security card and $900 in mixed bills.

The Kensington Elementary School posted Sunday on their Facebook page saying, “As many of you may have heard, one of our Mandarin teachers, Miss Guo has been hospitalized since Friday night with life-threatening injuries. As a show of love and support, we are encouraging all of our students and staff to wear purple this week, which is Miss Guo’s favorite color, and bring in sunflowers, her favorite flower.

“I mean the dads out in the line today, they were all in purple, teachers in purple, kids in purple. It’s just a great community and were just showing support,” said Hope Morris, whose daughter attends Kensington Elementary.

Please read more here.

Here’s a Go Fund Me link for the family.

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, Delaware  — Anna Lee was not surprised when she walked into a meeting for Forest Hills Elementary’s Spanish Immersion Program and found the room filled with white faces.

“I had it on my radar already that the program was relatively segregated because I know people who have older kids there,” Lee said. “It wasn’t exactly a revelation.”

She counted three Hispanic parents –- including her husband -– and two black parents among the roughly 45 people in the school’s auditorium.

During that meeting, Lee recalled, Forest Hill’s principal, Deborah Greenwood, was asked how students would be chosen. The principal told attendees she wasn’t sure yet.

Please read more here.

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 new parents, or as a sale item to support their programs. The books can be purchased in bulk much more cheaply than buying them through Amazon.

As a parent of two daughters who’ve been in Mandarin immersion programs at two different schools for a total of 17 years now, I wrote A Parent’s Guide as the how-to manual that I wished I’d had when we started this process.

Many schools have found that by giving copies of the book to parents early on (sometimes even before school starts) they can spend more time building a great school and less time explaining the nuts and bolts of immersion. Informed parents, teachers tell me, are calmer and more empowered parents.

A Parent’s Guide covers:

• How immersion works in the classroom
• The benefits of bilingualism for the brain
• Chinese 101 for immersion parents
• The academic possibilities immersion opens to students
• Chinese literacy issues
• The six types of Mandarin immersion families
• Why schools offer immersion
• How parents can turbo-charge their children’s Chinese

If you order 25 or more books, I can have them dropped shipped to your school for $12 a copy. If you order 50 or more they go down to $11 a copy. And, as one program did, if you buy 100 they go down to $10 per book.

Some PTAs have bought them and then sold them at the regular price of $18.95 as a fund raiser as well.

If your school is interested, please contact me at weise (at) well (dot) com

A great overview of Canada’s Mandarin immersion landscape. It’s remarkable that 43% of the greater Vancouver area in British Columbia is Asian-Canadian, and yet it has only three small program. Edmonton, in Alberta, by contrast has a vibrant and large immersion program.

Also check out the stories at the end by the dad whose daughter speaks Mandarin and how it helped her get jobs, even in high school. A good one to tell the kids!

Metro Vancouver losing competitiveness due to lack of language immersion programs

Bing Thom and Loretta Kong still remember when Kong interviewed for a position with the renowned Vancouver-based architect’s firm in 2007.

“She spoke English, Mandarin and Cantonese,” said Thom, adding that was a key reason for hiring the young architect. “Loretta studied Chinese history and was immersed in the culture.”

Kong, now an associate with Shape Architecture in Vancouver, is a product of the extensive bilingual-immersion programs in Edmonton schools. Kong took half of her elementary and high-school classes in Mandarin Chinese.

“I do remember him being very surprised,” she recalled of the meeting with Thom. “It did impress him that a smaller centre like Edmonton had a program like this for more than 20 years.”

Since 1984, the Alberta capital has offered one of the largest Mandarin Chinese programs in Canada, with 2,009 students enrolled in 13 schools. It is the school district’s second-most-popular bilingual-immersion program, behind French with 3,703 student. What’s more, Edmonton also has 1,335 students in its Arabic program, in addition to having comparable programs for German, Hebrew, Spanish, Ukrainian and American Sign Language.

By comparison, Metro school, serving a much larger population, have about 500 students in total in immersion Mandarin programs.

As the school year starts, some parents are again demanding that B.C. — Canada’s gateway to the Pacific — should be doing more to increase foreign-language competency among students. The alternative, they say, is an increasingly uncompetitive workforce, especially when compared to graduates of programs like Edmonton’s.

Please read more here.

Forest Hills Mandarin Chinese Immersion students recently hosted a group of 29 students from Shanghai at the Cascade Recreation Park.

In addition to lunch, the 60-plus children spent time on the newly installed play structure and participated in a few organized games.

But most importantly, it was a chance to practice their language skills while making new friends and having fun.

Forest Hills students in the seven-year-old program take half of their classes in Mandarin from teachers from China. This is the second year for the picnic with students visiting from China, said Tim Shaw, principal of Meadowbrook Elementary.

Please read more here.

[from the YonHap News Agency]

Diversity in public schools

Korea’s elementary and secondary schools have been lacking in globalization efforts. A couple of recent cases shows that Korean adolescents may get more chances to learn about the merits of diversity and embrace multiculturalism in their formative years.

The Seoul City education office announced last week that it will pursue the establishment of “international elementary schools,” offering Chinese immersion programs at schools located in parts of Seoul with a growing Chinese-speaking population. The education office has chosen Youngil Elementary School in Guro and Daedong Elementary School in Yeongdeungpo to try out the Chinese immersion program. These two schools offer regular classes and extra-curricular activities in both Korean and Chinese. The education office is aiming to establish the two schools as international elementary schools by 2018.

Whether this plan will become a reality is uncertain. Currently, the law governing the establishment of elementary and secondary schools does not allow an international educational curriculum at elementary schools. So a legislative revision will be necessary to establish an international elementary school. At the middle school level, there are four international schools.

Please read more here.