Wei Yu International Charter School, a Mandarin immersion public elementary school in West San Jose, will hold an information session for prospective parents from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the San Jose Library’s West Valley Branch, 1243 San Tomas Aquino Road.
Children’s activities will be provided during the session.
The school, chartered by the state Board of Education, plans to open in the fall in the Moreland School District with kindergarten and first grades, and expand eventually through eighth grade. Open enrollment extends through Monday.
Tens of thousands of people, including Los Angeles Unified School District Board President Steve Zimmer, participated in a “walk-in” last week to show support for traditional public schools at a time when they are facing increasing pressure from — and loss of students to — charter and private operators.
Note that this isn’t immersion, it’s more the typical hour-a-day language class many of us had in high school. But it’s interesting that there’s pressure on the district to make Mandarin classes available in middle school for students who weren’t able to get into immersion programs. Though of course my response would be to increase the number of immersion programs….
San Francisco school children could soon have more opportunities to learn a language other than English in elementary school under a pilot program approved Tuesday night.
A resolution approved unanimously by the San Francisco Unified School District board Tuesday asked the district to prepare a pilot program offering Mandarin language instruction at elementary schools that feed into middle schools that offer Mandarin.
Unlike existing immersion programs, that offer all daily instruction in the target language, this program would offer daily classes in the language in addition to normal daily classes conducted in English, according to the district.
If it is found to be feasible, the pilot program would be implemented by the 2018-2019 school year, with other languages to follow district-wide if it is considered a success.
I would note that whether or not being bilingual actually makes you smarter or better at executive function, it’s still a heck of a useful thing to be able to speak two more more languages.
The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism
For decades, some psychologists have claimed that bilinguals have better mental control. Their work is now being called into question.
In one of his sketches, comedian Eddie Izzard talks about how English speakers see bilingualism: “Two languages in one head? No one can live at that speed! Good lord, man. You’re asking the impossible,” he says. This satirical view used to be a serious one. People believed that if children grew up with two languages rattling around their heads, they would become so confused that their “intellectual and spiritual growth would not thereby be doubled, but halved,” wrote one professor in 1890. “The use of a foreign language in the home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation,” said another in 1926.
A century on, things are very different. Since the 1960s, several studies have shown that bilingualism leads to many advantages, beyond the obvious social benefits of being able to speak to more people. It also supposedly improves executive function—a catch-all term for advanced mental abilities that allow us to control our thoughts and behavior, such as focusing on a goal, ignoring distractions, switching attention, and planning for the future.
Lion dancers at the Chinese American School’s 2015 Chinese New Year event, the Mass Greeting.
Monday, Feb. 8 is the Lunar New Year, an event celebrated by over one billion people worldwide. Students in Chinese immersion programs across North America will have spent the weeks leading up to it learning about the holiday the Chinese call Spring Festival by doing things like making red lanterns, singing songs and maybe learning to write 新年快乐 (Happy New Year) with a brush.
But in a thoughtful message to his school community this week, the headmaster of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco, the nation’s oldest Mandarin immersion program, talked about going deeper into an event that for many parents is a cultural closed door, simply The Festival of Lion Dances and Dumplings.
In a school that embraces both Chinese language and culture, writes Jeff Bissell, the goal should be to give students a deep understanding of the cultural meaning of this holiday. I asked his permission to reprint part of his essay, because it is such an excellent example of the world immersion can open our children up to—but one we as parents must also embrace.
Having a Happy…and Authentic…Lunar New Year
By Jeffrey Bissell
On avoiding “orientalism,” the West’s sometimes shallow, romanticized perceptions and fictional depictions of “The East.”
I’m not Chinese. Although I was lucky enough to live in China for fifteen years and spent many enjoyable lunar new years with local friends, I wasn’t raised in a family or in a community that celebrated and enjoyed this holiday the same way my family enjoyed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July when I was growing up in the Midwest.
How lucky we are to have so many families at the Chinese American International School whose relationship to the lunar new year is much deeper than mine! And so at this time of year we should regard these members of our community as precious resources; ask them what the lunar new year means to them!
Not only will you gain knowledge that contextualizes the two dimensional images and forms that we associate with the lunar new year, but you will also be infected with the contagious positive energy that they radiate as they speak about their magical childhood experiences—just like the excitement your kids feel as they dress up for Halloween or prepare to visit their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins on Thanksgiving.
My impressions of the meaning of the lunar new year are filtered through the lens of an outsider. But here they are:
Home – In Chinese the word for home and the word for family are the same: jiā 家. My home town means my family’s village: jiā xiāng 家乡. It feels warm and it feels like it’s where we belong. Years ago, Chinese seldom traveled far outside their villages, being home was something most people took for granted. Today it is estimated that more than 275 million rural Chinese have left their villages and relocated to urban areas in search of employment. That number is more than 85% of the entire population of the U.S.!
Each year at this time, as the lunar new year approaches, massive numbers of these migrants struggle to return home—most of them on trains and buses. It is expected that some 332 million train trips will be made over the course of the lunar new year holiday in China this year, and this past Tuesday railway officials estimated that 175,000 people passed through the Guangzhou railway station in a single day—that’s more than two and a half times the number of people that can fit into Levi’s Stadium to watch Coldplay and Beyonce!
The vast majority of these people are not riding on the bullet or maglev trains that have received so much attention. They are riding in overcrowded, poorly ventilated, second-class hard-seat carriages, many of them standing, some for 24-hours or more. Why would anyone endure this?
Ask any migrant in China—they want to be home.
Gratitude – On the morning of the first day of the lunar new year, people pay visits to their closest friends, colleagues and teachers, wishing them a happy new year. This is called bài nián 拜年. One of the purposes of bài nián is to express thanks that one has made it through the previous year, perhaps to thank the person being visited for her or his help over the previous 12 months. This is a heartfelt expression of gratitude for one’s good fortune and good friends.
On day two typically, women return to their parents’ homes (called huí niáng jia 回娘家) with their spouses dutifully in tow. This is the daughter’s way of expressing gratitude for the upbringing her parents provided and the spouse’s way of expressing gratitude for raising such a wonderful wife.
Hope and Optimism – During the lunar new year season we see bright spring couplets on either side of doorways. These balanced, auspicious phrases express hope and optimism for the coming year:
All things are as we wish and good fortune is at our door, everything is smooth sailing and our lucky star has arrived.
As people bài nián, they often greet each other with four character phrases that express hope that the coming year will bring good fortune:
万事如意
wàn shì rú yì
May all things go your way.
心想事成
xīn xiăng shì chéng
May you realize your heart’s desires.
大吉大利
dà jí dà lì
May you enjoy good fortune and great benefit.
年年有余
nián nián yŏu yú
May you enjoy abundance every year.
By far the most popular phrase—one with which many parents may be familiar from having heard it in Cantonese as Gong Hey Fat Cho —is 恭喜发财 gōng xĭ fā cái “Wishing you prosperity”, or more literally, “Congratulations, get rich!”
Home, gratitude, hope and optimism. These are not exotic concepts at all, they are universal, and we understand them in our own way in San Francisco. I don’t need them to romanticize China in order to connect with the meaning of the lunar new year.
February and March are the months many Mandarin immersion programs send out letters of placement or acceptance to new families.
As they rev up for new incoming Kinder classes, several schools have asked if they can buy my book, A Parent’s Guide to Mandarin Immersion, in bulk for those new parents.
The answer is yes, and a lot more cheaply than buying it from 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 although no one’s yet done this, at 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
These are from CARLA, the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota.
If your program is new, it’s a great place for staff and teachers to get the basics. And if your program’s been around for awhile, the new workshop on character literacy (i.e. how to get kids reading in Chinese) is really exciting.
You can see more about this highly respected program at the link below. If your district can’t afford to send teachers, this would be a good one for parents to fund raise for!
Learn about the Advanced Practices in Second Language Teaching Professional Development Certificate offered by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development in collaboration with the CARLA summer institute program: www.carla.umn.edu/institutes/certificate.html
The summer institutes have been developed and are offered with support, in part, from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Language Resource Center program. The summer institutes are co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development and College of Liberal Arts.
Mandarin Immersion Parents Council 