Typical week's worth of homework

I know a few parents who are chomping at the bit to get this kind of information... ;)

This is what a typical week's worth of homework looks like for our program. This is only for the homework that happens in Chinese, not anything that happens in English.

As you will see, none of it is very difficult. The teacher usually accepts a wide range of sentence qualities. Earlier in the year, they were required to write sentences with at least 13 charcters or more. I wonder if that requirement was dropped since they were now required to write book reports in addition to this homework.

Weekly homework packets were distributed on Fridays. Kids could decide if they wanted to get a jumpstart over the weekend, but official due dates were Tues through Friday for select pages. I've organized this by what was expected to be done, Monday through Friday.

I have also included the teacher's markings on my child's actual homework so you can see how the teacher corrected homework from Tues through Friday and returned those corrections directly to the student. This meant they were getting immediate feedback on their homework each day, so the assignments were not submitted into a void, but treated as very active parts of the current learning.

Each week introduced a set of characters and expressions based on narrative texts they were reading together in class. Here is what the kids received and worked on writing a few sentences to show comprehension:

Monday through Friday - there was always a reading assignment to 1) read the textbook and 2) read something of your own choice. The parents were required to provide a signature to indicate that they had held their kids accountable to this reading time.


Monday:

Character practice to match pinyin; write sentences for phrases of the week; provide an answer to an open-ended question based on the story being read in class.

Story problems in Chinese; calculation skills practice.

Tuesday:

More character practice matched with pinyin; fill-in-the-blank to show comprehension.

More math word problems and calculation skills reinforcement.

Continued in the next post...

From Memorization to Engagement and Association - Stroke Order

Now that I've got you "hooked" wondering what I mean by memorization being the wrong way to go...

It isn't to say that your brain won't "memorize" something - eventually. But it's more about how you go about doing it. And when it comes to your kid... well, rote memorization really is boring.

What you need to do is think about it as imprinting on the brain. How do you imprint successfully? Engagement and making associations are the best approaches. You might say, well, a language immersion program is supposed to be a high quality type of engagement. That is true. It's better than "learning in translation" wherein the teacher speaks English (or the native tongue of the students in class) and tells you "this" is what x means, or "this" is what y means...

But the critical piece of that immersion experience is engaging with a native speaker to find and create meaning in that moment of engagement. You can do more at home to increase the amount of time you are spending imprinting. In the old days, people listened to tapes. These days, you can do Child Road on the iPad.

So this is for listening/speaking engagement. I would also argue that reading/writing engagement requires copying characters. But some might object to this being rote. I disagree. Writing characters is a foundational engagement experience with the Chinese language.

Whether you look at it from a cultural perspective - the role of calligraphy - or from a brain imprinting perspective, this engagement experience is what makes learning and knowing the Chinese language at its core, in the same way that English speakers/writers might consider the experience of the typewriter or the QWERTY keyboard, or even the level of revere Spelling Bees have despite SpellCheck programs.

I look at my child's K-2 period and I am grateful to those few voices - Chinese mommies - who helped me feel all right in pushing my child to write every day and follow the correct stroke order. After all, this is what I grew up with. But like many parents, I did wonder if this was cruel torture. How tough should I be with something like stroke order? Our K teacher advised that it was very important, but not important to get the strokes very pretty. Plus, it was okay to mess up quite a bit. Developmentally, the hand-eye coordination and fine motor movements were still developing, so don't push too hard. But by First Grade, those motor skills are developing quite well and very quickly. So you want to capture that developmental stage and imprint the practice of writing (copying characters) and doing the correct stroke order.

This is another testament to the value of the Jinan University ZW Books. Daily character practice is built into each daily assignment. No need for teachers or parents to negotiate what, how much, and when to do this. A bunch of highly insightful professional linguists have already figured it out for us.

At First Grade, I had to spend a week overcoming the whining and melodramatic tears, but once that week was over, all has been good since. Through the course of 2nd grade up to now at the finish of 3rd, I can witness the ease and speed with which my child writes characters by hand. This ease and speed allows her to tolerate the difficulty of Chinese literacy more easily. It also allows her to "see" new characters more quickly because she has learned to deconstruct them. This is the genius of following the correct stroke order. Your brain eventually catches on to what is happening. But you cannot figure it out by passive engagement.

Looking at flash cards trying to memorize characters now seems so futile, in retrospect. During the K-1 years, I made a lot of flash cards, but we hardly used them. When I was a kid, we never made flash cards. I get that it's a common practice. But if you have limited time, I would suggest character writing practice is a much better use of your time.

Next up, I'll post about making associations.

Memorizing Chinese Characters is NOT the way to learn Chinese successfully

I kid you not - this is a huge myth that pervades learning Chinese. But I was glad to learn from a language teacher recently that I am not the only one who objects to this approach.

The thing is, I used to think this way. As an imperfect bilingual growing up in America, I really did think that the problem was that the Chinese language required us to memorize every single goddamn character - no wonder we were always struggling! And we didn't grow up with it all around us, so we couldn't compare ourselves to our brilliant parents. It just wasn't fair. Plus, we could make fun of their English. Yes, looking back, we were cruel. America had made us hard.

Now, of course, I have a different view. I realize how adolescent my own perspective had been. And wholly unrealistic, on top of that. First of all, I was a kid. The child's developmental stages, as any serious parent or developmental professional can attest to, is a far different reality than the adult brain. My parents, like many immigrants, did not know what it was like to learn both English and Chinese simultaneously as children. They did not start learning English until they got into high school. This is a very different developmental stage than ages 5-10, or K-5. (As many parents also know, 6th-8th grade is also another big developmental leap, as well as the changes that go on still at high school...)

So my parents, like many parents, as well as many professional native speaking Chinese teachers - they have struggled to understand what happens at these early ages of learning Mandarin while being surrounded by an English-speaking environment. I think it has been hard for them to speak against this "memorization" approach because they genuinely think that this is the approach that must be comprehensible to the English-speaking brain.

And my generation fully supported that view because we were made to do a lot of things we didn't understand as children, in order to learn this language. I went through most of my adult life up to having a child with the notion, "Yeah, learning Chinese is really hard; you have to memorize everything cuz there is no alphabet!" And oh, we were worked hard as slaves to do it, too! Yeah, right. Not so fast.

Now that I am a parent, and I've taken my child through these early K-3 stages, I can definitively say that "memorizing characters" as most people think of it, is not the way to go. I now see the illusions and even delusions - all mythologies that take people's focus away from the best practices, away from the things that really are different between the languages and could be better bridged. So in the coming months, I hope to illuminate why memorizing is not the way to go. Engagement is the way to go. And engagement in the right things. You might say, "Well, how is that different?"

My response, "Let's hope you have a giant light bulb moment after you read all that needs to be understood." It needs a paradigm shift in your thinking. Not a terribly big one. Not like Copernicus figuring out the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around, level of shift. But a significant one that will change your view on what memorizing characters adds up to being.

I get that this is hard. Like I said, I didn't understand this until becoming a parent. Now I see how faulty my own thinking had been, as well as even my parents or other Chinese teachers, and certainly the thinking of parents who don't know Chinese but are participating in this fast-growing experiment of Mandarin Immersion programs in America. I also think that Chinese teachers, despite their perhaps long tenures of teaching, it is hard for them to fully appreciate how powerful the faulty paradigms can be because they didn't grow up in English-dominant societies.

It is nobody's fault. These are the reasons that distinct languages and cultures exist in the first place. But to perpetuate the myths with hubris... that, I think, is distinctly American and needs to be left behind.

Learning Chinese is Hard - but it's not worth sacrificing your child's happiness

Yup, that's the bottom line. There is no escaping the need to apply yourself and work hard. I've heard so many parents try tricks and think there is some elusive, undiscovered "magic" method or pill they can get their hands on, that much time and energy is wasted missing the obvious.

Is the hard work worth it? I think so. I am so impressed with the ones who do it - especially the ones who don't come from a background that would make them do it otherwise. An entire world of wonder awaits you.

But you cannot escape the blood, sweat and tears. I know, your teacher didn't tell you. She didn't want to scare you. And you've got so many of your peers jumping on the Mandarin bandwagon that you think you must be missing out if you don't do it.

Learning to become literate in the Chinese language is even hard for native speakers of Chinese. I've noticed that some non-Chinese "American" parents seem to think that this only applies to native speakers who are uneducated or outright dumb and less capable than their very own brilliant little geniuses. Hmmm. Yah. Okay. Your kid is that much of a genius. Thumbs up. Keep at it... But don't say no one ever told you...

Think long and hard. If you do this, you will give your child a precious gift. If you don't commit, however, then you will have wasted his/her time when they could have been happier doing something else.

Teach your child the hard work early on. You will see how that becomes a life-long value that will carry him/her in so many other ways, including giving him/her the true "magical" insight into this amazing language.

Don't do it early enough - then if your kid doesn't develop a natural love for this, you will be sacrificing his/her happiness for something that you have to wonder if you really wanted in the first place.

A trend is still just a trend. Learning bad Mandarin is the equivalent of learning far less than a street ruffian. If all the other stuff is not in place - all the things that mean a "good" to "excellent" education in the language your child does, in fact, fully understand, then you are not giving your child a "good" education.

Why MI programs might fail native speaker Chinese kids and high-performing bilinguals

I understand that most of what I've written on this blog is not very concrete, but more focused on describing attitudes and points of view. It is hard to "see" why someone like me would have so many objections to all the things going wrong in MI programs without seeing anything concrete.

I came across old summer homework that was post-1st grade for us. It is hard to look forward in these programs because parents like me, we never had MI as an opportunity or resource. With so many parents like me saying that Saturday Chinese School was terrible and thinking that full-time MI must be better, then it is hard to break down all the mythologies that seem to have been built up around Mandarin Immersion programs.

But I will assert something that one ABC mom had said to me awhile ago - "I expect my daughter to do at least as much as I did, and hope that she will be able to do more."

Example of why it was NOT as much as we did as kids in Saturday School:

Vocabulary box at the top has these characters/vocabularies listed inside:

回家， 多少，走路，都是， 再见， 笑话，每天，兔子，洗手，果汁，休息，汽车，飞机

Below are fill-in-the-blank exercises wherein one of the characters is missing and the child is supposed to write in the one that matches:

回——， 多——， ——路，——是，——见，——话，——天，——子，——手，果——，——息，——车，飞——

My child was assigned not one but several of these worksheets as summer review. For the finish of First Grade, going into Second Grade. Drawing lines to match 2 characters or circling them in a Word Search type format were also included.

Suffice to say, thankfully I have skills enough to have already pushed my child to do far more than this in the prior year. We were already doing this much and more from our K year and beyond, thanks to a teacher with higher expectations and the Jinshan University textbooks. (And to be completely fair to the teachers of that year, they were brand new to the school. This material was inherited from the prior teacher who had been a wonderful instructor in the way she held herself, but clearly had very low literacy expectations for these kids. I don't doubt it was derived from the student demographics and not from this teacher's own abilities, were she to be teaching in a heritage school.)

But how were the English-only (or non-Chinese-language-proficient) parents supposed to judge this material?

Any native speaker of Chinese should be looking at this in horror. Given the number of hours that your child is supposedly working hard during the school year, 9 months out of the year, 5 days per week, and a majority percentage of a 6 to 7-hour day... I expected my child to have accomplished far more than this level of mastery. Sure, there were more characters/vocabularies than what I've written above. But not by much. Even if you double or triple the numbers, here, you are not looking at a very high level of cognitive mastery to reflect the age of 6 years old. You aren't even reflecting the finish of Kindergarten for kids who are living in China or Taiwan or who are going to a well-functioning Chinese School on the weekends.

For the English-only crowd: all I can say is, without fully translating every word or what it represents in the entire canon of what you are presented with in these packets, it all sums up as "See Spot Run" vocabulary and expression. Moreover, without the requirement that you at least listen to CDs and/or DVDs or watch YouTube videos to get your child to sing songs in Chinese, then where is the whole language experience for your kid? And while teachers might say, this is only a bare minimum of writing and reading review, the total message becomes, "This is the total sum of what your child is expected to have mastered at this age."

I understand that both parents and teachers have witnessed some English-only kids (or those coming from a language that is not Chinese) who seem to be "doing better" and seem to be able to speak more. These kids are likely engaged with a tutor during the out-of-school times. But that engagement that is so focused on speaking/listening will not carry these kids into middle and high school, or even beyond with functional proficiency. Why? How do I know this? It all comes from the high rates of bilinguals in this country who did not get academic training in their parents' native language. Low levels of heritage language training can be found in lots of ethnic communities. Plenty of Chinese kids grew up with this level of language and even more so in the home, but cannot speak like an adult or necessarily read even to that low elementary level.

Without the literacy to match all that burgeoning skill in speaking and listening, then very little of it will stick. Moreover, without engaging in literature that keeps pace with the grade level academics, then your kid will only master language that is about classroom management ("sit up" "stand over there" "line up," "raise your hand") and whatever activities your tutor reinforces. If you are not making sure that your child gets consistent, systematic training that continuously goes forward, while simultaneously circling back to review and reinforce, then there is no way your poor child can hang on to so many words and ideas coming at him and constructed in a syntax that is so completely different from the language he knows. Without the experience of "whole language" through good literature, then unless you can afford paying a bunch of highly eloquent educated Mandarin speaking adults to be around your kid much of the time, then you are seriously out of luck with this weak listening/speaking osmosis approach.

Going back to this homework - many of us parents then asked, if this is where things are for First Grade, do things get exponentially harder during 2nd grade so that the kids can end up somewhere reasonable for the amount of time that is being invested? As it turned out, the answer was "No." Then, looking at 3rd grade homework, truly, not much more was being accomplished. The rate of both volume increase and difficulty was not even at a high linear slope. Very gentle, barely sloping increase. (For the character counters out there, this wasn't just about the number of characters, but also the quality of the vocabularies and expressions.)

Part of sticking around is about making the calculation of just how bad will it be. Can I supplement at home? Is it still worth it to have Chinese every day? Is it still better than Saturday Chinese School? Can I tough it out at home and teach Chinese myself? Do I have the resources to go elsewhere? There are no easy answers to these questions for both the native speaking Chinese and the higher-performing bilinguals.

As I pressed some of the teachers to provide answers to those of us who knew that this was bad, we got a variety of answers. The teachers who were from ABC backgrounds and had achieved their high levels of Chinese through studies in America (Chinese heritage schools and college, graduate school), they also knew that this was less than what we had gotten at Chinese school as kids. But they were convinced by their training that this was all that a majority English-only group of kids could do, especially with the paucity of resources they were given. I could not argue with that perspective.

Then there were the native speaker Chinese teachers. Here is where a combination of life experience and professional teaching experience may fail everyone. Teachers who have little background in understanding what ABC's have been able to do in America, then they might couple their lack of understanding with what they witness as the high rates of ABC's with very poor Chinese language skills, that they are convinced all of it is a struggle, anyway. So I can see how difficult it would be to convince them of "more" being better. Moreover, none of these teachers want to be pegged as the main culprits for failure.

I don't blame them. They are stuck in a complicated situation. There has been far too much blame assigned to teachers and teachers alone (not ever administrators or policy makers who are, in all cases, making 2 and 3 times the money that classroom teachers are making) for student failure. Keep the standards low, then it will be easier to get more kids over this bar. Raise the standards higher... well, that is, in fact, a crazy proposition when faced with so many kids who simply don't know Mandarin Chinese at all.

All of these teachers, however, are vulnerable to caving to parent pressure. Whether ethnically Chinese or non-Chinese American, I hear from Mandarin teachers everywhere that many parents simply complain that learning Chinese is too much work. They don't like the homework; it's too hard to get their kids to sit through it; they have their own ideas about how their genius kids will get to high levels of mastery (which seem not to include homework or any sort of focus or dedication). Parent complaints, then, end up being the single largest reason that decent and even good Chinese language teachers become ineffective teachers in the eyes of native Chinese parents and the higher-performing Chinese-American parents.

Laughing your way to the 3B's: Fun and Funny Stories to keep your kid engaged

Many of us ABC's grew up with content that was rather "stuffy." We didn't have access to books and stories that were more modern. Sun Wu Kong, or the Monkey King stories were the most fun we could get. And he was a riot, no doubt.

But the classical canon for Chinese literature then feeds the problem of putting all things Chinese into a box. I think this explains why you might hear a few too many Chinese Americans who claim they "hate" things that are Chinese or can only shudder and shake their heads when they think about Saturday Chinese School. I have even heard from native Chinese who come to America as teens or adults, that they have met (with horror) Chinese Americans or ABC's who just outright don't want anything to do with anything Chinese or anybody who is Chinese. Their memories of how they grew up were that bad. Very sad.

Taking it out of a box is what will get you to the 3B's. That experience can go in many different ways - out of the classroom, out of the family, out of the usual touristic adventures, out of the textbooks, out of the flash cards... just out. Anything that expresses spontaneity or a much more organic interaction, rather than one that is contrived, can help you. And while I am a fan of the classical Chinese canon, I can also see why it can be limited, especially if that is all that you learn about what it means to be Chinese. And certainly, many have taken things too far in throwing it all away. That is not the solution either. People need to find a healthy dynamic in balancing the old with the new.

Humor is the topic of this post. I mentioned the readers Learning Chinese Through Stories as a great help in learning to drop Pinyin. These stories are also really funny. But it's probably for about 3rd grade when your kid has the developmental maturity to understand the more subtle irony that is communicated.

Prior to that, the Diary of a Kid readers are great. The first two books chronicle 小屁 Xiao Pi's adventures in kindergarten. They capture the innocence and naivete of a child's earnest but mischief-making perspective on the world that my kid found very easy to relate to and enjoy. It made bedtime reading fun and not a chore. 小屁 is silly just in the way that 5, 6 and 7 year olds are silly. Sometimes, his reasons for why he does things is exactly how your child would think, but then we find out how that child-like reasoning creates more of a mess than anyone imagined.

Plus, all the pinyin helped me as a parent with imperfect Chinese reading skills. And now, my child can largely read it on her own with all the pinyin support. Along the way, your child's vocabulary will increase with less effort through the stories of these situations that s/he will be able to relate to directly, since they all have to do with being at school or at home. This series continues up through the elementary grades. Nanhai Books only have the first 2 in the series. We have bought them to follow 小屁 through 6th grade from DangDang.com.

Another similar series is to follow a child named 小朵朵 Xiao Duo Duo, and another named 小豆豆Xiao Dou Dou. These stories are similarly cute and hilarious, and you and your child can follow these kids while they go through the elementary years.

As I've mentioned again and again, content matters. The brain doesn't want to go through boring drills and droning memorization work. If that is your child's only experience of a language, then it does not mirror what s/he experiences with the English language. Not even close. The "immersion" method is supposed to mimic what one experiences with one's native language. Full engagement. But just like kids around the world who fully enjoy the content from Sesame Street in their own language and with their own cultural content, then your kids need appropriate content engagement in the Mandarin Chinese language. And sure, not all the content is going to match the American and Western culture with which your child is familiar, but modern Chinese life is really not that far off from what your kid experiences. S/he will see that through these stories.

The wrong focus: High school/college levels, grades and requirements

This may sound like I am contradicting my previous advice. On the one hand, I am telling you to look at high school and college as a way to understand levels for language achievement. On the other hand, I am going to say in this post that it's bogus.

Both statements are true. First, looking at these existing standards and the way they play out at high schools and colleges in America is a way to understand what you think you might be doing in the K-8 years. If your expectation is that your kid should repeat what they accomplished during K-8 Mandarin studies while attending Mandarin Levels 1, 2, 3 and AP during High School and/or College years, then you might want to wonder about the quality of your Immersion program. Or maybe your kid should be in a Foreign Language Model program, instead.

The content for the High School and College levels are all aligned with ACTFL. This is part of the problem.

Full-time immersion programs, on the other hand, are supposed to have their content aligned with the full slate of content that makes up the Total Education Curriculum - i.e., all subjects across the board.

Most language experts already know that the Foreign Language model does not necessarily produce high results. Immersion, meanwhile, can produce the 3B's, if done correctly.

After chatting with a high school Mandarin teacher recently, it sounds like some of the problem lies with kids and parents just wanting to fulfill requirements. This must then explain what I found odd about allowing students to pass with a 'D' throughout Levels 1, 2 and 3, but requiring a grade of 'A' or 'B' in Level 3 in order to get into AP Chinese. AP Chinese is not a requirement for graduating from high school, nor is it a requirement for entering college.

But we all know that students who have passed Levels 1, 2 and 3 do not necessarily have functional proficiency in the language. Here is where high school and college levels and requirements break down and do not serve us in reaching the 3B's.

With a Grade of 'D' or higher... but you need 'A' or 'B' to get to AP

This is a continuation of the earlier post on looking at high schools and beyond in order to understand leveling in language education in America.

I saw that a high school had posted that in order to advance from level One to Two, and then from Two to Three, then a prerequisite was stated.

I would like to ask - is the idea of a "prerequisite" a new idea in American education? Sometimes, when people are talking about Mandarin Immersion programs, it does, in fact, sound like they have never heard of prerequisites or that their children will never have to face such a thing.

Like I've said, from the reasonable to the bizarre.

The bar for going from one level to the next is low, indeed. But then what happens? This same high school then states that in order to enter their AP Chinese class, the prerequisite was to have passed Level 3 with a grade of 'A' or 'B', or to take a test. Why not keep the bar low? Maybe kids and their parents need to see what failure through a Nationally applied standard like the AP looks like before they might reflect more honestly about the utility of their kid passing with a 'D' in prior years in order to advance.

I would hope that the student is getting some more enlightened guidance at the school in order to guide this student toward something more worthwhile to do than passing their language courses with no more than a 'D.' Maybe try Spanish instead of Mandarin? Why not? Maybe that kid would then get a 'C' instead.

I think this illustrates the larger point. What's the bridge? What's the path to getting there? At that point, who is getting eliminated from the running and who is able to go forward?

Educators and parents need to take an honest look at how kids get a finishing grade of 'A' or 'B' for Level 3 Mandarin. What does it require? And of course, not the entitlement backlash, but what do kids actually need to be able to do at that level.

Are these kids getting prepared in the earlier years to do this? If not, then what needs to happen?

Like I've said, lowering the standards doesn't help anyone. Eventually, these kids will have to meet up with the outside world. Being so entirely unprepared to do so with any moderate chances of success is cruel, it is irresponsible of the grown ups. This is just tantamount to setting them up for failure. You can't blame the kids. You have to blame all the grown ups - all the previous teachers, administrators and parents who hid the truth from their children.

Mandarin Equals "Academic Excellence" but Street Rogues in China Speak Mandarin, too - Mythbusting and an Immigration History Lesson

It is hard for Chinese teachers to imagine the various mental models - as I've said, from the reasonable to the bizarre - that go on in the heads of parents who have signed up for Mandarin Immersion programs. I, myself, being fully American, have had a hard time believing some of the truly bizarre things I've encountered. Hence this blog. It's time to call out the crazy. Why?

Because once you get rid of people's really outlandish notions that get in the way of their children's future success and present-day potential, then the very positive hard work can begin. There are a lot of challenges just in walking this path when it is defined and understood as its own course of action. But many parents have thrown in additional obstacles for their kids, obstacles that are entirely of their own making.

Chinese teachers, meanwhile, usually think that the misunderstanding is a more generalized difficulty of the differences between Chinese and American culture. While that may be true in some and even many instances. This gap cannot be entirely understood this way... because people really do say the craziest things.

Mandarin = Academic or Academic Excellence or "good school"

This notion runs the gamut of assumptions from parents believing that anyone who is signing up for the program must be the type to care about school and academics, thereby leading to their own kids to be amongst other families who care about school and academics at a basic level. "Caring" in this instance then translates to having good study habits and behavioral norms that make the classroom environment productive and advanced, i.e., the kids are all naturally smart and they can all move at a faster pace than a group of "average" kids. Here is a list of some of those myths:

• Signing up for Mandarin Immersion eliminates the troubled kids, the ones with behavioral problems.
• Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means getting something "elite"- special, rare and expensive.
• Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means your kid will be around Chinese kids who are all smart, well-behaved in a quiet way, and everybody tests well.
• Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means that your presumed gifted kid will get a challenge because he would otherwise be bored in a "regular" classroom. (And you don't have to worry about your kid doing well because the program automatically means "academic" and somebody told you your kid is gifted so he'll thrive no matter what.)
• Signing up for Mandarin Immersion means that your kid will automatically get a "good" or even "excellent" education.

And then there are the parents who have taken all this another step further. I've heard some parents say that they signed up for Mandarin Immersion so that they would not be with "slow" immigrant Chinese kids who don't know English, as well as some who have said they refuse to allow their children to be with Cantonese kids all together.

What's the reasoning? Some people say that they don't want their kids to be in a "slow" class. Others don't want their own kids to "feel bad" of "feel behind" when their kids are learning Mandarin. So they don't want their kids learning alongside "too many" or even any Chinese kids who would outdo and out-shine their own kids. They justify this from that social coddling perspective, that the American way of protecting (and sheltering) your child's emotional development is a good thing. The part about not being around Cantonese kids can come from Cantonese parents, themselves, who are so desperate for their kids not to get stuck in what they perceive as a Cantonese linguistic ghetto that they overly fetishize Mandarin.

To all this, I want to scream at these people -

"You are an idiot!! Do you realize that because there are so many of YOUR KIND, then MY kid is in a slow class because we are stuck with so many kids like yours who don't understand enough Mandarin to go at even a NORMAL pace of instruction???!!!"

Instead, I just shake my head and walk away in frustration and anger. Even my well-meaning friends who are not in MI programs for their own kids, to whom I can readily complain, they just shake their heads with that look of "Don't you know how lucky you are to be in one of those programs?"

Everyone has assumed that anything labeled "Mandarin" is intrinsically superior. Not only does this baffle me, but when I try to explain this to teachers, they think it's impossible. All I can say is, this is what people say in the English language. I am completely sure that I understood what was said. But the teachers are often not privy to these views because of the immersion model - that you don't speak to the teacher in English, or that you limit your interactions with the teacher in English so as to preserve the immersion bubble.

In many ways it has been true that the Mandarin-speaking Chinese who have ended up in the United States over the last 40 years have been from a better educated class of people. There are material reasons for this. They lie in the biased history of America's immigration laws. Just look up things like the Chinese Exclusion Acts and then the later Family Reunification Act. The main ways through which Mandarin-speaking Chinese have been able to come to America have been through scholarship (as sponsored students) or through sponsored work visas for highly skilled labor. This is part of why so many Americans have perceived the Chinese from Mandarin-speaking backgrounds as being more "academic."

But the difference in populations between Cantonese and Mandarin speaking Chinese in America comes from the fact that Mandarin-speaking people did not have as wide access to immigrate as did the Cantonese. This is historical. Then, when the 1965 Family Reunification Act was passed, this increased the ability of Mandarin-speaking people to bring their families over, which increased those numbers. But the same has been true for Cantonese. Since so many Cantonese already had such a strong foothold in America, then their numbers could grow even more quickly.

And to be exact, there are long term historical reasons within China for all these things, as well. Mandarin was the language of the court, the language of the elite, of the imperial bureaucracy. So sure, Mandarin or HanYu in China has also been the language of "the educated" and "the elite" for a long time, too.

I think there are two forces that are changing this dominance of spoken Cantonese in America.

1. One is the sheer numbers of work visa sponsorships that technology companies are undertaking. These companies require a kind of workforce that largely rests within the Mandarin-speaking groups in Mainland and Taiwan. Moreover, recruiting these Mandarin-speaking individuals does not mean one thing. They might have learned Mandarin through school, but at home they come from Shanghainese, GuanXi, Hubei, Hakka, Fujian, Shandong, and other backgrounds. You can hear the increase through the accents and dialects that are showing up on the streets of America. 
2. The second force is the success of the Communist education efforts. More and more Cantonese, as well as Southerners across the board, are simply becoming increasingly proficient in Mandarin while growing up in China.

But it is still just a language, just a vehicle for whatever gets communicated. As I realized on my first trip to Beijing, when China was much poorer than today and most people were still wearing Mao uniforms, every street rogue (流氓) can speak Mandarin. This was an awakening for me, too. Because my experience with Mandarin had also been in a bubble with my own family and all their friends. This was a bubble of "the educated," or at least, better educated than a street ruffian. But it could be said that the Communists "democratized" Mandarin by making it the official language of the country beyond "the center," and educating the average person and especially those who have been chronically under-educated and disadvantaged in China. This has broken down Mandarin's elite status in China. Regional dialects are increasingly giving way to Mandarin/HanYu. All the natural things that come of this dynamic are occurring, including a breaking up (or breaking down, depending on your point of view) of former values and social relationships.

What matters, then? What you say still matters. The content of what you say, what you write, what you think, what you do. No one's thoughts and actions are automatically imbued with "excellence." That is still up to the individual and the court of public opinion to figure out.

Accents while speaking Chinese...

Yet another set of red herring issues that drove me crazy. There were a few Chinese American mommies in our first MI program who would go on and on and on about accents. These parents had some Taiwanese background in them. But I suspect their actual skills in Mandarin were poor. Poor enough to produce a kind of prejudice that was just plain stupid.

They would judge teachers by their accent. Yup. You heard me. They judged teachers positively or negatively based on the accent with which the teachers spoke Mandarin. If it was what they termed a "Taiwanese" accent, then the teacher was deemed to be "good." On the other hand, if a Cantonese accent was discerned, then the teacher was judged negatively.

They spread their prejudice throughout the English-Only parent community. It was so stupid that I didn't even know how to address it at times. Why bother? What incredible idiocy.

I've also heard Cantonese parents speak to this, in their desperation to "get Mandarin" for their kids. There is some kind of weird and desperate longing for "pure Mandarin" that baffles me. Unless you come from a family of linguists or bigots, then it's not a feature of functional proficiency.

My parents spoke English with an accent for their entire lives. That didn't stop them from achieving being comprehensible at a high level and therefore leading rich and productive lives while operating in this "foreign" language. But that is the difference and distance of going from a native Chinese speaker to being proficient in the English language.

Now, what we are talking about with Chinese teachers is the difference between one dialect and another. But all these dialects - and especially true for the main dialects - they are all part of the Chinese language. Thought and expression are generally constructed on a similar basis, so the distance between Cantonese and Mandarin, for example, is nowhere near the distance between Cantonese and English.

An accent? About as significant as someone speaking with a British accent v. an American one. Most people who are native English speakers don't negatively judge intelligence and competence based on this difference in accent. We have friends who are French, Italian, Argentine... their accents while speaking English do not seem to leave them open for automatic negative judgment around their competence. Just their own behavior or the quality of the ideas reflected by the actual words that come out of their mouths.

For those who are perpetuating this issue for Chinese people, just know that it is a reflection of their own ignorance. It is not a real or material difference.

Does it influence what people think about each other and whether or not they want to do business or have a social relationship? Sure. Just like Southern Americans relate to each other because of their accents and their food cultures, or that surfer culture from SoCal to Hawaii might feel there is a connection, or that people who like to watch soccer might like hanging out together, then sure, when people identify things like being from Taiwan v. Mainland, or Shandong v. GuanXi or Suzhou v. Hubei, whatever. The extent to which this matters for doing business is also up to the other various resources of the people in play.

But for education happening at such a basic level? And we are still talking about elementary school, here... Wow. Get a grip. You've got a long, long way to go just to end up educated, let alone proficient in a "foreign" language, let alone speaking accent-free. You might want to focus more attention on accumulating things like vocabulary and knowledge... or critical thinking skills... just to name a few.

Learning Disabilities getting masked in Early Language Immersion programs

Big issue. Big set of questions to ask. The first and foremost difficulty is the resource-poor environment. Public school systems have enough challenges already in meeting the needs of Special Education students, and to do so all in English.

The craze over language immersion has created a new set of challenges - how can you identify and meet the needs of a kid who may have special education needs while s/he is in an early language immersion program (starting from K or 1st grade) when it would be crazy difficult to figure out what was happening when this kid has emerging skills in both English and a language that the family does not know?

While some experts have termed this stage "emerging bilingualism," I am skeptical that this is even appropriate. The bigger issue is whether or not this kid got any support and intervention during the pre-K years. This issue should get lumped into the "school readiness" or "pre-school for all" camp, not in the language immersion camp.

Unfortunately, the "equity and access" principle is being leveraged, here. That is to say, parents who are so desperate for what they see as a leg-up for their kids in being able to "have access" to learning Mandarin Chinese, they have lost sight of the bigger picture. And so have many professional educators. Why would you want to hinder a child's best chances at success by dumping him/her into a language immersion program when s/he might be better served in a special needs classroom/school wherein s/he could get the early intervention and support that can make or break their later transition into the Mainstream? Or even make or break their greater abilities to attain higher levels of skills than if they never got this help? Getting Mandarin as a Foreign Language, however, is a different thing. Sometimes called the FLES model (Foreign Language in Elementary School), this approach makes a lot more sense for special needs kids.

Even more bizarre, I've heard some parents express their resentment at not being able to get FLES Mandarin, so they take it out on the immersion program, trying to insist that the goals of the immersion program should be at the same level as a FLES program, since the FLES program doesn't exist. This is not reasonable.

I am a big believer in the Nurture side of the Nature/Nurture debate. I have mommy friends who have gone down the path of getting their kids that early intervention. They have attested to how much it made all the difference. Transformative. Confidence-feeding, not draining. But there remains a lot of fear of stigma in parents' minds. And that is just for getting a general education, in the English language, in the language that is known to everyone involved. Compound all this with language immersion, let alone a language like Mandarin Chinese which is so vastly different than English as compared to languages like Spanish or French or German... Sheesh. Talk about asking for trouble.

Then there are the native Chinese who show up. And they are confused by this entire matter. What I've seen is that most don't even know to ask the question. But one of the key areas to look at is whether or not your District/School has the resources to support these special needs kids. If the answer is "No," then you have to realize that no one gets chased out in public education. What happens is that everyone hobbles along, unless your parent community has the ability and the will to close the gap. There are schools who are able to leverage their parent and teacher social capital to make things happen. But there are schools that cannot.

But you have to realize that it takes moving mountains to meet the needs of special needs kids inside a Chinese/English Dual Immersion program. Identifying these kids would be a huge hurdle. Then figuring out what special support they needed would be another.

We left the public MI program we had started because we saw that this gap was too huge and the parent/teacher social capital was not ever going to be able to meet the challenges in order to make up the shortfall of the District's inability to address this.

Another layer of the problem are the parents, themselves. It is one thing to identify these kids and their needs, but if there are parents who are using the weakness of the system to hide, then the program is in even more trouble. We saw plenty of parents in denial about their kids needing special attention. It was draining for the teachers who were already overly taxed by needing to get a huge number of English-Only kids on board to basic Mandarin.

The end result? Not only were the kids not learning anything beyond basic "baby" Mandarin, but they simply weren't accomplishing much else in any other school subject. (The English-Only parents would further cover up this fact by supplementing at home for Reading and Math in English so that the kids would test well. But that was all there was to it. Sounds simple, right? Send kid to free MI program, get "baby" tourist Mandarin skills, come home and drill on reading in English and Math, test okay for a District that has low standards anyway, tell everyone you're at a "good school." Some parents could add to the list their hard work in advocating for a low-standards program that would continue up the line through high school. Many parents don't realize that this is what is being advocated for. But that is what is happening. It's up to the high school teachers to stop this trend that is alighting like an epidemic trying to infect the whole system.)

The thing is - the poor kids. For the ones who are "stuck" doing early immersion but need special ed help, they are not to blame. They did not choose to be in the program. They don't know what is happening.

I've also heard some English-Only parents try to compare themselves to Chinese-proficient kids who would need special education support. Well, that is entirely different. And by the way, most of the bilingual immersion programs in the entire country have their roots in supporting these Chinese-proficient kids in the first place. The kids are coming from Chinese-proficient backgrounds. The point of these programs was to have teachers who are proficient in both English and Chinese, and also trained to support special needs, thereby creating a manageable pathway for these special needs kids who already understand the Chinese language and need further development of their language skills in both Chinese and English as a way to further their cognitive development. The end goal was so that they would become more educated and proficient in the English language. But that they needed the Chinese instruction in place as a bridge to become "more educated" (since the information/knowledge could be carried by the vehicle that is the Chinese language which they already understood) and proficient in the English language, so that "The System" could churn out competent citizens (who are proficient in English which is the language of public life in the USA).

But somehow, all this has gotten warped. Many kids are losing out. But especially those who could benefit from the early interventions that they would get in a normal, regular program that could identify their special needs.

But working with a kid who walks in the door with special needs and does not have any Chinese skills... this is ignoring the true needs of the kid. I think it is outright cruel. Most importantly, this kid should have gotten better support in the pre-K years. A MI program isn't going to fix what this kid needs. Parents, however, in their hysteria over what they think "getting" Mandarin is all about... it all just feeds the denial.