So, Cathie Black has a preoccupation with Mandarin...
An article published in the New York Times on January 4th highlights Cathie Black's obsession with NYC public school students learning a language, and her preferred language is Mandarin Chinese. I thought the story was interesting and highlighted the importance of children learning a second language while they are still young and retain an aptitude for language. Researchers believe that there may be a critical period, lasting roughly from infancy until puberty, during which language acquisition is effortless. According to these researchers, changes occur in the structure of the brain during puberty after which it is much harder to learn a language.
Today's world is shrinking rapidly and trade is increasingly global in scope, and the greatest reason for this shrinkage is technology. Consumers and businesses now have access to products from many different countries and order to be at least competitive, if not successful, it is necessary to communicate in the language of the country that you are attempting to do business in.
This article also brings to mind a fundamental difference between Americans and citizens of many other countries. Most people in Europe, Asia, Africa and most of South America are not only bilingual, but multilingual, while Americans traveling abroad routinely struggle with rudimentary communication in the language of their host country. People are more inviting when you are able to communicate with them in the language that they are most comfortable with.
There is a lucky group of second-graders at Harlem Success Academy 3 whose teacher realizes this and has managed to eek out some spare time from an already packed academic schedule and rigorous curriculum. The second graders of Goucher College are learning Mandarin Chinese this year! Kiss your brain Goucher College! Huge firecracker cheer for Ms. Pan for helping to shape the worlds next generation of global travelers!
Read the full NY Times article below:
Focusing on Languages (Mainly Mandarin)
By FERNANDA SANTOS
During her visit to High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx on Monday, one of the stops in five-borough tour that worked as her formal introduction to her new job, New York City’s schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, gathered around a table with students and alumni, discussing career paths, opportunities and plans.
One man told her he was studying architecture at State University of New York at Delhi. One woman said she was majoring in criminal justice at Hostos Community College. Another, who is graduating at the end of the month, described to Ms. Black how learning to play a musical instrument helped her learn new words.
Before she left the building, Ms. Black peppered the principal, Tanya John, with questions about college preparedness and the school’s curriculum. Then, she revealed what is starting to look like an obsession.
“I’m pushing for Mandarin Chinese,” she said. She was laughing, but foreign-language instruction seems to be serious business for Ms. Black — and Mandarin, the new Spanish.
Last month, before she traded a job running one of the world’s largest magazine publishing companies for a job running the nation’s largest public school system, Ms. Black was already making noise about the importance of learning Mandarin. And the noise only amplified on her first day on the job.
During a visit to Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Dec. 15, Ms. Black, who was then still chairman of Hearst Magazines, told students in a Mandarin class that maybe some day one of them would have “a good job at a magazine in China” and urged them to “keep studying” the language. On Monday, she suggested to a student at High School of Violin and Dance, “You should study Mandarin.” (Ms. John, the school’s principal, said that the school did not offer Mandarin, but that classes could be taken online.)
At her next stop on the tour, Democracy Prep High School in Harlem, Ms. Black stepped into a foreign language classroom, and an Asian language at that, though not Mandarin.
“Why Korean?” she asked the school’s founder, Seth Andrew, as the teacher, Jung Jin Lee, who is known as J. J., quizzed the students on the meaning of the letters projected on the wall.
Turns out there are many reasons, and one of them is this: A college scholarship application from a black or Latino student from Harlem is more likely to stand out if the student is fluent in Korean, Mr. Andrew told her.
In an interview on Tuesday, he said that was the explanation he gave to parents when the school started offering Korean in the fall of 2009 and made it a graduation requirement; he says it is the only high school in the country to do so.
That first year, “there was a lot pushback from the students and their families; they didn’t understand why they weren’t learning Spanish,” Mr. Andrew said. But in a school where 20 percent of the students are Latino (the other 80 percent are black), “by teaching a language that no one in our school had ever had before, everyone would be on equal footing when walking through the door,” he said.
He had more to offer Ms. Black. Korean is a phonetic language, he told her, so instead of having to memorize thousands of characters, as Mandarin would have demanded of them, the students had to learn only a few dozen letters.
“She really liked the idea,” said Mr. Andrew, who is the superintendent of Democracy Prep Public Schools, which operates two charters in three campuses in Harlem.
Whether that will prompt some new policy, directive or pilot program, it might be too early to tell; Ms. Black held her first cabinet meeting on Tuesday, and there are a lot of other issues she listed as priorities during Monday’s tour, including the budget.
Still, one of the students at Democracy Prep, Melia Douyon, 15, who is in 10th grade, told Ms. Black of the school trip she took to Korea last year with two of her classmates, and then squeezed in a little request: “If we had more funding per student,” she said, “we could send more kids to Korea.”
