Stupid parents = stupid kids
From “South Texas Chisme“:
While the rest of her fifth-grade class was taking Spanish classes mandated by the Grapevine-Colleyville school district curriculum, Ashleigh Allison sat in the Timberline Elementary School library writing a report about France.
Ashleigh and her mother, Leigh Allison, say teaching elementary school Spanish only makes life easier for Hispanic immigrants in the community who do not learn or speak English. And Ashleigh shouldn’t be forced to conform, they say.
“She wants to be that one voice that forces them to learn English,” Allison said. “We’re not going to turn America into a bilingual country to accommodate you.”
I’m all in favor of non-conformity, but come on… this is moronic. Even the “English First” idiots don’t go this far. STC picked up their post from a story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
“…we’re all for teaching foreign languages,” said K.C. McAlpin, executive director of Virginia-based ProEnglish, which works to preserve English as the common language of the U.S.
Texas’ curriculum requires a school district to offer, “to the extent possible, languages other than English” for elementary- and middle school-age children.
Most districts offer some level of language instruction, said Monica Martinez, curriculum director with the Texas Education Agency. And for most, Spanish is the language of choice. It’s easier to learn and speak than many other languages, and school districts can hire more experienced Spanish teachers than teachers of other languages.
“But it could be French. It could be American Sign Language,” Martinez said. “It’s left to local district discretion to determine what they offer.”
Texas, having a Spanish-speaking minority as long as it’s been a part of the United States, still has German, French and even Sorbia-speaking communities. Not to mention Vietnamese, Arabic, Comanche and a host of others.
English is still the first language of 82 percent of the United States (and that’s an all-time historic high). Spanish is the second most common language (spoken by about nine percent of the United States), followed by French, German, Italian, Chinese and Navajo.
German at one time was spoken by about 15 or 20 percent of the United States.
The United States is still the sixth or seventh largest Spanish-speaking nation (depending on who is counting, and how they count Spanish-speakers), the kid isn’t going to learn a whole lot of Spanish.
…Grapevine-Colleyville elementary students must take Spanish two days a week in nine-week rotations with art classes.
I can’t say two days a week is going to make a kid fluent, and it sure isn’t going to make her forget her English. Unless the kid is writing her report in French, I can’t see how her “independent study” fits the language requirement.
mexfiles.net 
Hey I linked to you (as I do every few weeks or so): http://plavwriter.blogspot.com/2008/02/bilingual-in-america.html.
Wish I was in a position to help you out with your fund drive, but until I’m earning dollars again, instead of pesos, that ain’t likely to happen. Still, keep bringing the good stuff. It’d be a shame to lose The Mex Files.
More like stupid parents=poor kid. The kid is just being used as a political pawn to express the parents viewpoint. We don’t really know if the kid is more interested in France than in the Spanish language, but it is likely that lack of spanish language skills in Texas will be a limiting factor towards some opportunities.
The lack of English skills in the entire nation will be a limiting factor towards some opportunities of those that refuse to speak it as a first language and putting Spanish as secondary. Remember which country you are in and learn English. Stop trying to force Spanish down the throats of Americans that have no need to learn it. If you choose to work and conduct business in my country it is your responibility to learn my language, not visa-versa.
Thanks, “Eyes of Texas” – very insightful. And if this American fifth-grader were a foreign-born businesswoman, your comment would even in some vague way be actually relevant.
Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of the ad I saw in Atencion San Miguel when we first moved to Mexico, in which a gringa was advertising for a language tutor. Specifically, the gringa was advertising for a tutor to teach her maid English so she could understand here. I guess her mama must’ve pulled her out of Spanish class as a kid to make a political point.
If I had any intensions of moving to another country to live I would learn the language of that country and not be so hardheaded to expect
people in that country to learn English to accommmodate me.
I know numerous people who have gone illegaly to the US, mostly from Michoacan, Mexico. I would say that pretty much all of them are willing and ready to learn English. They really want to. It is a slow process for them to learn, on top of all th other things that they are dealing with.
To chage the subject just a little bit: I have read some articles about Mexican immigration that say that it is only the more ambitious Mexican who are pulling it off to come here. Other articles say that it is only those who don’t have what it takes to make it there. So there are 2 completely different viewpoints to the same existence. I am not sure which of the 2 is true, or if they both might be???????
My work brings me frequently into rural, indigenous Mexico, far away from paved roads, supermarkets, video rentals and fast food. In many indigenous Mexican communities the children are not interested in learning the ancestral indigenous language of their community. They want to learn English. Their parents want them to learn English. The same goes for upper-class urban Mexican populations who will spend considerable sums of money to send their children to bilingual schools or to private English lessons.
In many parts of Mexico it is still a privilege to be able to study the language of their northern neighbor (and eastern neighbor…lest we forget Belize is English-speaking). On the other hand, the parents of this poor fifth-grader in Texas are quite willing to flush the corresponding privilege down the toilet and dumb down the education of their daughter in order to satisfy their bizarre and misinformed political agenda. Very sad indeed.