Tuesday, January 23, 2007

An experiment I'd like to try

I was looking at the ELL numbers again yesterday, you know, the ones where they lied about students making progress...

"The error involved a miscalculation that allowed students not making progress to show as making progress. "

"Down" means "up", it could happen to anyone.

Anyways, considering that our public indoctrination camps can't seem to get these kids to "move up by one level of English proficiency" (meaning they go from speaking "no english" to being able to ask "where's the bathroom") I thought that maybe we need a fresh idea.

Instead of throwing tax dollars at a miserable failure of a program (or as the schools call it "the gravy train") I propose parking students in front of American television for 2 hours a day.

Seriously, I honestly believe that watching two hours of TV in English would be more likely to take these kids up one point on the five point scale than all the "let's make MEChA posters in class today" projects that they do in ELL class.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Next, is they need to understand the words, "wash you hands."

Anonymous said...

And "Would you like fries with that?".

Not teaching english is a way to guarantee lifetime laborer status to a student.

They would be better off skipping school, learning english, and getting a GED later.

Anonymous said...

Daniel, I'd like to know what your qualifications in linguistic studies are.

Anonymous said...

School i.e. socialst Gov't monopoly doesn't want them to do good becuase they want/need people that want their handouts-Communism breeds communism and breeds NEED of Gov't "help" and eliminates self sufficiency.
If we were ALL self sufficient (like the 1st 200 years of our Nations founding) Many Gov't workers would be out of work and could NOT push their Socialist agenda on anyone because we don't need them anymore. Except Fire & police of course.
Communist Democrats push even more Gov't "programs" and invite more "Victums" i.e. Illegal Aliens or 3rd Worlders, to take Tax monies and deplete budget so they ask for 20% increase in budget.

THINK ABOUT IT ONLY A 2% POPULATION GROWTH STATEWIDE IN 10 YEARS BUT THEY NEED A 20% INCREASE in FUNDING? hmmmm.

Anybody making 20% more money?

Anonymous said...

I grew up in Canada during the 1960s. We had lots of European refugee families coming into the country. The kids would show up at the beginning of the school year speaking little to no english and be fully fluent by the end of the year.

How did they do it? Simple. Total immersion. There were no ENNL classes, no foreign language TV or newspapers and, in the case of at least one friend, only english was allowed to be spoken in the home and he was spanked if caught using his native language.

These people came to Canada to be Canadians, not Germans, Latvians, Estonians or whatever. They embraced their new homeland and melted into the melting pot.

The problem with most of today's hispanic immigrants is that they don't want to be Americans, they want to be hispanics with a better standard of living. They do not embrace American culture, choosing instead to cling to their old culture. The culture that made the places they come from third world countries.

The problem with us is that we enable this destructive behavior. There's a reason these people are working marginal jobs at the lowest rung of society and it is NOT because they are stupid, lazy or otherwise somehow inferior. It is simply because that if you don't speak english, and speak it well, you're never going to succeed to ANY degree in the United States. There i sno amount of multiculturalist pap that will ever change this.