I grew up in the United States. My public education, in high school at least, required that I take two years of "foreign" language. At the time, my choices were Latin, German, French, and Spanish, though, at least in the schools that I attended, Spanish was the "also ran" language. Spanish wasn't openly discouraged, but nor did it receive the positive press afforded the other "European" languages. Furthermore, fewer sections were available, and those that were, always seemed to compete with other requirements like mathematics, making scheduling more difficult and less "practical". I ended up choosing German. As an undergraduate, I focused on French, and independently studied Greek and Latin. As a graduate student studying the history and philosophy of science, I was required to study French and German. I was trained to read these languages in preparation for archival work, not to speak the languages. For years I read these languages in daily on-line newspapers, but in time, I lost interest, my skill faded, and I am functionally a single language reader, writer and speaker. I am monolingual in a world that demands more.
Now I am a second language learner fumbling my way through the most important cultural and most commonly spoken language in the Americas. My decision to avoid Spanish in high school and college doesn't look so sound from this vantage point; actually, it feels pretty stupid. Learning a second language as an adult is a whole lot more difficult than learning it as a child. More so, a lot has changed demographically up north in the last three decades, and soon Spanish will be as common a language as English in the whole of North America, just as it is throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. My hope is that, in the United States at least, they come to their senses and require all students to take Spanish from an early age.
My biggest language mistake, Spanish aside, is not taking advantage of what I had at home. I've written before of the woman who raised me, a stunning and dynamic Iranian, my mom in spirit if not blood. She speaks multiple languages, and did so around the house when we were kids. We boys got away with ignoring these languages, especially Farsi, except when we were in trouble. My female cousin was made to learn the language. While I may be, in her words, Persian by association, I missed out on more than a single language. Learning to speak two languages makes it a whole lot easier to learn three, or more, in an increasingly global working and living environment.
At Baldwin, we are functionally an English immersion environment. Other than languages, all instruction is in English. We are working on improving our language instruction in Spanish, specifically in the lower grades. We are updating our texts and readings. We are doing more writing in Spanish. We are growing our holdings in the elementary library, and will soon require that students alternate between Spanish and English selections when they check out books. We will add an extra hour per week of Spanish instruction in the coming school year. We are working closely with our team to grow our pedagogy. Our efforts are only part of the solution; the other occurs at home.
If you are a native speaker of Spanish, which describes most of our community, I encourage you to ensure that your children are immersed in their cultural language away from our campus. Don't let them get away with speaking English at home; they get plenty of practice here, and most media is in English. Whether at the dinner table, in the car to and from school, or out and about in your communities, speak Spanish with your children. Ideally, all of our students will graduate fully bilingual in English and Spanish. That's a tall order, especially true bilingualism, defined by the ability to speak, read, and write in more than one language without having to translate across languages. It's defined by the ability to think in a language, to dream in a language. That can't happen with only a few hours of formal instruction per week, no matter how spectacular the offering. We'll need your help to achieve this important outcome.
An emerging adult, functionally bilingual in English and Spanish, has an altogether different ceiling in life. They are more global in their citizenship. They are more sensitive to cultural differences. They are more confident in additional language learning. They are more capable of transitioning and integrating across cultural and national borders. They will have so many more job opportunities of real quality.
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