Drop Spanish? Must decide this week.

[calgal]

My dd is a sophomore getting Bs and Cs in core courses with strong personal effort and with one period of instructional support daily due to LD and ADD. She started Spanish 1 this year due to the 2 years of foreign language required for Cal State admissions. (Foreign language is not required at her high school.) However, her progress report grade for Spanish is a D and I am not confident that she can bring it up to a C this semester. She loses lots of points for punctuation errors and inattention to detail. She is thinking about withdrawing from the class and looking into taking American Sign Language at a community college instead. I have told her that a D in Spanish will rule out admission to Cal State schools. Am I correct? Is ASL at a CC any easier than Spanish? She could also start French at her high school next fall, but I don't know if French is any easier or less detail-intensive. If she drops within the next six days, the class disappears from the transcript. Any advice is appreciated.

[2collegewego]

French and Spanish will be about the same regarding punctuation and grammar. (Spanish is a bit easier to spell however.) Honestly, if she were my daughter, if I knew she has been working at this class and that were her grade, I would have her drop. If she were nearing the end of her 2nd year, I might say to tough it out but if she's starting with a D, it would be hard to get a higher grade later on because foreign language classes build on what the students already know.

I don't know if the ASL is acceptable to California schools but it is probably easier for most LD kids, especially those with language disabilities. I know someone who taught himself ASL just from a book and did it well enough that he was able to supervise a deaf employee.

By the way, if somehow ASL does not fulfill the California requirements, I suggest you have her drop anyway and spend the year teaching her as much Spanish as you can. Rent Destinos from your library. (It's a PBS series designed to teach the language.) Get picture books with Spanish words. Take her to a Spanish-language bodega, restaurant, church or fair to have her practice. Look into something like Concordia Language camp next summer. Then, have her take Spanish I next year and consider a tutor if she needs it.

[Marian]

French is NOT easier than Spanish. Almost all Spanish words (except a few that were borrowed from other languages) are spelled phonetically, although it may take a year or two for students to pick up on the spelling rules. This is not true of French.

[mom60]

My son has LD and ADD. He suffered through Spanish grades 8-11. I think it ended up counting for 3 yrs. He could not spell and his grammar in English was terrible and his Spanish was just as bad. In 10th grade he had a teacher who took pity on him. My son had a 504 so had accommodations. This teacher decided to take the accommodations to heart and did not count any of my son's vocabulary tests. On in class writing he did not take points away for grammar or spelling errors. The teacher did expect correct spelling in hw and at home assignments. We got through that year with a tutor and my son ended up with a B -. 11th grade he had an excellent teacher and a good tutor. He struggled but ended up with another B-. Both those grades were generous.
Ask for accommodations. If the teacher see's how hard she is working maybe you can work something out.
In Ca the public schools will not count a D as passing for college admissions. They will count ASL. I know quite a number of LD students who have used ASL as their foreign language. They have found it easier.
My soph high school D is also LD/ADD. Spanish is also a struggle. She is lucky her teacher gives a lot of weight to HW, your notebook and to participation. She also gives extra credit for doing online work. Have you D look into the online tutorial that the textbook company puts out. There are games and other things to help with studying. I think my D will do okay because the teacher wants the students to do well. I think my D's grade will be good but I doubt she will be ready for 5/6.
Tutor, talk to teacher, accommodations, online tutorial.

[Grumpster]

You can't risk a D. She could also study on her own a little this year and try again next year? French is certainly harder than Spanish. ASL is an interesting possibility.

[ReadyToRoll]

Does Cal State have a program for LD students with different entrance requirements? If not, you might not want your daughter in a school which doesn't know how to differentiate and work with kids with significant LDs. (It seems crazy that they force every kid to take a language and then require a certain grade in that course, without any modifications for kids who cannot learn languages well....)

[vods91]

I have never taken Spanish through my time at high school career but I have heard from fellow friends that unlike French, Spanish tends to get more difficult as you go through the more advanced courses. I took French all the way through AP and for me, It plateaued. It was hard but then it's difficulty kind of leveled pff. I love French already so I am a bit biased but I believe French is easier than Spanish.

[calgal]

The Cal State website says to check with the individual school as to whether a student can waive the language admissions requirement, so I will do that this week for the schools we are targeting (the less competitive Cal States).. I am not sure the Spanish teacher will certify that she is disabled as relates to foreign language studies (It's a D not an F).
I think she would get two course credits from the CC that could be applied to college, which would be nice.

[TwistedxKiss]

"If not, you might not want your daughter in a school which doesn't know how to differentiate and work with kids with significant LDs."

This is an extremely important point. It is also important to be sure that the specific school she ends up going to understands her LDs and is prepared to accommodate them-- find out specifics. Find out what they will offer for different courses and requirements, and GET IT IN WRITING. People with my LD get screwed on a daily basis and I only very narrowly avoided it myself. Unfortunately at this point in time you can never take for granted that your 504 rights will be honored by a school.


As for whether ASL would be easier, I think it's important to note that there are different kinds of difficulty. For example with my auditory processing disorder, Spanish is REALLY hard. Latin is very difficult for many and considered to be harder than Spanish, but because it is usually not taught anymore with a spoken component it is MUCH easier for me even if the parts of Spanish I was good at are not as difficult as Latin on the whole. No matter how "easy" Spanish may be, if it doesn't play toward your skills it's not going to be easy for YOU anyway. To me, it's about the potential to succeed. Sometimes with an LD that potential just isn't there-- maybe you can pass if you're lucky, but sometimes it's just not possible to work as hard as you need to in a given time frame to get a good grade--especially when you have other classes to focus on too. Might she have to work harder to learn ASL at the CC? Possibly. But if her Spanish isn't developing because of her LDs and ASL wouldn't be affected, there should be nothing stopping her from having the potential to do well in it even if it is traditionally harder. There is a difference between something being difficult because of an LD and something being difficult because the material is challenging. It's very important to remember that. One is MUCH easier to work around than the other.

[pozuelo7]

well this is just my own 2 cents, but Spanish is an easy language to master. I may be biased because I was raised in Spain, but every word is spelled phonetically, and there are no real "tricks" like there are in English. I can't really say for French, but I would imagine that it would be more difficult to learn because of all the "wierd" sounds they seem to have (no offense to anybody

[2collegewego]

Calgal, I'm not sure why the foreign language teacher would have to "certify" that she is disabled regarding foreign language. Is this a public high school? Does she have an IEP or 504? And what is her disability? If it is a public school and your daughter is classified (with either an IEP or 504) with a language-based disability, you would call a 504/IEP meeting to ask for accommodations for the disability. I do have a friend whose daughter, for example, was graded "spelling exempt" because she was coded with dysgraphia. However, that exemption was both in English and in foreign language.

One other question.. .I just noticed you wrote that your daughter gets many points off for punctuation. Do you mean punctuation or accent marks (which is really spelling)? I am trying to figure out why she would be graded for punctuation in the first two months of Spanish. Punctuation, at this level, is essentially the same as English except for the upside down question marks/ exclamation points at the beginning of sentences. If she's getting a lot of points off for that, it seems persnickety to me. One possible accommodation for that is to ask for her to take her tests on a computer with spell check/grammar check. There is foreign language spell check and I think there is foreign language grammar check too but I'm not sure.

I really do think ASL is a good move. And TwistedxKiss, Latin would probably be better for any student who has auditory processing issues but if the OP's daughter has problems with grammar or spelling, switching to Latin wouldn't help.

[TwistedxKiss]

I know, my point was more that what is difficult for non-LD students may be easier for an LD student than the traditionally "easy" route, not that Latin would be a good move for her. I was just interjecting my own experience with foreign language and LDs, as Spanish vs Latin for me and MY LDs could be analogous to the OP's D and Spanish vs ASL due to her specific LD. Latin is very difficult for many, many people and Spanish is typically views as one of the easiest foreign languages to pick up, but due to my particular circumstances the opposite is true. The same could be true for the OP's D and Spanish vs ASL.

[50isthenew40]

In our district in CA, ASL counts for the language requirement. Very few high schools offer it though, so some students take it at the community college. It would be a good thing to check into. The downside right now is that it's really hard to get into classes in community colleges.

Another thing to consider though is that each Spanish teacher is different in how they grade. Many teachers would not make accents and punctuation a huge part of the writing grade in the beginning level, and also would weight speaking, reading, and listening ability as highly as writing. This particular teacher sounds like an especially bad match for your dd's learning style.

[calgal]

The Spanish teacher is very old style. She was supposed to retire last year but didn't. On a recent homework assignment, she subtracted a point from each of my daughter's 10 sentences for things like lack of a period, misspelled word, missing word, etc so that she ended up with a 0/10 on that assignment despite having written 10 almost correct sentences. I think with a less rigid teacher accommodations could have worked, but not with this teacher, and especially not now, when the grade is heading downward.
My daughter decided today that she will withdraw from the class this week. In terms of plan B, it is too late to sign up for a fall ASL class at the CC, but the classes are not full. She will probably do one semester there in the spring and the second during the summer. BYU does have an online ASL class that uses videotapes. It would be nice not to have to travel twice a week to the CC during the homework hours, but I suspect an in person class would be superior for ASL. I also am considering an online Hebrew course if I can find one, as she has some background in Hebrew from earlier schooling.

[Hunt]

The Spanish teacher is very old style. She was supposed to retire last year but didn't. On a recent homework assignment, she subtracted a point from each of my daughter's 10 sentences for things like lack of a period, misspelled word, missing word, etc so that she ended up with a 0/10 on that assignment despite having written 10 almost correct sentences. I think with a less rigid teacher accommodations could have worked, but not with this teacher, and especially not now, when the grade is heading downward.

If this is the teacher's approach, I think you made the right choice. While I agree that typically French is harder than Spanish, a tough teacher can make anything unnecessarily hard.