German in Boarding Schools

[doschicos]

@Pincite

In the SPS directory, there are 15 modern language faculty listed: 7 are Spanish teachers. Groton: 6 of 11 are Spanish teachers. Hotchkiss: 7 for 15. This is way too much. What’s wrong with encouraging kids to try something different?

There is a reason that some economic studies do not see the point of learning Spanish (social services aside): tons of people in the U.S. already know Spanish.

If you are making an international business argument for Spanish, it really does have to go with Portuguese to some extent (Latin America is what matters — not Spain).

With all of these Spanish teachers, I would imagine it would be very difficult for kids to max out the course offerings. What I am suggesting is that, instead of taking another Spanish class after Spanish 4 or so, kids should be thinking about starting Portuguese (or 1 out of 7 of those kids should be, thereby having but 1 less Spanish teacher and 1 Portuguese teacher; actually, 1 out of 9 or 10 will suffice, because some will want to start with Portuguese to begin with).

In any event, there is plenty of time in college to study abroad, to take more Portuguese, and even Spanish; that’s when you can “go deeper”.

But might I suggest that 1/2 of boarding school’s modern language offerings should not be allocated to a language that already has more native speakers in the United States than the entire country of Spain? Just my opinion…

Why view the offerings as too much? The goal should be fluency. Very few Americans reach the stage of fluency despite learning another language throughout middle school, high school and college. Very few. Become fluent in one language. Much better, IMO, than a smattering of a couple, which is pretty useless for anything other than being a tourist. If one wishes to become a polyglot, better and easier with fluency in a similar language.

I doubt offering Portuguese would be a case of if you build it, they will come. It’s even fairly limited as a college option, isn’t it?