Did I miss what's up with the coughing? Something long-lasting but expected to resolve soon -- a nagging bronchitis or something, or some kind of semi-permanent condition?
Something kids with asthma, like him, are prone to.
I'd dropped the asthma somehow. Good that he doesn't sound distressed by it at all.
Maman/Baba, Persian terms for Mom and Dad. I spoke exclusively Persian with him for about the first 18-months, and then I gave up.
Least funny comments ever, old timers.
Least funny comments ever
Kinda hard to walk that fine line between edgy and Seth Macfarlane edgy when talking about the asthmatic toddler of someone you internet-know.
We were concerned about possible Francophilia, NTTAWWT.
Does he call your wife something else when talking to her or was she fine with Maman?
One cannot fail to be impressed with the 3yo boot-n-rally.
Universality of babytalk names for parents FTW!
when talking to her
Still usually "maman," but "mom" is definitely becoming more common. I was impressed, several months back, when he was talking to a kid on the playground and referred to me as his "daddy," which no one ever calls me. Code switching!
Kid never called the better half anything but his actual name, and dropped all variants of "mom" for me like a hot potato as soon as he noticed that no one else used it. My own mother leapt on this to insinuate that I must feel wounded and/or inadequate as a mother, which may provide some insight into my skepticism that a bit of formalized chit chat via board/card games is sufficient to smooth over the stony surface of familial get togethers.
oggged, I really hope your little one outgrows the puking thing for a host of reasons, but near the top of the list is how to get enough calories to stay down the kid. One bout of appendicitis was enough to set ours back by a noticeable amount, it took months to get something spare back on him. Last night seeing him at the end of dance class I wanted to hang a placard on him proclaiming "they really do feed me, honest". How many years in a row can he grow 1/2 inch per month???
Also wonder what it does to his tooth enamel. Ouch.
Ogged's kid's tooth enamel. So far as I can tell ballet not doing anything for or to my kids teeth.
Eh, the tooth enamel is unimportant until the adult teeth come in. Nothing to worry about for a couple of years.
Lee doesn't like it that Mara mostly calls me by my name, though she's been switching back to "mommy" some lately. Nia calls us both by our names, though occasionally will call me "my mom" in my hearing and more often elsewhere. Both have referred to Lee as their dad or sort-of dad, though Mara reserves "Daddy" for her actual dad. We're Mommy and Mama to Selah, and it was Mara who initially chose which of us got which name.
Selah hasn't been sick at all since starting daily steroids and, probably as a result, has chunked up and gotten significantly taller. We've been trying keeping the windows open and so far she hasn't had any breathing trouble, so I'm tentatively optimistic that her asthma will be the mild and well-managed kind.
Hawaii's dance recital is coming up, and my MIL and SIL are both coming to town to watch.
It is so insanely over-the-top and adorable that I think our dance instructor is some sort of genius. They're tap dancing to Crazy Little Thing Called Love. She has them doing moves like the "heart-thump" move with your hands, pretending to rev their motorcycles, bouncing on one hip contrapposto, and that last move - executed by four and five year olds - predictably has me in stitches every single time. The whole dance is amazing.
14: excellent point, recalling bulimics of my youth. BTW, what the hell is with the braces for milk teeth???? When did those become a thing?
Dress rehearsal phone video, hg! Always works to catch the ultimate in cute/amusing!
Kid's spring show weekend after next, and still no piano reduction score in evidence. Lost in post from Moscow? Metronome accompaniment has a certain minimalist allure.
dq, you've utterly failed to concern me.
Wait until they start skyrocketing.
Is that what happens when a cleveland steamer breaks down?
There are braces for milk teeth? That's nuts.
I couldn't get my braces until my baby teeth all fell out, of course, which they refused to. At 14 I had the last four pulled. Then I wore braces into my first year of college. It was the weird school, where the ground rules included not being able to leave the surrounding valley during term, so I needed the student body to pass a motion allowing me to go into town to get my orthodonture cranked. There was debate, but I prevailed.
"But we have all the baling wire and pliers an orthodontist could need."
referred to me as his "daddy," which no one ever calls me
Until now, daddy. [bats eyelashes]
It's about time for him to meet his Uncle Apo.
To the OP, I recently had this conversation with my 3 year old:
3yo: thank you for the hug!
me: you're welcome
3yo: I like this hug.
me: So do I! And you know what else? I like you, too.
3yo: I like brownies.
He's usually pretty good about responding to "I love you" with "I love you too," but sometimes he can't help expressing his affection for cake first/instead.
Mr. Not-Quite-2 has recently started embellishing our titles as "Mommyo" and "Daddyo". Not a full-bore "Daddy-o", but cute and close.
I spoke exclusively Persian with him for about the first 18-months, and then I gave up
Do you still speak Persian sometimes? My mom used Spanish in a seemingly ad hoc way (like, certain things were always said in Spanish, such as tienes una llamada or pásame la mantequilla por favor), but it still seemed to have an effect. My brother and I speak it well and with only mildly horrible gringo accents. Oh, and as a side benefit, my dad now knows the Spanish word for butter.
I don't, but my mom does. She quizzed him the other day on a bunch of persian words, and he got about 85% of them right. Second kid has heard virtually no persian. Sorry, little buddy!
Is it too late? I'm thinking you may be apologizing to the second kid a lot when he grows up.
We say "Poor second kid" a lot, so he knows that deep down we care about him.
How much time do they spend with your mother? If she's around a lot and speaks Persian to them when she is, that might ease the way if they want to learn it properly when they're older.
Just make sure you say it in Persian, so he won't know what you're talking about.
A lot. I can't say it's a concern. If they learn it, great; if not, maybe they'll care, but probably not.
28: I think our parents are about the same age, and my father would always ask for the butter in Spanish. Was there an ad on TV in their formative years? Dad speaks only a little Spanish otherwise, but that phrase is seared into my brain along with "throw your gum in the trash" in Spanish and "the windshield wipers don't work" in French (don't ask).
Why did you stop?
He was going to be starting school, and he'd really heard very little English (my wife was working crazy hours in NM) and I didn't want his first experience of school to be "what the fuck are these people saying?"
Sounds like there's no reason not to restart now that that initial stage is past. It does seem like a shame not to give them the basis of a second language at the age where you can do it with almost no effort or difficulty for them.
The reason is that I'm more comfortable with English, but you're probably right. Meddlesome, but right.
and my father would always ask for the butter in Spanish. Was there an ad on TV in their formative years?
My grandmother has this (unfunny) joke:
Ropa isn't rope.
Sopa isn't soap.
And butter is meant-to-kill-ya!
Maybe that's where all the dads learned it.
But I have issues about language learning -- it's something that just seems impossible for me, so anything that would make it easier for your kids seems like an obvious win.
An early episode of Community has Troy and Abed doing a nonsense rap of all the words they know in Spanish that rhyme (butter, library, disco, doll), and Sally and Newt crack themselves up doing it in chorus.
I was chatting with a friend yesterday about how unbelievably difficult it would be to immerse your kid in a Spanish environment here in Heebie Town, despite most of the town being native speakers of Spanish. The dual language classrooms here are nothing like the bilingual schools in Austin - they're intended to teach migrant kids English, and only English, and the English-speaking kids in the classroom get a really sloooowwwwww school year, either in quick slangy Spanish but mostly in slow, repetitive English. There is such a class stigma that it would be an uphill battle to convince a group that you actually want them to stick to Spanish and force your kid to be confused. Let alone where you would locate such a group and how you would presumably pay for such a thing.
But I always thought it meant lard! Very disappointing, believe me the central valley town of that name fits lard better than butter.
they're intended to teach migrant kids English, and only English
To be evangelical about the program my kids were in, it seemed really successful in teaching the immigrant Spanish-speaking kids English. The Anglo kids were hit and miss on how much Spanish they got (I think they all got a lot by school standards, but probably less than half were really fluent, and some of the kids I'm calling Anglo were Spanish language heritage kids), but the kids who came in with no English were accentless by third grade. (Well, urban NYC Latino accentless, but not someone you'd distinguish from Latino born here).
And I think what worked was partially that they did emphasize the Spanish as an academic language of instruction -- it was sink or swim for both groups in their non-primary language, and the Latino kids got to be the academic stars half the week. And of course they admitted a mixed class, 50-50 each language dominant, so the kids had each other for language support.
44: I just checked and you're right, it's lard not butter.
I did not realize that Spanish for "butter" is the diminutive of "lard".
The dual language schools in Austin seem much more akin to the LB's experience. I suspect the research is clear that those are preferable, and the funding/expertise hasn't trickled down to Heebie Town, and on top of that there isn't a critical mass of Anglo parents who wouldn't trust that this is a UMC-privilege-approved thing to do to your kid.
Correct the double-negatives in that last clause, if you please.
My brother teaches at a school in El Paso that sounds similar to LB's. In part it may be that you just need to be a bigger city to have a critical mass for any unusual schooling.
And there are integration issues. I bet our school wouldn't have worked as well if they hadn't maintained a fairly 50-50 split in the student body, and of course you can only work with the kids you've got in the school's catchment area.
And the world rights on its axis. Whew!
Getting the bilingual education thing right is difficult, as hg points out the 50-50 mix lb's kidd benefited from is only part of it - all kinds of social realities and expectations are at play. I had more than a few friends at Cal who grew up in Spanish speaking homes but couldn't write in Spanish and were extremely uncomfortable using even spoken Spanish in any situation that didn't resemble messing about with peers or hanging out with grandma.
Many of my mock trial students, tho, e.g. Spanish and Cantonese speakers, have gotten decent academic instruction in their non-English language and are much more confident. This result falls off quickly for speakers of locally obscure languages, kids from Pakistan, Nepal, Brazil, etc.
Or what 50 said, plus hg's point re UMC parent buy-in.
I had more than a few friends at Cal who grew up in Spanish speaking homes but couldn't write in Spanish and were extremely uncomfortable using even spoken Spanish in any situation that didn't resemble messing about with peers or hanging out with grandma.
Yeah, Sally's current Spanish teacher talks about how hard it is getting heritage speakers who haven't had any school Spanish before high school up to academic speed.
And, just because it's funny, I brag about Sally's Spanish, but while her accent, grammar, and understanding are all good, she complains about having a really restricted vocabulary -- trying to write, she always finds herself circumlocuting around words she doesn't know. She was bitching that something she wrote about solar power sounded sort of insane along those lines, and something about how she described it had me saying "You mean like this?" And she confirmed, yes, exactly like that.
The native French speakers who spend only a couple of years at the kid's school do not turn into proficient English speakers. The curriculum is only 20% English, the French are generally very shy at speaking in foreign languages, and French dominates in the corridors and playing fields as well as the classroom. Sorry, temporary Parisian transplant kids.
As someone raised in multi-lingual environments, I suspect it may be a two part process: hearing the language at a young age may be necessary, but not sufficient, to speaking it fluently later. But kids are amazingly flexible (I speak my childhood languages fluently; I don't think my siblings do). So I'd err on speaking to the kids in Persian and not sweating if they speak English (or whatever the dominant language is) now, but not take it personally if they shy away from it later.
37 He'd have picked it up very very quickly. Full immersion for little kids is quite effective. I'm told my Polish was much better than my English at age four, and still clearly better when I started kindergarten, by the end of that year it was the reverse. How long did it take you to pick up English and at what age?
56 I managed to learn almost no French during my first two years in Genf. Then, a few (miserable) months into my time in a French language school I was more or less fluent, though definitely not native. Immersion works quite well for older kids as well. But here were some kids at my school who had lived most of their lives in Geneva without getting fully fluent in French and the short term ones almost never got anywhere near fluency unless their parents had dumped them in a French speaking school for a while. I imagine it's even worse now what with the internet and cable TV and whatnot.
Think it also helps to be unashamed to speak a second language yourself around the house, even if you are rusty. Then learning languages becomes just something normal that people do. This was a big part of the kid learning to compose, he thought was the ordinary progression in any new language: speak, read, write.
I know a few kids (4 well, another couple by internet) who have done 6 month exchanges, all to France, although the company sets up Spanish and German exchanges too. The eldest had her 13th birthday towards the end of her stay in France, and her French 'sister' is over now. The others were all around 10/11 when they did it, and 2/3/4 years later still seem to have retained near-native fluency. My kids were never at all tempted, so I didn't have to think about it too much, but it's an interesting idea.
I know just about enough French to get by even in rural France where no one speaks English, enough French and Latin to be able to make a bit of sense of written Italian and Spanish, and have forgotten all my school German as I've never used it.
It was strange being in Flanders at Easter and really not having a clue about what labels or people said. At the vet (have to get the dog de-tapewormed before returning to the UK) I asked, "English? Francais?" and she said "oh, my English is much better than my French" and talked to me in beautiful English. This was about 10 miles from the border with Wallonie, where French is spoken, and about 30 miles from the French border.
It's also possible that her French was just as good as her English, but she prefers speaking in English for political reasons.
The language politics of Belgium are completely insane. My favorite is the way that train announcements work.
"The National Railway Company of Belgium gives its information in the train in the language of the region. This means for instance that in a train driving from Antwerp to Charleroi, announcements are made - during a single train ride - firstly (in the Flemish Region) in Dutch, then (in the Brussels-Capital Region) in both languages (in the language native to the announcing railway employee immediately followed by the other), then (again in the Flemish Region) once more only in Dutch and thereafter (in Wallonia) only in French. The ticket inspector however is bound to respond in either language."
Yeah, memories of trying to communicate with Hungarians in the early nineties. For fuck's sake it won't kill you to speak a bit of Russian to the American trying to reserve a room or buy some food.
I was going to post this article about how multilingual people have a different personality in each language, and solicit anecdotes from you all, but now it seems too similar to the current conversation. So, multilinguals, are you crazy?
56: Oh hey, is your kid at the place over on O/ak St/reet? I know a guy who works there.
61.2: I was baffled to discover in the mid-'90s that the ticket agent at the train station in the little town across the Rhine from Strasbourg spoke no French. FFS, lady, I walked over from France!
64: All the Hungarian I knew in the early 90s: yes, no, good, thank you, pretty thank you, no meat, 23, tram replacement bus. Surely I must have known how to say hello? Nothing comes to mind -- I think maybe we just said ciao or servus or something?
66: nope, he's at the other one.
Definitely different in French than English, but I don't think"personality" is the right way to describe it. The map of mental concepts in my head is swapped, physically my mouth and hands are doing totally different things, just ... very different.
I don't think I have different personalities in different languages. Hand gestures are a different story.
I think full immersion works for kids but I wonder if it sticks if it's not reinforced. My mother didn't learn English until she was 8; before that she spoke Yiddish/Polish/Russian. But when she came to America she switched almost entirely to English (except Yiddish with her parents, who were not very talkative) and by her 30s she had basically lost all the other languages, except for halting Yiddish when she needed to talk to her parents. But even with Yiddish she wasn't fluent any more. If I wanted to truly make someone bilingual I would make sure they had a number of years abroad interspersed during their teen and college years so they could really reinforce the language -- I question what these 'Chinese immersion' schools and the like could do alone.
29, 39: Putting in a vote for providing both kids as much opportunity as possible to be comfortable in persian. Mayhap they could become interested in learning to read/write it later, even. But one doesn't want to pressure the little tykes.
Basic Spanish should really be part of the Common Core by now.
I wonder if your mom would have an easier time picking it up again if she were placed in a Yiddish/Russian/Polish environment for a while. My dad spoke fluent German as a little kid during the war and then very deliberately forgot it immediately afterwards, refusing to even be present when it was spoken. Then, more than twenty years later, he ended up in Austria for a few months and he said he picked it up very quickly. And then he forgot it all over again, though not deliberately this time.
73: I'm unable to tell whether this is a joke. What are people -- people I respect -- making of the Common Core dispute these days?
I hear that Louis C.K. is against it but is misunderstood. This would be neither here nor there for me were it not for the fact that I've just lately actually watched his Louie comedy series, which I find really good. I know I'm behind the times.
Mara's preschool best friend joined her class speaking almost no English and picked it up very fast. His parents speak to him only in their home language (Telugu, I think) unless they're around English speakers, because they think it's the only way to keep up his non-English language skills at all as he grows. There was a time when I imagined speaking French to my hypothetical children, but instead just focus on getting them to stop talking about what they're not "opposed" to do and so on.
I'm pro-Common Core, but find myself in the minority most places because of that. I think most complaints against the Common Core are about bad implementations of it and have little to nothing to do with the standards themselves. I've seen our kindergarten curriculum (and we're in a state where it rolled out early anyway) and have been very impressed with it.
I heard that Common Core doesn't include languages.
I have no idea what Common Core is, but I'll take Thorn's opinion over Louis C.K.'s on the matter.
About 90% of the people who are opposed to the Common Core are actually opposed to something else (frequent standardized testing, teacher evaluation, curriculum companies' crappy product) but think the Common Core includes these things (it doesn't).
Common Core only applies to Math and English/Language Arts until middle school, when the Language Arts application gets broader. You can read the actual details on this website by selecting a subject and then looking at the standards for each grade level. I admit I've only looked at the lower grades since that's where my kids are, but I haven't yet found anything objectionable.
79: I didn't know that. I had the general impression that opposition to the Common Core was rising because it appears to incorporate all the things people don't like about No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, e.g. standardized testing, etc. I wondered if something was off about. I thought, back when it was first proposed anyway, that Common Core was a state-based collective initiative to establish cross-state educational standards. Which seems like a good idea.
I thought, back when it was first proposed anyway, that Common Core was a state-based collective initiative to establish cross-state educational standards. Which seems like a good idea.
Is this not what it is? As suggested by the words "common" and "core"?
Hey do we gave any Harvard librarians 'round these parts, or Harvard types in general? Have an urgent Harvard library question!
Curious to know what an urgent library question might be?
Difficult to imagine there are none, so here is the emergency: need a copy of the piano reduction score(s) for the Hertel version of La Fille Mal Gardée, in boxes 93 and 94 of the Nikolai Sergeyev Collection at the Harvard Theatre Collection of the Houghton Library. The reduction sent from Moscow doesn't include the piece the kids are doing in the show weekend after next. If the reduction from Harvard has it, the school will seek permission, etc., they are good about this. But first step is to see if the reduction(s) include the piece.
If someone would be kind enough to go to the library and copy the scores, I will be very grateful and will shower delightfulness on you in some form or fashion.
Parsimon's article refers to Louis C.K. objecting to the heavy emphasis on standardized testing, which has nothing to do with Common Core as I understand it.
If the scores are in a special collection, you probably need to make a request through the library. They'll probably scan them in a decent resolution and send them to you in a pdf or something like that. You generally can't self-service scan/copy from that kind of material.
I suppose I could look up their procedures.
Website says they are available for photocopying in person, but doesn't say they'll send a scan. I'll call first thing in the morning but thought there was a decent chance someone here would be in situ.
Here's their information page on copy requests. If no one here can help you by going there on your behalf, I recommend emailing them with your question because I don't think I could figure out how to fill out their request form without help and I used to work for a similar type of place.
Oh, right, the telephone. I don't think I've seen a policy that confusing. It makes me feel better about the place where I worked. We sent as little paper as we could.
Thanks fake accent! Hopefully they are genial.
Ah, it's too bad: I had hoped I could be helpful, but in situ is the one thing I'm not at the moment. The librarians are sure to be helpful, at least.
The librarians are sure to be helpful, at least.
This is something that drives me crazy - librarians are generally very helpful, especially if they regularly do public-facing work, and yet so many library websites are so hard to use and policies that you'd hope would be simple can take a lot of explanation. That copy policy looks like a very conservative interpretation of the law, which I guess is good if you're university counsel, who probably never personally makes requests.
Hmmm item 97 is 29 orchestral parts for the Pas Sabotiere ... if the reductions don't include it, those would really substantially reduce the work of making a reduction.
Here's a link to a video, you have to go to 1:11:40, it follows a very unfortunate "gypsy" dance. It's a very cute little character dance for kids, basically "dance of the hayseeds." They make a tremendously satisfying racket, but the kid says after rehearsal he does tend to have a bit of a crick in the neck. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZx4AVi44bY
The language immersion discussion upthread is interesting. I don't have a whole lot to add, but since I happen to be in Bethel right now I thought I'd note that Yup'ik-English bilingualism shows a lot of the same dynamics that other people have discussed above, including being more comfortable in one language or the other at different ages and having that potentially change. A lot of the school districts in this part of the state have set up Yup'ik immersion programs, especially for the lower grades, but kids who end up moving to Anchorage or other places where they're mostly using English don't always maintain their fluency even after going through those programs. There are a lot of complicated sociolinguistic dynamics surrounding this, though, so it's hard to generalize from it.
my father would always ask for the butter in Spanish.
My grandfather would do this in Norwegian, which makes a lot of sense, because butter is central to Norwegian culture. I always found the mayo/mustard sandwich debate confusing, because clearly the first condiment is always butter! I wish my parents had spoken to me in Norwegian. My grandparents would speak in Norwegian, but I think they were still a bit assimilationist in their mindset. My grandmother thought "white" meant Anglo-Saxon in the strict definition, so she was paranoid about having an accent and being discriminated against. (No amount of explaining that Norwegians were white would convince her otherwise. On the plus side, it did mean she was very down with solidarity for actual oppressed minorities.) I did get enough exposure that I can speak Norwegian without an obvious foreign accent, which isn't always helpful, since sounding and looking native without native fluency can be hard.
I am definitely a different person in my second language, in part because I don't have total adult fluency. I feel more immature, and it's probably because I speak more like a 12 year old. It's frustrating to have people treat you like a child when you're not, especially when you don't have the tools to express that you're not a child.* When I taught English in China, I found it really easy to relate to my students, ages 8-13: we laughed at the same jokes and seemed roughly on the same wavelength. In the US, I find it much harder to relate to that age group.
*There's a lot of stuff going on here, one part of it is language, part of it is my own appearance (people think I look small and young), part of it is gender, part of it is personality (I'm quiet and reserved, Chinese women of a certain age tend not to be), and another part is just a general well-meaning condescension towards foreigners. People don't really think I know how to feed and clothe myself or generally just survive. I've had tiny, 70 lb grandmas grab my arm and march me across the street because they think I can't do it myself, and the store clerks will see I'm interested in an item and then pick the brand they think is best and put it in my cart. If I try to take it out and pick a different brand they argue with me that I'm being stupid because clearly red date oatmeal is the healthiest for a young women. And so forth. It's both incredibly kind and incredibly aggravating, like you're living in a perpetual family dinner where your aunt lets you know that time is ticking and she's found a nice boy who went to a good school and now he's a lawyer and you can't have babies forever and when are you going to get a real job and lose those 10 lbs and omg are you really leaving the house dressed like that young lady?
re: 88
I know the people who run the digitisation service at Harvard. Not sure if that would help, in this instance, though, as what you are asking sounds like a fairly simple request.
It might be expensive, though.
I had more than a few friends at Cal who grew up in Spanish speaking homes but couldn't write in Spanish and were extremely uncomfortable using even spoken Spanish in any situation that didn't resemble messing about with peers or hanging out with grandma.
This is very much the case with the 2gen Kashmiri kids round here (s/Spanish/Urdu/). Mostly not even messing around with peers. I suspect it's pretty universal.
Yeah. Punjabi speaking friends, from back in Scotland, a couple of them spoke very good Punjabi -- oldest children, born when their parents didn't speak much English -- but reported that their younger siblings didn't. And most weren't literate in Punjabi or Urdu. I know one friend's younger brother, who was very devout, spoke excellent Arabic and was a strong reader of classical Arabic, but didn't really have conversational Punjabi.
We aren't doing a great job, I think, with the Czech at home for xelA. My wife speaks Czech to him when they are along together, but that's not a big percentage of his time. So I don't know how that'll pan out as he gets older.
100 Does she switch to English when you or other English speakers are around? That could be very confusing.
101.1 is probably fair, though I don't know much about Massachusetts. I just think most of the arguments "against" it I've seen are like Louis CK's, that there's a specific piece of homework, usually math, that is weird or annoying and thus the Common Core is bunk. Except the Common Core doesn't tell schools how to teach math, just what math concepts need to be covered. From what I see online, NY is implementing it particularly badly. But as I said, our local school is using quality literature with a multicultural focus and coming at math from several directions that seem like they'll be effective, and those decisions about what is taught have to be connected to the relevant underlying Common Core standards but are not themselves the Common Core.
I live in a high-poverty school district on a state border. Nia went to at least three and possibly four kindergartens in two different states, which left her with huge gaps in what she should or could have learned that year, and that experience is pretty typical for kids in our district. I don't think having the Common Core will solve that problem, but it should make it easier for schools to communicate with each other about what a child has or should have learned and maybe make it easier to fill in the missing pieces. That doesn't mean all the schools need to be run the same way or using the same books or whatever people think, but I do think having shared standards will help some at-risk kids, and they're the ones I care about most.
And I do remember the link in 104, but again if Massachusetts is so fantastic, why is there still as much disparity between white MA kids and black MA kids as there is between white MA kids and white AL kids? I don't want to aspire to have my kids two grade levels behind yours. (Not that that's actually an argument in favor of Common Core either.)
My perception, could be wrong, us that many conservative critics of common core and other public school curriculum reforms in the US tend to rail against top-down uniformity as the thin wedge of the coming Stalinist state. But when the same conservatives are exposed to the French system they get a massive boner because "old fashioned!" This seems to be an actual phenomenon in a sterile byway of the math wars. The little I've read gave me the distinct impression the Americans had no clue what the French were actually on about, and the French didn't give a fig about the American point of view, just wanted to wave a banner of international aggrieved solidarity. I agree with thorn some degree of standardization very useful, but the whole debate makes me preemptively exhausted on behalf of the entire education sector, doomed to labor under massive cultural expectations and provide endless battlegrounds for political wars.
100. This is basically what I did with my son. He understands pretty well at 12, can say simple sentences. Understanding but not speaking is pretty common for second generation kids I think. A summer abroad or something can provide a kick to start talking. Not an option for me, unfortunately.
109.1: That's silly. I'm reliably informed that Obamacare was specifically created by Stalin to destroy America.
I was mostly joking too, knecht, and obviously race is problematic. I'm just saying that Massachusetts doesn't seem to have it all absolutely right for everyone, and I don't think any other place does either. But I doubt I meaningfully disagree with Mike in general.
A Modest Proposal: Alabama Whites Are Genetically Inferior to Massachusetts Whites
When my sister lived near Birmingham, she always did say that your IQ goes down 15 points as you drive over the state line into Alabama.
109.1 is correct, with the additional factor being that the standards are poorly understood. Conservatives are knee-jerk reactionaries when it comes to anything that looks like a dictate from Washington.
79, 86: I'll have to look up more about how the Common Core standards have been tied up into standardized testing, teacher evaluation and whatnot, given that the former have ostensibly nothing to do with the latter. I'm willing to blame Arne Duncan, but I'd like to know how it works on the ground, how local school districts implement.
I'll guess that there's some sort of messy intersection of testing requirements with Common Core standards. It's not clear to me that school systems are able to function without strict testing and such any more.
Apparently the Common Core is deeply bound up with increased testing requirements. Here is the always terrific Diane Ravitch taking apart a triumphalist Newsweek piece on the Common Core.