Re: American Jingoism

Robert Hailman wrote:

<<Out of curiosity, is 1750 considered to be a small
school?
My highschool,
with 5 grades (9-OAC) is just shy of 2300, and is
considered to be quite a
large school.

As far as languages go, in Toronto the languages schools
offer tend to be
decided by the ethnic makeup of the student body - my
school, being in a
European neighbourhood, offers 5 years of French, 4 of
German, and 3 of
Spanish. Other schools in the city offer all sorts of crazy

languages, for
anywhere from one to three years - a friend of mine has
taken Finnish and
Tamil at her (very multicultural) school.>>


I'll delurk for this one a bit.  I don't know that 1,750
would be considered a small high school in the US, my own
high school (one of three in the city) consisted of four
grades (9-12) and had about 1,200 students, and was
definitely considered average.  In less densely populated
areas schools can be quite small and are also often
regional to make up a more reasonable number of students.

For its size though, my school had a large variety of
languages:  four years each of Japanese, French, Spanish,
Italian, German, Latin, Modern Greek and (Haitian) Creole
were offered, in addition to a separate Spanish program for
Hispanics.  This was largely due to the ethnic makeup of
the city, and the Greek community at large actually
subsidized the salary of the Greek teacher.  Plans are in
the making to offer four years of Mandarin starting in two
to three years, and Japanese, French and Spanish were
offered for an additional three years prior to high school
(grades 6-8).  When I was in middle school, it was required
to choose one of those three languages and take it for all
three years (you could only choose one though), but now
foreign language is entirely optional in middle school.  It
was also optional in high school -- not even a single year
of any language was or is required to graduate, I would
estimate that only 25% or so bother to take four years of a
foreign language.  AFAIK, this is the norm in my area of
the country (Southwestern Connecticut, about 45 minutes
east of NYC by commuter rail).  Truly unfortunate in my
opinion.


nicole (hmm, I guess now that the list has more than one
nicole, I had better sign off differently)

nicole perrin

PS -- As a completely unrelated issue, I'd just like to
enter a plea on behalf of those of us using webmail and
reading the digest:  when angular brackets are used to
represent orthography, and when they only enclose an "s",
the rest of the digest is slashed-through and this really
sucks!  Please, please be careful of this! </rant>

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