Question:
What worked for you sounds a lot closer to English immersion than
"Transitional Bilingual Education". That is, you spent half a day in
intensive English classes and the other half in regular academic
classes taught in English, as opposed to receiving you academic
instruction in Greek for a period of years. So I'm curious why you
voted against question 2. Could you elaborate?
Answer:
As I say, it was a close call.
Partly, I was influenced by my other language-learning experiences.
At age 9, learning English was a matter of 2 months. In my teens,
learning French was a matter of 2 years. And never mind my attempts
to learn Japanese as an adult :-)
A 4th-grader missing two months worth of arithmetic in favor of
English lessons is a good trade-off. A 9th-grader missing a year or
two of math in favor of English lessons is not so great. English is
vital, but I'd gladly teach 9th-graders algebra in Portuguese, as a
practical matter.
Now, I don't think Question2 would actually forbid teaching
high-schoolers math in their native language, but the _tone_ of many
of its supporters worried me. The tone seemed (sometimes) to be that
English is God's own language, and teaching kids in other languages is
somehow a moral compromise, instead of a strictly _practical_ one.
"Bilingual Education" as a _practical_ compromise has many failings,
no doubt, but it sounds to me like those failings are at the
operational, not philosophical, level. Fixing the operational
problems (e.g. hiring teachers who are both competent algebra
instructors and fluent Portuguese speakers) is a different approach
from renouncing the philosophy.
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