Schools adding Chinese to courses
About 20 teenagers showed up before dawn in Room 201 of the middle-school building at Episcopal High School recently, donned headphones and listened to a woman in Shanghai, China, teach them words associated with putting money into an envelope.
On that Feb. 8 morning, the students were learning Mandarin Chinese as part of a pilot program. It was the last day of a month’s worth of lessons.
The private high school is gauging interest to see if it should offer Chinese as an elective, perhaps as early as next year.
If so, it joins a handful of schools in the greater Baton Rouge area that offer Chinese instruction.
“It’s amazing,” said Jewel Reuter, Episcopal’s dean of curriculum and instruction for the school. “They come, they’re engaged, and they’re not getting credit for this course.”
Baton Rouge International School is the only day school in the area that lists Chinese teachers as faculty on its website.
Other schools sign students up for an online course. The Dunham School, for instance, has a handful of students who participate each year in an online course called Chinese 360, said Nikole Blanchard, the school’s technology coordinator.
Baton Rouge Chinese School offers classes after school and on weekends at South Baton Rouge Church of Christ.
Baton Rouge International School offers a multi-language program where students are immersed in three languages, English, Spanish and French.
“We start almost from birth,” said Hafid Laroussi, director of business and development for the school.
Starting at age 3, if they are deemed ready, children can start learning Chinese as their fourth language. By the time the children reach middle school, they all have to take Chinese, he said.
“It’s the first spoken language in the world by the numbers,” Laroussi said. “It’s a huge language for international economic development.”
Laroussi said online Chinese language programs are good as far as they go.
“There is no way you can replace human presence in language,” he said.
Finding people to teach Chinese is difficult, he said.
Episcopal is employing a New York City company, Mando Mandarin.
For the pilot program, Reuter was present in Room 201 to monitor the teenagers while they listened to their teacher overseas, but behavior problems were rare, she said.
Mando Mandarin President Michael Cheng, who is of Chinese heritage but wasn’t always fluent in the language, said he hit upon the idea for the company after visiting China.
He said he participated in at least 30 different approaches to learning the language before settling on what has become the approach of Mando Mandarin.
“I wanted to find out how to learn the language in the least amount of time possible,” he explained.
After he started the company in 2007, focusing at first on one-on-one online tutoring,
his company revised its approach so it could handle a classroom.
For Episcopal, Mando Mandarin shrunk its normal course down to just a month.
Episcopal student Elizabeth Butler said she and other students were not expecting much given how brief it was.
“We thought it was going to be like survival Mandarin, but we actually learned some of the culture of China,” Butler said.
The teacher in Shanghai that morning, for instance, taught Chinese characters via the decorative stamps applied to mail.
The biggest problem was occasional transmission lags, Butler said.
Katherine Ann Andreeff is in seventh grade and at just 13 was the youngest person in the class. She said she really enjoyed the class.
“I really with I could take Chinese rather than Spanish,” Andreeff said.
For two students wearing headphones, it was less of a class and more of a curiosity.
They are exchange students from China, Beijing specifically.
They came to the class along with the Episcopal student with whom they live.
“They think learning Chinese is fun,” said Kelly Han, 15. “They like to come up to you and say ‘Nǐ hǎo!’”
Having the exchange students take part in the class wasn’t the original plan.
“It’s merged in a nice way,” said Katherine Sutcliffe, associate head of the school, who oversees the exchange program.
“This class is just like when I started learning English,” observed Gilbert Cui, 16.
Chris Sammons, a senior at Episcopal and Cui’s roommate temporarily, said the language takes some getting used to.
“The words are kind of short and choppy,” Sammons said.
Still, Sammons said, he makes an effort to say some things in Chinese to Cui.
“It makes him feel like we actually care,” he said.
One exchange student for whom Episcopal made a strong impression was Caesar Xiong.
He gave a farewell address to students Feb. 7. He said he plans to come back in March to rejoin a school robotics team in an upcoming competition.
He said he enjoyed getting to know his teachers on a more personal level than the at-a-distance Chinese style of instruction.
“The students, they are not afraid of the teacher,” he said.
And there’s another reason for Xiong to remember his time here.
“I had my first hug. A girl,” he explained with a smile.
Xiong’s farewell address can be found at:
http://www.ehsbr.org/podium/default.aspx?t=204&nid=631083&bl=/default.aspx.