At my school...
Wednesday, 15 August 2007 10:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
montagnarde1793It's truly outrageous, what my school is doing: after going to every possible level in the bureaucracy to try to convince them for months ("we sympathize," everyone said, "but our hands are tied"), after having looked at every other option (there are none), my school has refused to offer the course French Literature 5AP.
Apparently, the old principal lied to us on two fronts: the first being that he neglected to tell us the schedules were fixed in June and let us think we still had a chance, the second, second about the number of students needed; we have eighteen, he said district policy was we needed twenty, the new principal says twenty-four.
Which is frankly ridiculous. I can't even begin to express to you the number of classes that have gone on at my school with only about ten people. But, of course, for French, we are "under-enrolled" and there's "not enough funding." They never have any problem funding the damn football team (or any other athletic crap), nor adding an entire new language program last year (Mandarin). Yes, I know the current conventional wisdom is that China is the way of the future, but fifty years ago weren't there plenty of people who said we'd all end up speaking Russian? And did that ever happen? I think not. And then, what do you know? People still speak French! Fucking amazing, isn't it? (And don't even get me started about Spanish--the common line here is, "why do you want to take French anyway, Spanish is so much more useful!" Yes, maybe if I wanted to stay in California for the entirety of my existence, but this isn't the Middle Ages: some people have broader horizons, you know. D:<)
The really sad thing about this is, of course, that only a couple of the other students who would have been enrolled really feel this injustice as passionately as I do, and they're not the ones who could most benefit from the course. We read, and would read French outside of class, but the others wouldn't know how to approach a book of literature, don't practice their French outside of class, and will forget it in the interim and not be able to continue in college. Which is really a sad state of affairs when the first thing the new president said is that she wants to make sure everyone gets the best education here and is as prepared as possible for college. Yeah. Right.
So here's the picture as it stands now: we have a willing and able teacher (but one who wants to be paid for teaching the class--can you imagine the audacity!), a serviceable classroom, enough copies of all the books on the reading list, and eighteen students, but apparently, letting those eighteen students learn was not a priority for a school in the face of other, more exciting things it could be doing, like spending millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art new swimming pool.
As you can imagine, I am disgusted and angry at the injustice of this. When my mother remarked that this is what first happened to the German program (now nonexistent), and, I would imagine, the Italian program before that (although that's much before my time), I said we weren't going to go down without a fight. French is the tongue of revolution, after all. Unfortunately, we have no assembly and no club where I could give a fiery speech on the subject, nobody really takes the school newspaper seriously except as an exercise in journalism (the content is unimportant, in other words), and, as much fun as it would be, I seriously doubt my ability to rally the student body (or even the people who wanted to take the class), to storm the administrative offices...
In other words, there is no organ in my school, as in the larger society, for fighting injustices. This one will not pass under the radar entirely, since we plan to tell the newspapers about it, but we are powerless to fix it. And that is the most disgusting, and the most saddening of anything.
Apparently, the old principal lied to us on two fronts: the first being that he neglected to tell us the schedules were fixed in June and let us think we still had a chance, the second, second about the number of students needed; we have eighteen, he said district policy was we needed twenty, the new principal says twenty-four.
Which is frankly ridiculous. I can't even begin to express to you the number of classes that have gone on at my school with only about ten people. But, of course, for French, we are "under-enrolled" and there's "not enough funding." They never have any problem funding the damn football team (or any other athletic crap), nor adding an entire new language program last year (Mandarin). Yes, I know the current conventional wisdom is that China is the way of the future, but fifty years ago weren't there plenty of people who said we'd all end up speaking Russian? And did that ever happen? I think not. And then, what do you know? People still speak French! Fucking amazing, isn't it? (And don't even get me started about Spanish--the common line here is, "why do you want to take French anyway, Spanish is so much more useful!" Yes, maybe if I wanted to stay in California for the entirety of my existence, but this isn't the Middle Ages: some people have broader horizons, you know. D:<)
The really sad thing about this is, of course, that only a couple of the other students who would have been enrolled really feel this injustice as passionately as I do, and they're not the ones who could most benefit from the course. We read, and would read French outside of class, but the others wouldn't know how to approach a book of literature, don't practice their French outside of class, and will forget it in the interim and not be able to continue in college. Which is really a sad state of affairs when the first thing the new president said is that she wants to make sure everyone gets the best education here and is as prepared as possible for college. Yeah. Right.
So here's the picture as it stands now: we have a willing and able teacher (but one who wants to be paid for teaching the class--can you imagine the audacity!), a serviceable classroom, enough copies of all the books on the reading list, and eighteen students, but apparently, letting those eighteen students learn was not a priority for a school in the face of other, more exciting things it could be doing, like spending millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art new swimming pool.
As you can imagine, I am disgusted and angry at the injustice of this. When my mother remarked that this is what first happened to the German program (now nonexistent), and, I would imagine, the Italian program before that (although that's much before my time), I said we weren't going to go down without a fight. French is the tongue of revolution, after all. Unfortunately, we have no assembly and no club where I could give a fiery speech on the subject, nobody really takes the school newspaper seriously except as an exercise in journalism (the content is unimportant, in other words), and, as much fun as it would be, I seriously doubt my ability to rally the student body (or even the people who wanted to take the class), to storm the administrative offices...
In other words, there is no organ in my school, as in the larger society, for fighting injustices. This one will not pass under the radar entirely, since we plan to tell the newspapers about it, but we are powerless to fix it. And that is the most disgusting, and the most saddening of anything.
