Lessons for a French teacher

I really don’t like to be critical of teachers, especially when I think my kids go to a great school. But, I received an introduction letter from my son’s Grade 1 French teacher and I just have to point a few things out.

Let’s start with the good stuff. The letter is intended to tell parents what our child will be learning, how they will be learning and how we can assist them with their learning.

Perfect.

The first problem though is the length of the letter – it’s a full page, front and back, single spaced, probably about 2,000 words (think four times the length of this blog). Unless you’re sharing the entire course material with parents, this is entirely too long.

We’re told “the program uses the Accelerative Integrated Method for teaching French.”

What a relief that is! I thought they might use some lesser method that’s slow and not integrated.

The third paragraph is as follows:

“The motivating activities address the needs of a variety of language learners and their learning styles, including kinesthetic, linguistic, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal which, in turn, helps students develop confidence and competence in French as they progress through each story unit."

I think they may be trying to say that this learning program will appeal to all the kids in the class, but it’s possible that this 41-word sentence actually isn’t saying much of anything. Either way, I’m certain I’ll see more of this gobbledegook come report card time.

The fifth paragraph begins, “In addition, as opportunities present themselves, we will introduce and learn other basic vocabulary...”

As opportunities present themselves? What else would you be doing? I guess that’s a drawback of the Accelerative Integrated Method.

The tenth paragraph (yes, the tenth) tells us what our child will need to do this year to do well in the class. This might be the most important piece of information in the letter and it barely made it onto the first page!

The children should “use class time wisely, stay focused and complete all class work in a reasonable time.” Hmm, not sure I see my son excelling in the world of “independent study.”

The top of the second page is the “How can you help?” section. I suspect many parents will see it when they grow weary from reading and turn the page over in the act of throwing it down on the table in frustration.

Apparently we are to explore French websites with our child. A suggestion or two about specific sites would have been helpful here.

I’m told my child “has a folder (chemise) that contains work in progress.”

What else would it contain? It’s a chemise!

“The chemise remains at school.”

You obviously don’t know my son.

I’m told my child “will also have a duo tang (cahier) that will be filled with the vocabulary for the unit, a script of the play, song sheets, puppets and additional vocabulary that may be introduced during other activities in class.”

A cahier filled with vocabulary concerns me and is it more than a little odd that this is the very first mention of puppets?

I’m not a teacher and I thought a chemise was a shirt, but I know that this letter would have been far better if it was one page max, had included a quick introduction of the teaching style and course content, followed by tips for success and what we as parents can do to help our child.

And really, in two pages you couldn’t mention that some kids will be forced to pee in their pants when they don’t know how to ask to go to the bathroom in French?