Dear HappyV
"I should also point out that in regards to Primary Mandarin programs, 'a couple of hours a week' was probably something like 30 minutes a day. CDNIS makes no claim to be a bilingual school - but they do produce students who are bi and tri lingual."
- You have to realize that CDNIS is an international school, full of children of expats and upper-middle class families. Many students don't stay thought until university, many leave for a high school education overseas or because of parental reasons, many are inserted through out the middle years. They produce bi and tri lingual students, only because the students coming in are already bi or tri lingual.
"You just shown that you are ignorant when it comes to how language functionality and fluency is assessed in pretty much every curricula around the world, including the IB. For your information, IB Language B students are assessed on pretty much all the criteria that you mentioned, in both oral, aural and written tasks. A student's IB score is reflective of all the criteria you mentioned."
- All the students in my mandarin class pre-write their oral task and rehearse it over and over again just so they can get a good grade. And for the written assessment, it's based on an easy chinese textbook that even my kid brother can read, in fact most of my peers who have a solid mandarin background find the mandarin program too easy and that their mandarin has worsened over time. Sure it looks good on a sheet of paper called their report cards, but it says nothing about applying that language in real life. Most of my mandarin class, when outside of the classroom, can barely speak a word of mandarin, if any at all. That's what HC meant when he said "I look at how comfortable they are in speaking, reading, listening, humor, slang, metaphors, getting up and speaking in public, inflections and pronunciations etc etc." There's no need to be harsh and call people ignorant now.
But seeing how your posts are filled with ego and a fanatical fondness of CDNIS, you must be affiliated with the school in some way, be it parent or staff, so here's to you:
A "good" program says nothing about a student's well being. For a student who isn't molded into one of the top scoring, CDNIS clones, life will be hard for you. What really angers me is that my fellow top scoring students don't really care about learning, delving deep, and asking questions; they care about doing to pass and achieving good results. They don't care about current issues or expanding their perspectives, they would never read unless instructed to do so and never write unless they have to. This school has an abnormally low student voice and spirit. The people who go for the student committee do it for their resumes; and are usually elected based on popularity. All activities, ideas, pranks have to be APPROVED by the vice principle, grad blurbs (final words from graduates in the yearbook) are edited to look good. Student's aren't allowed to order lunch from outside of school because of "environmental concerns", yet when raising money for the school pizza boxes pile sky high. Really it's just part of the Chartwells monopoly because the school's worked out a deal with them. This school calls itself a "charity", yet students have to pay for their own sports trips, MUN trips, their own equipment bags, uniforms, computers, software and the list goes on and on. No wait, you have to have your software removed before you leave the school; we don't even get to keep the software on our computers, but we have to pay for it. Where does all our money go? It's an awful lot our parents have to pay for textbooks and pencils. Oh, I nearly forgot about the new "arts center", where parents can now sit comfortably in cushioned seats to watch their little CDNIS clones perform on a real stage; so it feels more exclusive. Because our students can't perform on the stage of our two already very large gyms, because our art students need a new art room that isn't even bigger than their old one, because it looks good. They can spend millions on a building we don't even need, yet we have to pay for literally everything in our school life. Really, it's a repulsive modern trend that sells the idea that in order to be successful in life, you have to pay thousands for a prestigious, state of the art primary school, high school, and university. It's called branding. All students are forced to purchase MacBooks in middle school, if even you get a Macbook from outside of school you have to pay for it to be reimaged by the technicians in our school for even the most basic function such as the school email to work on your computer. Everything has to be synchronized and controlled. And this is all just a small part of the problems in CDNIS.
"I also have expertise in the research that studies best teaching practice for language acquisition. I reassert my previous statement that 'more is not always better', and that the assessment of the success of a language program should not be based solely on the number of hours of teaching instruction, but also on how student inquiry and learning is supported throughout the curriculum."
- Language acquisition? None to be acquired at CDNIS. My whole mandarin class speaks very little mandarin, if any at all. Or my whole grade, for that matter. Except maybe for bs, because you've been speaking it. You know nothing about education, or language acquisition, for that matter.
"I have offered much more precise information"
- this is exactly your problem, you'll find in life "precise information" will only get you so far, that between people, experiences, and things such as connection between people, laughter, love, will be much more important than sheer results on a sheet of paper.
"Whatever your personal opinion might be, a school's exam results are usually taken to be a fair indication of how 'good' the program is. For example, I would like to know if the immersion program at KCIS can offer a 6.9/7 average across the 56% who took Mandarin as Language B in last year's IB results."
- If your definition of how "good" a program is simply numbers on a sheet of paper then I truly feel bad for you.
I guess what really angers me is that you speak as if a "good" program, a bunch of scores represent everything in a school, including the well being of its students. You are wrong. Your behavior on this forum is pure ego and cowardice, I almost laughed when you told people to PM you about information about CDNIS. That would defeat the point of this forum.
Regards, thelonewalker
CDNIS Graduating Class of 2011
Offers from: U of T, York, Carleton, and so on.
But then again, this is all just from 8 years of experience in CDNIS.
I don't have your "expertise".
But I would never send my kid to CDNIS.
