Globe and Mailcolumnist Margaret Wente’s piece “There's just one problem with French immersion ... well, several, actually,” posted June 4, was absolutely spot on.
I know because we lived it.
Wente talked about how French immersion programs are closet elite programs within the school system, and how few kids who go into it actually end up fluent in the language.
Check and check.
While we live one block from a public school and two blocks from a Catholic school (with French immersion), our choice of school in Estevan was largely based on my experiences in North Battleford.
As an air cadet instructor, I did recruiting sessions in almost every school in the Battlefords. There were some very distinct trends I found. Kids in the public system were rowdier, distracted and doing a half-hour presentation for them closely approximated herding cats. In the Catholic system, kids were much better behaved and inquisitive. In the French immersion system, they were pretty much all focused, attentive and eager to ask questions.
I wanted our kids to go to a school where God has a place. However, we’re not Catholic, but Protestant. Since I believe, as Christians, we’re all playing on the same team, that doesn’t make much difference, I want to send my kids to a Christian school. But when we looked into registering the kids here, we were told, “Oh, no, you need to be Catholic, or in the French immersion program.”
So we registered our property taxes with the Catholic system and put Katrina into French immersion Pre-kindergarten. She remained in the program through kindergarten, Grade 1 and 2. By the end of that, we pulled the plug. She could neither read nor write in English or French to any sort of capacity expected at that grade level. We had to do something, now.
It was at that time we found out, oh, you don’t have to be in French immersion to go to the Catholic school. Gee, thanks. Spencer was spared French immersion entirely.
As Wente pointed out, “For many parents, French immersion is a way to game the system. It filters out the kids with behavioural problems and special needs, along with the low achievers. In short, it’s a form of streaming. Most French-immersion students are from affluent, high-achieving families that work hard to give their children an edge. And who can blame them?”
From what I saw, through cadets and working as a reporter, is this was precisely the case. Parents who will go through that extra effort of putting their kids into French immersion are parents who, frankly, give a damn. They are more involved with their kids, and thus their kids generally do better overall. Conversely, problem kids often have parents who won’t make such an effort, and thus are self-weeded from the program. I would say we found this to be very much true.
But the last time I had any exposure to French was core French in Grade 12 back in 1992. For my wife, Michelle, she didn’t even take French that far. So we were functionally useless in all capacities for helping Katrina with her homework. We found ourselves turning to Google Translate for everything.
Marcus Gee writing “French immersion could do with a dose of reality” in the June 3 Globe and Mail, pointed out French immersion often ends up with poor quality teachers. Gee wrote, “It’s hard to find French-immersion teachers. The shortage is chronic. Schools scramble to fill immersion teaching posts and end up with a lot of teachers who can’t teach, can’t speak very good French or can’t do either.”
We had one teacher that was great – lots of homework (mostly vocabulary, which is absolutely necessary in a second language), and a second that was, um, not so great. Halfway through the year we realized she had stopped assigning homework early in the year. Why? A few parents made comments on the amount of homework, so she stopped.
One friend, a teacher, suggested, “One of the requirements should be a parent who is fluent in French. The reality is kids get homework. If the parents cannot help with homework you are setting them up for failure and if they are not fluent, better be prepared to spend money on weekly French tutors. And that leads into the upper crust only discussion.”
In an effort to put our kids in a Christian school, I made a mistake I feel is on parallel with my own flunking out of engineering. Thankfully, four years later, we seem to have been able to finally get caught up and made up for those four essentially wasted years.
If I knew a smart remark in French, I would insert it here. I don’t.
French immersion isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.
