Spring Bulletin 2012 - The Park School

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� Liga Aldins French and Spanish In her 34 years at Park, Liga has worn many hats. In 1977, she began as a Nursery teacher (coteaching with Andrew Segar), taught library classes to Park’s youngest students, worked as a secondary school counselor for Grades VI and VIII, and helped Comfort Cope with the student community service organization, Helping Hand. Since 1981, Liga has donned a French chapeau, adding a sombrero in 1991, when the School added Spanish to the curriculum. In the ensuing years, Liga has enjoyed organizing and chaperoning ninth grade trips to France and Spain, as well as her longtime role as a Grade VI advisor. Liga, who hails from Latvia, earned a BA and MA in French at Tufts University. She also studied for a year in Paris at the Sorbonne University. During a sabbatical year, the Aldins family lived in Riga, Latvia, where Liga taught French and English. “Park’s program is very intentional. Every student in a sixth grade language classroom is starting from zero, so every piece is dissected and taught.” 8 The Park School Bulletin | L A N G U A G E WHY BEGIN IN GRADE VI? hile numerous studies indicate that very W young children can learn to speak foreign languages easily in a bilingual or immersion environment, typical language programs for elementary school students offer only one or two hours of class per week. Students do become familiar with vocabulary and may pick up the accent from years of exposure, but are not really further ahead of Park students who begin in Grade VI. Alan explains, “Many programs, and particularly immersion programs, avoid teaching grammar altogether. While there certainly are advantages to those kinds of programs, they often assume children will figure out grammatical structures as they would in their first language. Unfortunately, that is not always the case with second language learning.” Kathy Come, who joined Park’s Modern Language Department in September, agrees, saying, “I came from a school that pretty much did that. The students started Spanish in Kindergarten, but never learned any grammar because it was supposed to happen naturally. I think it’s a lovely idea, but being in a classroom is not the same as being immersed in a culture and learning the language.” “In fact,” Liga Aldins points out, “Sometimes we get kids who speak Spanish at home but have never been taught any of the formal rules or parts of speech. So, they are on equal
footing conjugating verbs with their classmates who are learning the language for the first time.” Maria Alvarez adds, “Park’s program is very intentional. Every student in a sixth grade language classroom is starting from zero, so every piece is dissected and taught.” HISTORY or most of Park’s 123 years, students learned F French and Latin. The 1910 catalogue indicates that French was required of all students in Grades V and above. Younger children (in Kindergarten through Grade IV) could study the language for an additional $25 per year. The status quo prevailed for nearly a century. In 1990, then Headmaster Bob Hurlbut announced that after nearly twenty years of debate, the School would add Spanish to the curriculum the following academic year. Why had it taken so long? “Historically,” Bob writes in the April 1990 issue of The Park Parent, “the chief bugaboo was a financial one. How could we add a language without increasing the faculty?” With creative brainstorming, the School managed to overcome this and other, lesser hurdles so that all sixth graders would now have a choice of studying French, Latin, or Spanish. The addition of Spanish required a more streamlined approach to foreign language study. Beginning in the 1990–91 year, Park discontinued the honors and regular sections of French and Latin and offered a single, homogenized level at each grade instead. At the same time, the Language Skills course (taken by sixth graders deemed ‘not ready’ to study a language) was eliminated but the content was integrated into the Grade VI English curriculum for all students. Adding a third language to Park’s course catalogue further cemented the idea of a Grade IX language trip as an intentional component of the curriculum. In March 1990, Greg Grote and Steve Kellogg had taken seven Grade IX Latin students on a 1,100-mile loop along Hadrian’s Wall to explore England’s cultural and historical heritage, focusing on the period of Roman occupation. The trip was heralded a huge success and quickly became institutionalized. A few years earlier, an optional eighth and ninth grade French Exchange Program with schools in LeMans and Paris had grown so popular that it became difficult to manage the more than 50 student travelers. In 1988, French Department Chair Susan Coe Adams decided to limit the trip to ninth graders. Soon after that, the October “exchange” with students from French schools was dropped and the trip took on the same outline as the Latin trip — an immersion experience for Park students in March. Park’s first class of Spanish students journeyed to Leon, Spain in March 1994. Writing in The Park Parent nearly 25 years ago, Bob Hurlbut explained that the addition of Spanish only served to strengthen Park’s language curriculum: “The overall goals of our foreign language program remain the same: to provide every Park student with a successful experience in studying his or her first foreign language (whether modern or classical) and to give these young people an appreciation of a culture and language different from their own, as they become citizens of tomorrow’s more international and interdependent world. “ Maria Fleming Alvarez ’81 Spanish Maria was a Nursery student at the “old” Park School, completing Grades K-VI at the Goddard Avenue campus. Ironically, as a fifth grader, she was deemed not ready for a second language. Instead, she was placed into the Language Arts class (a grammar and vocabulary course no longer offered), which she loved. She went on to study both French and Latin at Milton Academy, spending 11th grade in France with School Year Abroad. In college at the University of California, Berkeley, she picked up Spanish and spent her junior year in Madrid, where she met her Spanish husband, Alfonso Alvarez. In 1989, she earned a MA from Middlebury College and began teaching Spanish at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, California. Since arriving at Park in 2001 to teach Spanish, Maria has added secondary school counselor, eighth grade advisor, and part-time archivist to her resume. The Park School Bulletin | Spring 2012 9
Page 1 and 2: The Park School Spring Bulletin 201
Page 3 and 4: Dear Friends, In this issue of the
Page 5 and 6: “PARK21”: A STRATEGIC PLAN FOR
Page 7 and 8: 21ST CENTURY LEARNING • Greater f
Page 12 and 13: Mulian Chen Mandarin After earning
Page 14 and 15: Alan Rivera French and Spanish Alan
Page 16 and 17: G R A D E I X : S T U D Y I N G L A
Page 18 and 19: �anguage A L U M N I P R O F I L
Page 20 and 21: Tracy Slater ’82 Freelance writer
Page 22 and 23: it’s a bit of a mystery as to how
Page 24 and 25: After Grades I through III at Park,
Page 26 and 27: Benjamin Stevens ’00 Candidate fo
Page 28 and 29: After ten years at Park (Nursery- G
Page 30 and 31: Bassil Bacare ’11 Spanish student
Page 32 and 33: Hilary Grinker Musser ’79 and her
Page 34 and 35: Diana, Lisa, and Mark have continue
Page 36 and 37: Hilary Sargent ’94 and son, Dash.
Page 38 and 39: S O U T H E N D P A R T Y Kathrene
Page 40 and 41: 1 Clockwise from top: 1. Mabel Gant
Page 42 and 43: R E M E M B E R I N G . . . Sara Na
Page 44: The Park School 171 Goddard Avenue

Spring Bulletin 2012 - The Park School

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