San Diego School Superintendent announced it would not allow ICE

[BigmanPigman]

on school sites to apprehend dreamers due to tue DACA decision. This was declared during the Defend DACA rally last night and was followed through today in a notice to teachers and parents. When your enter the school system you are required to complete a " Home Language Survey" as well as proof of residence. All students are welcome whether or not they are legal citizens. Being able to speak English is not a requirement. This has been the standard practice for over 20 years. Many of my former student did not speak English nor did their parents. Translators were provided during parent teacher conferences and meetings. Other students were more than happy to help and translate in the classrooms. We also tested in many languages (Tagalog, Spanish, Vietnamese, etc.). The multi culture classroom environment is a positive experience for parents, teachers and students.

This is what the rest of the country should be supporting and doing.

[lapfog_1]

1. how many DACA dreamers

are high school age or younger?

Most are college age or older now, right?

[BigmanPigman]

5. MY neighbor who teaches in high school told me yesterday

that they have many dreamers at his school but you aren't allowed to ask questions about subjects like this. It is a privacy issue I guess. Since San Diego is the 5th largest district in the country there are many dreamers in our schools as well as the entire city and state. San Diego borders Mexico after all. Our city and state also has a large Asian community.

[Ligyron]

2. RESIST!!!

[DFW]

3. Here in Germany

Some 25 years ago, a French family moved into our neighborhood. He was an engineer of some kind, and his company had stationed him in Düsseldorf for three years to sort out some technical thing or other. There were two small girls in the family, and the younger one was in the class of my younger daughter at the local elementary school. I volunteered one day to help out the class because they were short of staff, and the French girl spent the whole morning telling me about her family and her home back in France--in French, of course. She didn't speak a word of German yet, but her parents placed her cold turkey into the local German elementary school. The class teacher was stunned, commenting that this girl never said a word in class, and yet here she was talking a blue streak to me. I said, "that is probably due to the fact that she hasn't the faintest idea what you are saying."

But children pick up things quickly (she and my daughter were 7 or 8). By the end of the second year, this girl not only spoke accent-free perfect German, but was also among the top three in her class.

Can you imagine how far she would have gotten if there had been some kind of cultural police lurking to exclude kids who didn't speak German?

[BigmanPigman]

4. I am not surprised. Immersion works really well.

When I went to teacher training courses (required by all teachers in the state of CA) we had to learn how to teach second language children. Every teacher had to get a special, separate credential. I learned that when a child is about 6 years old the area of the brain that learns a language is very large. By the time a person is 21 that same area has shrunk to about 1/10 of its original size. That is one reason kids can learn languages much faster and easier than adults. The kids can transfer one language to another rapidly.