We’ve (my wife and I) have gone to a couple of Parent/Teacher conferences. My wife usually goes to my daughter’s teacher and I split up and go to our exchange student’s teachers.
I am happy to say things are going well. The teachers seem to have an understanding on how Aya comprehends and grades accordingly. As I would imagine, it isn’t in their best interest that a poor grade is given if a student is trying and does over 5-6 hours of homework every night (compared to an average American student who does 2-3hrs). There are 2 other exchange students at the High School both from different organizations, one from Brazil and the other from Thailand.
I had learned that both of them had many more years of English than Aya (who had only 3 years of it). I know I say only 3 years, but if you were to take Spanish or French and get placed into an All Spanish or French school – I would expect more than half of us would flounder under the pressure of mental translation and understanding and to perform the written homework in a non-native language. It boggles the mind to think that someone can do it on only 3 years of English.
Aya doesn’t feel she is getting better in her language skills; both auditory and spoken language. On the contrary I sense that she is improving very well, hence the whole idea of immersion.
I recently learned the girl from Thailand had been taught English since the 3rd Grade. I am not sure about the boy from Brazil, though I heard he was a good soccer (football) player but wanted to try something different and chose to take American football and joined the team – not sure how successful he is, however he had made the sport cover page of the local paper.
I am happy to say things are going well. The teachers seem to have an understanding on how Aya comprehends and grades accordingly. As I would imagine, it isn’t in their best interest that a poor grade is given if a student is trying and does over 5-6 hours of homework every night (compared to an average American student who does 2-3hrs). There are 2 other exchange students at the High School both from different organizations, one from Brazil and the other from Thailand.
I had learned that both of them had many more years of English than Aya (who had only 3 years of it). I know I say only 3 years, but if you were to take Spanish or French and get placed into an All Spanish or French school – I would expect more than half of us would flounder under the pressure of mental translation and understanding and to perform the written homework in a non-native language. It boggles the mind to think that someone can do it on only 3 years of English.
Aya doesn’t feel she is getting better in her language skills; both auditory and spoken language. On the contrary I sense that she is improving very well, hence the whole idea of immersion.
I recently learned the girl from Thailand had been taught English since the 3rd Grade. I am not sure about the boy from Brazil, though I heard he was a good soccer (football) player but wanted to try something different and chose to take American football and joined the team – not sure how successful he is, however he had made the sport cover page of the local paper.
We told Aya, she could suffer a letter grade in order to enjoy life in the America a little more - since most of her time home from school was put into doing essays for History class.
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