by Tracy López for Mamiverse
It’s the worst nightmare of a parent trying to raise a bilingual child.
“I hate Spanish class and I have all my foreign language credits now—I don’t want to take it next year. Are you going to make me?”
Those were the words of my 14 year old son, a well-behaved, straight-A student who is involved in all kinds of extracurricular activities and a highly selective academic program. He’s in advanced classes, including Honors Biology, where he’s one of only two freshman in a classroom full of sophomores. In other words he’s a great kid, an excellent student, and he’s not bailing on Spanish class because of laziness.
For a while I refused to hear my son out. He had already skipped ahead to Spanish III this year thanks to the Spanish he’s learned at home, but I wanted him to go on to Spanish IV next year. I wanted him to take Advanced Placement, college-level Spanish after that. I wanted him to love Spanish the way I do, to realize this is the only opportunity he has to learn the language formally since we don’t live near (and could never afford) a dual-immersion school.
READ RELATED: A CASE FOR BILINGUAL EDUCATION
After weeks of putting it off, an upcoming appointment with his guidance counselor to discuss next year’s scheduling forced me to sit down to talk about the issue. I reluctantly asked my son why he wanted to drop Spanish in his next academic year and discovered that as usual, he was making a mature, well-thought out decision and not one based on impulse. Among his arguments for wanting to drop Spanish, here are a few of the reasons we discussed.
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