TA: Sudden change!

I just had a minor epiphany, I guess you could term it. Instead of trying to reform high school foreign language education programs, I am now thinking about starting from the bottom, as it were. I want to write about second language education starting in elementary schools. I base this partially on my experience as a Kindergartener. In Atlanta (Metropolitan Atlanta, that is) I began speaking Spanish at a very young age. In Kindergarten I had a Spanish class every single day with this woman from Puerto Rico. Because of that continual exposure, as well as the presence of Hispanic children around me, I was able to learn the Spanish language. I am fluent in it now today largely due to that early experience. (Of course, my Spanish accent is all over the place, since I started with Puerto Rican Spanish and then got exposed to Guatemalan, Spaniard, Venezuelan, Dominican, and Mexican dialects over the years and married into a Mexican-American family :)

Annnyway, as I was saying, the school district to whom I want to write this paper is:
The Gwinnett County (Georgia) School System

The point I want to get across is that implementing second language education from Kindergarten to high school graduation will improve children's test scores, and enable to them to communicate with a much broader base of people.

Now, I won't go into everything right here and now on this blog, but I do want to go over a source I wish to use. There was this project that was tried on the Lincoln Public Schools District by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Reviewing the entirety of the article at this point is not feasible, but the article explains the methodology for teaching the students at first. The teachers would begin on a broader scale and narrow down the conversations and lessons into a narrower, more developed vein. The beginners had no text books, as text books are useless for Kindergarteners. The teachers would only introduce broad topics and introduce simple concepts. As the children progressed, the teachers would make the conversations more specific and applicable to a certain aspect of life, and then textbooks would start to be introduced. Those teachers who were not native speakers and/or needed further training to teach higher levels, took classes given by the school district to better qualify them to teach older kids.

Now, I know that there is a lot of subjective wording here. I also know that there are those who will say, "Well yeah, it might be possible in some places, but in GEORGIA? Georgia only has whites and blacks!" That assumption is wrong. Gwinnett is the perfect place to implement foreign language education from Kindergarten. Gwinnett is a hodgepodge of everything under the sun, especially Hispanic immigrants. There are plenty of chances to use basically any major foreign language you have under your belt. The Board will know that, and I will show them the benefits and feasibility of second language education from Kindergarten.