You’d think that a Mandarin immersion program in an elementary school would take off and even flourish in a place like Palo Alto, where people live in a politically progressive, multicultural community that’s attuned to what it takes to be competitive in a global economy and has the resources to make the necessary changes. That’s not what happened this week, when the school board voted down (3-2) a proposal to create 2 Mandarin classes for about 20 kindergarteners and first graders.

What the hell happened in Palo Alto?

News reports listed a couple reasons. The Associated Press reported that people didn’t like how it took resources away from more pressing issues like getting test scores up in reading and math, and The New York Times made vague intimations of racism against Asians. One board member was also quoted as saying that "Unless we have a language opportunity for all elementary kids, this is a problem.”

I still want to know more about the politics on the ground, but is it really that bad for foreign language programs elsewhere? It sounds like Palo Alto’s schools are very competitive, and that non-Asian parents resent the growing Asian population (17%), who they think will have an advantage in the classes. So rather than creating a Mandarin elite in Palo Alto, the school board decided to deny it for everyone. Maybe this is why Chinese classes could fly in the Chicago schools I visited last year – no one was exactly dying to get into them otherwise. And this story in the San Francisco
Chronicle showed how a dual immersion Mandarin-English program was moved to this school in order to diversify schools via parent choice.

That’s a rich irony: underperforming schools will get language resources that the overperforming schools don’t. It's probably not repeatable, though, particularly since politics on the ground will allocate resources away from language education. Still, with all the media fervor about the popularity of Chinese classes, action by the College Board, and action at the federal level to promote language learning, there's no predicting what politics on the ground will yield -- even in the places where you'd predict it to go in your favor.

UPDATE:
Here's a discussion thread on a Palo Alto forum, with postings from parents, some of whom are both undereducated about language acquisition and -- it seems to me -- micromanaging their kids' education. Fortunately, there are also some strong advocates of the Mandarin program taking questions and handing out websites.

UPDATED UPDATE:
According to a contact who's in the language acquisition business, the immersion plan wasn't going to work, anyway. The little kids should at least get 40-minute classes; save the immersion for later, if you develop it at all -- he pointed out that the Chinese immersion program in Portland kept only a few students by the time they were in 8th grade. So Mandarin immersion in Palo Alto was doomed as much by its zealous supporters as well as zealous parents?

Here's a modest story by Rachael King, a reporter in Oregon and a Columbia University comparative literature grad, which may explain why, despite its modestness, I like her story about a local police chief who's studying Persian.

Why?

1. She gets the global facts right and cites her sources:

Persian is considered more difficult for English speakers to learn than Romantic languages like French, Italian and Spanish, but easier than Arabic or Mandarin Chinese, according to the National Virtual Translation Center, an office of the federal government. The language uses a modified version of the Arabic alphabet that has 32 letters and looks very different from English.

That last sentence could use some work -- does the language or the alphabet look different from English? But she sneaks in the info that "Persian" is sometimes called "Farsi." This makes me suspect that she originally wrote "Roman alphabet" but some dim-thinking, fast-working editor changed it.

2. It portrays how he's studying the language and what he expects to do with it, and portrays them realistically. This leads to some intriguing narrative bits:

Bush said he does not expect the ability to speak Persian to come in handy as a police officer in Prineville. He added that he also speaks German and has only needed to use that language twice in his years of work as a Prineville police officer.

(I wonder what those two instances were?)

From a general reporter, this is pretty good stuff.

The Department of Justice requested in its 2008 budget that the NVTC receive $3.5 million to "provide translation services at the Intelligence Community Linguistic Exploitation Program."

And that's the only item in this press release describing any budget items for language, folks. And that's a $21.8 billion budget request.

Right out of college I worked at a law firm in Minneapolis, entering the medical records of asbestos plaintiffs into a computer. It was a hell of a way to save up money for foreign adventures.* Back home from said foreign adventures a couple of years later, I worked for a small-town lawyer and also as an administrative assistant for a chemical engineering professor at MIT. Other secretarial jobs came and, even though they went, I continued to spend plenty of time as a teacher, an academic, and a writer doing that awkward sterile mating dance with photocopiers. Some were sleek. Others were balky as old chainsaws. That humans should mingle with photocopiers at all in the time of cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop is curious. But it gives teaching a special drama if your fingers are deep in the copier’s inscrutable trays ten minutes before class. And there’s nothing else like photocopying all 300 or so pages of one’s copyedited and factchecked manuscript before sending it back to the publisher, as I did today, to bring rushing back all the loathsome time I spent photocopying someone else’s stuff. Who cares that I’m photocopying? Nobody. Yet I’m copying my first book, and I knew that acutely. That gap was delicious. I don’t know that I ever wished for or even imagined such a moment, but I’m so very glad to be having it.

*For one thing my plans to go to Asia were almost derailed when I was recommended for a job in Alaska to work on Exxon Valdez cases for local plaintiffs. After fantasizing about the frigid north for a while, I didn't get the job. I also sat in a cube across from the office from a tall, lean, blonde, beautiful woman lawyer who might done some law but more likely was a secret weapon employed to rain distraction against the opposition. Also distracting legal secretaries in the cubes.

"Thanks for picking up the clothes."

Pause.

"I mean, the dishes."

Pause.

"Heh, that was a good one."

From a set of powerpoints for a talk, "How to have a bad career in research/academia," by David Patterson

7 Talk Commandments for a Bad Career

I. Thou shalt not illustrate.
II. Thou shalt not covet brevity.
III. Thou shalt not print large.
IV. Thou shalt not use color.
V. Thou shalt not skip slides in a long talk.
VI. Thou shalt cover thy naked slides.
VII. Thou shalt not practice.

Includes other gems, such as "Let Complexity Be Your Guide
(Confuse Thine Enemies)," "Don’t be Distracted by Others (Avoid Feedback)," and "Be THE leading expert."

See, one of the reasons to keep googling, nexising, and whatevering your name is that old pubs are still putting their archives online. Which is how I discovered a review in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of the 1999 version of the anthology, New Stories from the South, in which appears my last piece of fiction. The reviewer, Michael Gills, who taught creative writing in Arkansas back then and is at the University of Utah nowadays, had this astoundingly positive thing to say:

If everything rides on telling the right story, and if the right story in this collection is one that somehow reconfigures tired southernisms, then Michael Erard's "Beyond The Point" (North American Review) is pivotal. All the foundation stones are here from the word go: "That summer when we were looking for something, we used to congregate at the Big House at South Point . . . . Some of us harbored anarchist dreams. The revolution had been unleashed, and we were partisans living off the fat of the toppled aristocracy . . . ." In this story, the "Big House" has been vacated, its former tenants gone for good, and the lonely offspring forced to realize what, if any, possibilities remain in their station. "Still, we never destroyed anything, except perhaps symbolically." One remembers Julian from "Everything That Rises Must Converge," how his dream in life, hypocritical to the core, was to one day return to the plantation of his youth. In Erard's story, such a return has occurred, only with startling repercussions: "But we hadn't come to the Big House to be reminded of truths . . . We moved with a singular idea in mind, away from the electrical light. Returned to amniotic baths, naked as we'd come. This was what we wanted . . . . If you didn't start over like this, you'd misunderstand your life's vividness, which was always about to begin . . . ." The story's final move, its crucial utterance, responds directly to Flannery O'Connor and the roots of a Southern literary lineage: "If you didn't disperse, you wouldn't know what it meant to be together. . . . So we waded out further, by ourselves . . . further and further . . . in the lapping dark seamed with glitters above and below."

That's a nice surprise. I think I'll keep nexising.

Lest I concern myself only with language errors, I'll pass along this story. Associated Press reports that a copper sculpture of a crane, valued at $3,000, which had been stolen but recovered was then mistaken for trash and thrown away.

The sculpture, stolen in November, is now believed to be buried under tons of trash at the Santa Cruz County dump.

"Somebody thought it was garbage," sheriff's Sgt. Fred Plageman said Tuesday...."It was human error on our part," Plageman said. "We are extremely disappointed and apologetic."

Speaking Together is a Robert Wood Johnson-funded project to test and disseminate methods for improving how hospitals provide language services. Right now, there are 10 testing sites in acute care hospitals. The program launched late in 2006.

The details will be interesting only to someone interested in health care administration, but the larger point is one that advocates of one society, one language (whether it's English or Esperanto) should heed: solutions to the problems posed by linguistic diversity don't have to have a linguistic solution. They can be social solutions as well. In fact, in a situation where someone needs care immediately, there isn't time for a linguistic solution. So a social solution is the only option.*

Much has been made in the past of Language Line, the telephone-based interpreter service. What's interesting about Speaking Together is that these sorts of technological solutions don't appear to be considered. This may reflect how the technology was never really suited for health care contexts, or how hospitals are committed to using local human resources first. Other reasons?

I first became interested in this question in grad school, where I spent a little time looking at the Bread & Roses strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. How did 25,000 striking mill employees organize, given that there were 21 languages (not sure of this number exactly) spoken among them all? Did bilingual/multilingual workers automatically become liaisons to centralized organizing committees? Or were leaders of language/ethnic groups chosen regardless of language ability but accompanied to meetings by interpreter types? What language(s) were meetings conducted in? Was language diversity ever an asset (e.g., meetings couldn't be surveilled as easily)? Strikers won their demands, if I remember correctly, though the gains were short-lived. I regret not getting into this more deeply, but there's a sociolinguistic thesis in here for someone who's less interested in ideology or identity than in operational questions (as I am).

*Linguistic solution = make everyone speak the same language.
Social solution = arrange, exploit, and develop existing human resources, both in individual and organizational terms, either temporarily or permanently

Medgadget reports that researchers at Cornell and the University of Washington are developing software so that compressed images of sign language can be transmitted via cellphone. The project is called MobileASL , and what's key here are cell phones and PDAs with larger screens, but also a skin detection capability in the video capture unit that focuses on hands and face, as well as some other detection of small and large movements.

Will be interesting to see how ASL via cellphone will change ASL, perhaps standardizing it.

Another modest but telling article about the birth of Spanish services in Minnesota churches. The reporter, Brooke Walsh, quotes one of the parishioners as saying, “It doesn’t matter if the language isn’t the same; it’s the presence of God." An associate pastor at another church said that "even though we may speak a different language, we are part of the same community of Jesus Christ.”

Banks and churches always have room for speakers of other languages. Oh, and I guess Nashville does, too. This last week, Mayor Bill Purcell vetoed an English-only ordinance passed by the city council. "If this ordinance becomes law, Nashville will become a less safe, less friendly and less successful city," the AP quoted Purcell as saying. "And as mayor, I cannot allow that to happen."

Big day in the writing life: bringing the books back to the library.

"That was a great scralp scatch."

"Heh."

"Scralp scatch. That's a good one."

Debbie Nathan is a writer who used to live in Texas; now she lives in New York City. When I met her in San Antonio, we had a great talk about language stuff; she did a MA in linguistics and has a great way of writing about language. (I'm still envious of her story for the Texas Observer about the evolution of the Texas accent , it's so well done.)

In 2002 she did another article for a NYC publication about teaching ESL in the Bronx, and I'm envious of this one, too. She wrote in the style of her students' English, but the manglings are never mocking and strike many notes of compassion and humor. It starts like this:

When I first working as ESL teacher twenty year ago I was be a little nervious. In that time I am more young than now, and when I turn around to writing at blackboard, I am think the students looking at my ass. But that a long time ago. Now my ass she is nothing for look.

Today I am teach in Bronx, my students from the Rep. Dominicana, from Mexico and from others Latinoamerica nation, many in this country too many years but they still speaking too less English and that English, it is just like this. Three hour a day three day a week, it student English have it own sabor it will get inside a teacher head and duration there even after class is finish. Inmigrant English living in the teacher mind even if teacher is no want.

The full article is here.

The Houston Chronicle recently did a story about the Texas Assessment of Knowledge of Skills (TAKS) test, which contains more and more questions written in Spanish, not simply translated from English. It's a good story, one that shows some appreciation for the difference between languages as a cultural one, not just a linguistic one.

Yet what caught my eye was this quote:

"If you're going to develop a test for a particular population, it should be developed and normed on the language that population speaks," said Angela Valenzuela, a professor in education at the University of Texas at Austin. "When it's not done that way, you really can't separate out linguistical errors from academic errors."

The word "linguistical" isn't actually a word. Or, not much of one: it gets all of 168 Google hits, one of which is Valenzuela's quote. The others appear to be ironic or written by non-native English speakers. Either Valenzuela was misquoted (by a writer who appeared to get so much other stuff right), or we have to say it's notable that the education professor, heralding a new sensitivity toward Spanish speakers, flubbed a word, an English word, and an English word about words. You'd think the reporter would extend the courtesy of cleaning the quote.

To compound the goofiness, I first read her quote in an emailed summary of UT professors in the news, which misquoted her:

"If you're going to develop a test for a particular population, it should be developed and normed on the language that population speaks," said Angela Valenzuela, an associate professor in education and Mexican-American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. "When it's not done that way, you really can't separate out linguistical errors from language errors."

(But based on the quote in the Chronicle, there's not much to separate "linguistical" from a language error, is there, Dr. Valenzuela?)

I've written before about Chinesepod, the Chinese language learning podcast out of Shanghai, which I'm listening to most mornings on my iPod at the gym.

From the ChinesePod blog comes this: a Chinese school in Portland, Oregon that's built around Chinesepod lessons and communities. What's interesting is that ChinesePod was designed according to a community-building model: you can download podcasts and read forums for free (extra lesson enhancers cost more), and listeners/users write in from all over the world to support each other, writing blogs about how their learning is going.

This Portland school is sort of an extended meet-up. It seems to be a natural next step for ChinesePod: the local outpost of a global community, instantiating in a specific place all the same community-building tools that ChinesePod has offered.

It's introduced here.

The Texas Observer just put online the piece I did about trying to pick up some Yucatec Maya on our honeymoon:

It’s a couple of days after Mel Gibson’s Mayan fantasy Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection.

Read the rest of the piece here.

...I wrote the "The Art of Identification" for Technology Review.

Last Sunday, two major papers (the NYT and the Detroit Free Press) published separate stories on foreign languages in baseball, the NYT about Japanese interpreters for major league Japanese players, the Freep about native English-speaking players picking up Spanish to talk to Cubans, Dominicans, and other Spanish-speaking players.

Of the two, from a journalist's perspective, the Times piece was better; the only glimpse the Freep reporter gives of an Anglo speaking Spanish is when Craig Monroe shouts "tengo hambre!" to himself.

Monroe wasn't speaking to anybody in particular. This is how he works at learning a second language, occasionally conversing with himself.

The Freep does talk about what teams potentially get out of the social cohesion that results from learning each other's language, as well as how attitudes about language on teams have changed.

Latin American players' early assimilation into America's baseball culture was often marked with derisive characterizations of the players' difficulties in grasping the English verbiage. So now the roles have changed with the English-speaking players having some difficulty in grasping Spanish.

But it lacked story and portrait and character. It was a softball. (OK, so maybe he drummed it out when he found out about the NYT piece, fair enough.)

By contrast, the Times gives you a quick image from the field, then broadens into context quickly, where baseball meets language meets business.

As the internationalization of Major League Baseball continues and more Japanese players come here to play, teams have increasingly been hiring interpreters to help ease their transition. Unlike Latin American players, who can usually find teammates, coaches and club officials who speak Spanish, Japanese players rarely have that option.

You get a sense of how various teams operate, and how much they're willing to pay their translators. (The Yankees pay too damn little -- $300,000 for an interpreter for two players who make a combined $17 million.) The piece is also sensitive to the fact that speakers of other languages (Chinese and Spanish) don't get interpreters; are they sore? Who knows.

But I wanted more from the Times piece. I wanted to hear more from the interpreters about this as a form of work, and how the game, the team, and fans look from their perspective. How fast do you have to work? How do you build rapport with a player? What if you don't? Do you have to know baseball? What if you don't? I also wanted more about the baseball slang that's hard to translate. And I wanted interpreting goof ups. ("Bunt! No, walk!")

In the end, neither story was gritty enough. I think the best example of this kind of story is the This American Life piece about Yao Ming's interpreter, done in 2003 or so. Until I get in the game, that is. Put me in the game, coach!