In recent weeks, The Rebellion has been inundated with letters from alumni advocating for Foreign Languages in the middle school. Every Monday a letter will be posted from an alumnus. The following is by Leigh Ricci-Williams, a Foreign Language teacher for the Foxborough Public School system and a graduate of Walpole High School.
As a proud graduate of the Walpole Public Schools Foreign Language program I am, to put it frankly, appalled at the prospect of cutting the middle school French and Spanish programs. I am currently a middle school French and Spanish teacher in Foxborough, and frequently brag about my experience in the Walpole Foreign Language program. With its expert and passionate staff, most of my peers studied not only French or Spanish, but also Latin. I am one of the lucky few who took advantage of the opportunity to take all three languages. To say that my studies in the Walpole Public Schools foreign language program have had an impact on my life would be an understatement. Without my foreign language education in the Walpole Public Schools I wouldn’t be remotely close to the confident, well-educated woman that I am today. It has had such a deep impact on my life that I cannot even separate it from myself, who I am, who I’ve become. It is just a part of me and my view of how I fit in to the world I live in.
My experience in the Walpole Public schools foreign language program has shaped me into the eager and global learner that defines who I am. My experience as a middle school French student awaked my love of learning. I had always been a good student, and a motivated learner, but in my French classes I began to really develop my thirst for knowledge. The idea of being able to communicate globally, study other cultures, and really delve into the historical events that have shaped our world into what it is today illuminated my outlook on life and the world in which we live.
In the Foreign Language classroom, I had so much fun that I didn’t even realize I was doing work! When I entered the high school, there was no doubt in my mind that I would take Latin. There, I gained a new perspective on language learning. In the Latin classroom, I focused on our ancient history, and how it shaped our current society. Without my Latin roots, I would not be the well-equipped reader and learner that I was in college and continue to be today. My study of Greek and Roman mythology opened my eyes to human nature. For how many thousands of years have we sought the answers to the very same questions? For how long have we held art as a means for conveying emotions inexplicable through words? All this I gained through just four years of Latin; four years that never would have happened if I hadn’t begun my French studies in middle school. How many students would feel ready to start two languages in high school, after never having any previous language learning experience?
I now spend my days sharing my passion with my students, and watching many of them uncover that desire to be lifelong learners and globally aware citizens. This is what the middle school students will be deprived of if the program is cut. There is great value in the ability to express one’s thoughts, opinions, ideas, and knowledge to a wider and ever-expanding audience. To whom is that not an extremely valuable skill? A far greater loss, however, would be the loss of the understanding that cultural perceptions of the world differ, and that in communicating we must be sensitive to those perceptions. The greatest loss that the students of Walpole would incur would be to miss the opportunity to come to the realization that there is a whole world out there waiting to be discovered. Children need to develop this understanding through their own experiences as early as possible. In order to have the proper perspective of who they are, how they fit into the world, and why they are learning anything that they are learning in school they need to come to this understanding on their own, while they are still young.
Some may say that students could gain this understanding in high school. However, do we really believe that this is not a monumental truth? Do we really believe that foreign language learning is just something to tack onto our education at the end for good measure? We’ve all heard the research that there is a small window for language development in childhood that we’re already missing. We are already behind so many nations in our teaching of language and our value in being multi-lingual. Can we really afford to miss the window for being open to the idea that the world is bigger than we could possibly imagine, that there are so many cultures, customs, and stories to be learned, that we are just one piece of this beautiful puzzle? We are just a small part of the human race. What kind of citizens do we want to send into the world: global learners ready and eager to gain as much as they can, or ethnocentric anglophones who see other languages as a hobby, an extra, a non-essential part of their education?
