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Madame Amy Roznos is seated at her computer, working on assignments for her French students. She has been greatly affected by language cuts as she is the only French teacher, and her classes have been cut down to French 3 and below. Photo by Bella Smith
students the ability to learn a second language, which I feel can be very beneficial to them when they grow up,” Mr. Wolfe said. “I think learning another language not only benefits the student by knowing a second language, but it also stretches the brain a bit and helps a student learn to get out of their comfort zone.” Former Spanish student Ally Brower is a junior who took three years of Spanish before deciding to switch out Spanish with a different class. “I used it mostly as a filler class. Yeah, Spanish was like an important thing to know, but it didn’t really feel like I was retaining anything,” Brower said. “I had a bunch of classes to take instead this year. And so I just couldn’t fit into my schedule.” Head of the World Language Department, and one of the Spanish teachers, Dr. Jennifer Miller shared how a class makes it to the final schedule. “Everybody enrolls in December, January, and then the principal takes all those numbers, and they say, we’re gonna put an average of, say, 26 kids in a class. They’ll do the math and figure out, say, 200 kids signed up for Spanish two. We divide that by 26, we get roughly eight sessions of Spanish 2. So I get those numbers from the principal and then I try to build a schedule.” Dr. Miller said. “Sometimes the principal comes to me and says … not many kids signed up for this language class … Sometimes we can run this class if we combine it with another class and then sometimes there’s just not room.” Dr. Miller thinks that students perceive Spanish as easier than French and German, and therefore decide to take it for easier points, but there’s actually much nuance in what language a student would be best taking. “There’s this perception that Spanish is the easy one. And so we get a lot of people that think, well, French and German are hard, which is not true. They all have their pluses and minuses as far as easy and hard,” Dr. Miller said. “If you want to be an engineer, you should probably take German. If you want to be a chef or work in fashion, maybe French is the right idea because there’s a lot of people you’re going to be working with who speak French in those areas.” Dr. Miller continues to expand on her ideas by reiterating the fact that she believes that students stop learning the language at the most pivotal part of the learning process. “Level two, you really start to see how knowing this language can benefit you and the rest of the world and stopping after level two is like running a marathon and stopping after like the first mile,” Dr. Miller said. “ It’s like why did you even bother?”
