The struggle of the language teachers and the language department is well-known around campus, with the combination of French 1 and 3, the rush to get from El Roble to CHS to teach German, and so much more.
French teacher Madame Wright and German teacher Frau Tsai juggling not two, not three, but four to six different levels and types of classes (including honors, AP, and IB), border on the realm of legend. Problems of stress, scheduling, and so much more are only going to be exacerbated by El Roble becoming a MYP school.
The implementation of the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP) has been a highly covered topic by the Wolfpacket in the past few years. A brief rundown: the MYP is a continuation of the high school IB Diploma Programme, which CHS students can choose to take part in starting from their junior year. The MYP begins in seventh grade and goes to tenth grade, where students are taught to be global citizens and make connections between classes and the real world. In the past few years, CHS and El Roble have been slowly transitioning to add MYP courses to their curriculums, by replacing honors courses with MYP and increasing the percentage of El Roble students taking languages.
The Middle Years Programme spans eight different subject groups, ranging from mathematics and science to the arts and language acquisition. Any MYP program must offer at least two languages, which explains last-year’s addition of German to the classes that El Roble offers. Students in the MYP must take a foreign language course every year in order to remain in the MYP, which explains the dramatic increase of seventh and eighth graders learning a language. However, the lack of resources at CUSD to support further language programs at El Roble and CHS only restricts and reduces the diversity of the languages at both schools. Language teachers are unsupported with their workloads, and lack of further hiring to help those teachers means that at some point, something must bend.
At the current standpoint, there is only one Spanish teacher, Martin Renteria, and one German teacher, Jennifer Tsai, at El Roble. Spanish classes operate on an A/B schedule going to their two electives, one every other day, with Renteria teaching classes to hundreds of students per week. On the other hand, only two German classes exist during the A/B schedule for zero period, as Tsai teaches both at El Roble as well as most of the German program, years 1-4 at CHS (Tamara Nicoll teaches a class of German 2). All of this is not enough to cover the entire population of El Roble, especially considering the fact that El Roble is in the midst of fully transitioning to a MYP school. Yet, as the language departments struggle to keep up with the number of students, the school district remains impartial to adding more language teachers to the curriculum.
The lack of language teachers to help balance out the number of students each language teacher is given to teach, only indicates failure for the administration to acknowledge the effects of adding MYP to El Roble.
French and German are historically single-teacher programs, with single instructors who teach classes from levels 1 to 4, including Honors 3 programs, and AP and IB Level 4. The stress that Frau Tsai and Madame Wright are under, not even counting the pressure that comes from teaching two more classes at El Roble, is something that many students at CHS are aware of.
With the implementation of MYP languages in El Roble last year, the number of students in the German program dramatically increased, so much so that English teacher, Tamara Nicoll, has been teaching another section of the traditionally single-class German 2. And yet, it seems as if the school district is not supporting the plight of the language teachers and the struggle of the language department burning out in the future.
Tsai and Wright should not be expected to teach classes at El Roble, considering they are already teaching a full complement of classes at CHS. In fact, both are already teaching an overage — an extra class, six rather than the regular five that teachers do. Seven is essentially impossible, and teaching only five means a lack of support for each language. Yet, in order to continue the MYP program and have two languages offered, one of them must teach at El Roble — otherwise the entire MYP program fails. While German is currently at El Roble, French is not, meaning that as more and more students at El Roble take a language, the number of students willing to take French in high school will diminish. Students with a head start in Spanish or German would most likely elect to continue in those languages in high school, bypassing French entirely. If this continues, it is a significant possibility that the French program will disappear and the German program will become too much to handle. CUSD must hire another French teacher and another German teacher, at least part-time, in order to make sure that these languages do not fail.
While the intent of MYP is to create a worldly student population, at this point in time, it only serves to limit the exposure the students will have to various cultures and languages around the world. As MYP moves to encompass the entirety of El Roble, there must be more support for all language teachers and all languages in order to preserve Spanish, French, and German at CHS in the future.
