We went to Red Robin for lunch yesterday after Sunday morning meeting. Kelly wanted to do some research for her latest Betty Blonde story line on eating out. After that we went to the Barnes and Noble down the street to just look as some books and hang out for awhile in an air conditioned room. We will start studying Rosetta Stone French in a week or two. Rosetta Stone Spanish has served us well, but we already speak Spanish and mostly just used it as a way to work on vocabulary and to get some assured daily practice. We are not sure how well the French program will work with a wholly unknown language. At any rate, even though we plan to augment our French learning, if we can afford it, with a semester of French immersion, I thought it might be good to wander over to the French section to learn what I could learn.
When I got there, there was a middle age woman sitting smack dab in the middle of the narrow aisle right in front of the French section reading a book. I tried to look on either side of her without being too intrusive. The woman did not move. After about five minutes, she saw that I was not going away and that I really DID want to see the French language books. So she moved one leg a little and asked me, “Have you ever learned a foreign language?”
I said, “Yes, I have.”
She said, “Do you know of a program that is really good for learning a language.”
I explained that Rosetta Stone had been very good for us in our Spanish, but that we mostly already spoke the language when we started using it. We were planning to start French with Rosetta Stone with the hope that someday we would be able to spend a summer of immersion in Quebec.
She said, “Rosetta Stone is really bad for anything other than a supplement.”
I wondered why she had even asked the question, but the answer came fairly quickly. She explained to me that she homeschooled her children and they were all on their third or fourth language. She then asked me what English program we used. I told her we used Sonlight in conjunction with some supplementary materials. She told me that what we were doing was really bad and that I should use program “X” (I forget what it was). She said, “We have a friend who is a Literature professor at Johns Hopkins and he says most students coming into his Introductory Literature class do not even have the rudimentary skills to perform basic Shakespeare interpretation.”
I knew I was in for it when started railing on the evils of our local school system, stating that the schools where she came from in Maryland were monumentally better.
I said, “Well, it is a good thing you homeschool so you can teach your kids the way you want them to be taught.”
She said, “Well, I don’t because I want my kids to compete in the Olympiads.”
She had really not been homeschooling for quite awhile. She had her kids in one of the local government charter schools. She felt that they had to have a record of winning in academic competitions and recognized volunteer work if her kids were going to have any hope of getting into “one of the Ivy’s.”
I told her our kids were probably not going to go to one of the Ivy’s. I thought I was gracious in not saying that they would go to one of the Ivy’s over my dead body, which is my ususal comment in these kinds of situations.
She said, “Oh”, and walked away.