Diversity. The thing that makes everything diverse. Diversity in today’s world means we have a plethora of things of different characteristics that make something diverse. In school, we have a plethora of students from all over the world of many religions and nationalities. That makes the school diverse. We have 4 world language classes to reflect upon that diversity. Spanish, French, German and Chinese. We all have our own classes that we take. Despite this, does the amount of world language classes available reflect upon the diversity of our school? Here are a few opinions?
Yes, our school manages to reflect on our society’s diversity well enough:
Mine:
The languages offered are diverse in my opinion at least. These languages all cover different parts of the world. Spanish covers basically the majority of the countries in the Americas. It also covers Spain. Spanish is also spoken mostly in states near Mexico. French is another language that is widely spoken worldwide. In general, it’s spoken in many countries in Europe and Africa such as Monaco, France, Switzerland (all in Europe) and Tunisia, Rwanda and Algerie (all in Africa). German is mostly spoken in Europe in countries such as Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Liechtenstein though there are people worldwide speaking Germany. Chinese is mostly spoken in China although there are lots of people with chinese heritage worldwide. Overall, these are diverse languages offered though they aren’t the most diverse. The limiting factors are budgets, resources and how many students want to take the languages. In the past, languages such as Hindi and Latin were cut from our school and High School South respectively because of a lack of interest. Thus with 4 languages spanning across many countries we are diverse however not to an extreme point however.
One survey taker:
The thing that made choose this was that the world language course reflects on our society´s diversity because in our society, we have many people with different cultural background and traditions. These world languages allow us to peek into the lives of some of the citizens in this society. This is why I chose my answer.
One more survey taker:
I think the language courses offered in this middle school reflect the diversity of the kids in our school because they offer not just European languages like Spanish, and french, but they offer German and even Chinese. This was probably made to try to get the school to try to get the school to implement more languages but, most of the other languages are hard, one being Indian because it has so many versions and types.
One last survey taker to support this side of the argument:
I believe that the schools language options widely reflect the languages spoken worldwide. Simply aside the fact that they cover some of the most spoken languages, they also cover languages that reflect our society. From Spanish to Chinese, diversity is written everywhere in both our district, and our languages. If I had to recreate the system, I would do it exactly the same as it is currently set. Although the majority of the population is Indian, their country is split by a multitude of different- beautiful dialects. Because of this it is almost impossible for someone to teach “Indian”. In conclusion, the schools language options are definitely reflective of our society’s diversity.
No, our school does not manage to reflect on our society’s diversity well enough:
Rohan:
I think that the schools world language courses do not reflect upon our society’s diversity, but with the amount of expenses and staff it would use, it is understandable. If it did reflect upon our society’s diversity, there would be too many languages that would use up staff, and cause expenses, even though, the sad truth is, a lot of those languages would end up having little to no students, simply because there are so many options. Three of the world language classes teach languages from Europe, but these languages are popular so it can be overlooked by many students and parents. And even though it doesn’t reflect the diversity of our society, most students are completely satisfied with learning these languages. But still, the fact is, even though it is understandable, that the schools world language courses do not reflect upon our society’s diversity.
Another survey taker:
I think that in today’s world, we are so culturally diverse everywhere, that we need to learn more than just what we do learn in our school. I would love to see classes in Latin, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Swahili, Japanese, Portuguese, Italian, and many more. It is needed to represent our cultural diversities, especially in school. I think it would make everyone happy if they could communicate globally. It helps us work out differences, solve political problems, and much more when we know how to communicate with other people well, especially across countries.
One last survey taker for this side of the argument:
I think that the world language courses mostly do not reflect our schools students because there are not many people in the school who, speak French, or German. And there a a little bit of people who speak Mandarin or Spanish. In my opinion I think that the most common language that people speak in school other than English is Hindi. So no I do not think that it reflects our diversity.
Consensus:
Overall, it seems, 73.7% of the 17 individuals (not counting the 2 who said they are unsure) who took the survey seem to believe that the school’s world language courses reflect on our diversity. Overall, most people who voted yes were satisfied and seemed to have thought we have enough languages. Others who did not mostly seemed to have the response that our school needs more language and that there aren’t enough. Despite the fact, people might have a desire to learn more languages, the limitations are that there is a budget and in order to fit that budget, WWP can only provide a specific amount of languages. Unfortunately, if there were a plethora of languages, many of them would barely even have enough students for just one class leave alone three classes. Thus the budget would go to waste and those teachers would not be very well utilised. The other limiting factor is that the students must need to have an interest. Nobody would add a class no student has a desire to learn. In the end, our school mostly according to survey takers has an overall diverse range of languages.
Grover Middle School's Jagazine 