translation?????

My daughter is Miss Independence as you know.  So of course finding out anything about anything from her, particularly related to her extremely private life at school is rare.  But a few days ago she just had to confide in me.
"mum, you'll never believe it" she said in something between amazement and dismay
"what?"
"well, finally me and one other girl are getting a chinese teacher all to ourselves and we're doing harder stuff"
"That's great "I say, "are you happy with that?"
"well, yes, it's better.  But I still have to do all the work of the normal grade 4 class as homework, just in case.  Which I don't really mind as it takes like 5 minutes.   But you're just not going to believe what we have to do.  It's incredible"
"What's that?" I ask, expecting something outrageous
"We have to translate things from Chinese into English, isn't that weird?" she says
"Uhm, yes I guess that's pretty strange when you're used to just using a chinese dictionary to look up anything you don't know" I say
"Exactly, how are we going to learn anything more if we keep on translating, I mean I KNOW what things mean in Chinese if I look them up in chinese, so why do I have to think about it in English as well if I'm learning Chinese?" she asks.

Valid questions.  I had a brief chat with her "normal" English teacher about this in passing.  That's the difference between learning a language as a second language in an explicit manner and learning a language through an implicit immersion method.  And naturally her chinese teachers have been trained as CSL teachers not as teachers in Chinese.  I'm sure they're going to have to think long and hard about how and why to do anything differently.

I'm glad she's thinking about her learning and her language learning.  Her next request was for a Chinese / chinese dictionary in Simplified characters as the one she's been using up to now is in Traditional characters.  One of my friends luckily had a spare one that she recommended we use.  So tonight she said to me, perhaps what she really needs is a chinese thesaurus rather than dictionary - does that actually exist? - someone help me out.  I'm sure it must.

I'm not sure what to do.  I discussed with her class teacher how it would probably be better for her to take initiative on her learning and discuss these differences with the teacher and the school and how her deep needs for continuing to expand the depth of her language and vocabulary could be addressed within the structures and limitations of a school following the "second language" model.

So this evening I suggested she used her class teacher as a sounding board to see what and how for her chinese learning.

Watch this space.  Baby steps.

Hunting and gathering ...

I guess I spoke to soon.  On our biennial family newsletter, which is getting briefer every 2 or so years - I think this time it was down to about 10 lines, I presumptively said that the "hunting and gathering" stage of our move to Singapore was over and it was time to relax and party.

How wrong I was.  I don't think the hunting and gathering stage ends before the first year is up. Or maybe the first five years would be safer.  I had one of those super grumpy days on Friday where nothing seemed to quite go right or get accomplished in quite the time I'd allocated to it or was prepared to allocate to it.  And I realized I'm still hunting and gathering here.  Still missing the mark.  Still not quite comprehending how things get done (or, sometimes why - omg what a place for red tape).  I'm the proverbial fish out of water and it's not their fault. Its mine for wanting this process to just hurry on up somewhat.