#484: Haitian Prejudices: Simidor comments on Jn-Gilles's (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From:Karioka9@cs.com

jjngilles@pap.care.org wrote:
> 
> Speaking a foreign language is a question of practice.  Generally the
> teachers that are teaching french don't speak french. That's it! It could be
> more than 14 years and the students would never speak french fluently.

Student fluency in French has less to do with teachers or the horribly boring 
school curriculum in Haiti, than with reading and language immersion at home. 
 Personally I slept my way through the grammar years and didn't speak much 
French at home (speaking French after school was for sissies, n'est-ce-pas?)  
So I learned  French with an attitude while trading comic books with my pals, 
and hold my poor teachers blameless for my few successes and countless 
failures.

The same is true with English.  For all the classes I snoozed through during 
adolescence, I never went past "My dog is Pluto." (I didn't relate well to 
that snotty dog and it never approved of me as a spokesperson.)   I later 
learned all the English I needed to learn from Bugs Bunny, and what a fine 
teacher Bugs was!   But consider the millions of college graduates in this 
country who cannot, for all the years they've spent studying French, hold a 
decent conversation with a two-year old French brat.  Is that also some kind 
of comment on their teachers' ability to speak French?

Haitian teachers work very hard and have very little to show for it.  Please, 
let's not throw garbage at them.

Daniel Simidor