Hunting the elusive French 3

[auntyamethyst]

Daughter's paperwork arrives from High School. But alas, her class schedule for Junior year lacks French 3. I question the school only to find that the class is not offered at all, because "there might not have been enough students, or the 'language department' might have decided that they needed more beginners' classes"; ha! Lillian loves

Comments

Re: French 3

[maryosmanski]

I finally saw Jerry's letter just today after I'd picked up my mail. A fellow teacher who knows I normally don't see the Mercersburg Journal sent me a photcopy.

I knew when we added German to the foreign language curriculum several years ago that a time might come when there would either be not enough students or not enough class periods in the day to offer the advanced third and fourth-year courses of both languages every single year. The policy at that point was to opt for French over German (one reason was that we already had the French textbooks and teacher materials). Then a year came when there were more students who wanted German 3 and not enough (the minimum is 5) for French 3, and it was decided that alternating French 3 one year and German 3 the next would work. I did not foresee in 2001 that "not enough class periods" would happen due to an administrative decision to reduce the number of class periods in the day.

The currciulum director position is not really a new one. There was one several years ago for a while, and then the work became the responsibility of someone with a slightly different job title who retired at the end of the last school year. Dr. Johnston was hired to replace that person who retired, and I think that was when the job title was resurrected.