Posted on 05/02/2016 8:21:13 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
I-Team: French teacher at HISD school doesn't speak French
HOUSTON - How do you teach a French class, if you don’t even speak French?
The I-Team discovered that’s exactly what is happening at the Houston Independent School District’s Energy Institute High School in the 1800 block of Sampson Street.
Sharonda White’s son Nathanial is a junior at the school.
"I thought it was a joke, I couldn't believe this was happening,” White said.
We asked her son about his classroom experience.
I-Team: “Does your teacher speak French?”
Nathanial White: “No sir.”
I-Team: “Have you ever heard him speak a word of French?”
Nathanial White: “Bonjour, but everybody knows that.”
The teacher, Albert Moyer, said in a brief phone interview that the extent of his French education was just one year in high school.
So why was he hired? To replace Jean Cius, a certified French teacher for more than 25 years.
“It makes me extremely mad,” Cius said. “I feel bad for the fact that the kids are not learning.”
Records show after a dispute in December, the school's principal removed Cius from campus.
But when he was later declared fit for duty, HISD did not give him back his old job, or any teaching job for that matter.
Cius was sent to another HISD campus, where he said he was assigned to monitor the halls.
“I feel so bad for the taxpayers because they're paying me for not doing anything at all,” he said.
However, Nathanial White's report card shows H-I-S-D is still using Cius as the teacher of record.
(Excerpt) Read more at khou.com ...
I knew a guy who was a French teacher assigned to teach Spanish.
He was taking Spanish at night at the second-year level to try to keep ahead of his students who were beginners. He was a quick study, and he knew French and Latin quite well, so he was doing pretty well.
But, still. You’d think you could find plenty of teachers who actually speak Spanish. He was a good guy, though. I liked him.
Pepe’ le Pew says “schools need more money——it’s for the kids...”
(SARC=ON!)
Affirmative action hire?
I had a Spanish teacher who could barely speak English. Dumber than a corn tortilla too
That’s racist, or xenophobic, or at the very least homophobic. At any rate it’s just not fair.
I had Luciano R. for a French teacher in high school. His first language was Italian. I think he knew enough French, but he neither did the immersion thing, nor was able to communicate the grammar of the language to English speakers well.
“Gise, Gise, you not know puh-se-cum-puh-se? You have to know puh-se-com-puh-se.”
For one semester in 1987, I substitute-taught in local public schools. One day I subbed for a Spanish teacher in the local high school, and one of the classes was Spanish III. Since I can handle a basic conversation in Spanish, I decided I would begin the class by speaking in Spanish to the students. After about a minute, one of the students in the back raised his hand, and then told me that no one ever spoke in Spanish in the class.
Eighteen years earlier, I took Spanish III in Japan (Yokohama, DOD school), and one day 3-4 of us convinced the teacher to let us go to off-campus to the local ramen joint, on our pledge that we would only speak in Spanish for the whole time we were there. She probably didn’t believe us, but we actually kept our part of the bargain, to the consternation of the Japanese restauranteurs, who had never heard a “foreign” language other than English.
My high school French teacher learned to speak French over the summer before she started teaching it. The school asked her if she would teach it and she told them she didn’t speak French. She said she listened to so many French language tapes over the summer that she caught on pretty easy. When I visited France I was able to get by with my two years of HS French!
Plus she was very nice to look at.
My high-school French teacher was French.
At least we always thought he was.
A few years after graduation he passed away, and sometime after that a tradesman I knew did some work on his widow’s house. He made the rather interesting discovery that he wasn’t French!
According to the widow the two of them fled Hungary ahead of the Soviet invasion in 1956.
Does this mean I speak Hungarian?
There may be a teacher’s union in Texas, but it has no power really. Texas is a right to work state.
As of press time, he is still teaching French.
That should be "teaching" French ...
It would be interesting to know why M. Cius, the French teacher of record, was removed: Records show after a dispute in December, the school's principal removed Cius from campus. Personal dispute? Chronic absenteeism? Felony indictment?
M. Cius is now a hall monitor in another school.
It is not unusual for districts to have trouble finding qualified subs in the foreign languages, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc.
The solution is obvious. Just offer higher pay for qualified subs in those fields. That is something that the union would NOT oppose. But most districts would rather spend the money on silly stuff like diversity workshops, etc.
Maybe, I suspect lack of vettin
Charmin had to fire a bear cause she could not %#&+ in the woods
The ACLU was stymied
"eees for zhe kids."
The English "th" and short vowel sounds are just about impossible for anyone else to get correctly. :-)
It reminds me of a personal story.
My mother-in-law used to work at an egg processing plant, candling, sorting, packaging etc.
The company was bought by another egg producer and was closed to consolidate their plants in another county, so she lost her job.
The USDA government EGG inspectors did not lose their jobs.
Being government employees, they were just transferred to another place in the government to INSPECT stuff.
Asked where one of them, a female, was going, she replied she was going downstate to an Defense Electronics manufacturer to INSPECT ELECTRONIC MISSILE COMPONENTS.................
Being able to speak versus being able to read a language are surprisingly different skills.
Probably due to different parts of the brain, motor skills, etc.
Perhaps he thought it was an Ebonics class.
My guess is that Albert Moyer is a union teacher and they’ll find another lame gig for him. They don’t fire union teachers. It’s union teachers first ............. students ........................... way down the line.
I knew a Hungarian couple like that. After they fled Hungary, they made their way to the US, but slowly and in stages. The couple made the effort to learn the languages of the countries they stayed in. The wife ended up being nearly fluent in French, German, and English.
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