Westminstenders: The Final Week

[RedToothBrush]

Our final week in the EU...

God Bless Andrew Neil, on BBC2 Daily Politics (as it now isn't), confronting the Scottish East Coast Tory with the question, which is more important, the fishing industry with 0.04% GDP, or financial services with 16%?

Also a feature earlier about the expats in France who voted Leave and now think they may have to take out French nationality to stay.

Urdu is one of the main MFLs taught at Ds' old secondary school Peregrina

Given the large cohort of young people with Indian/Pakistani heritage, that's not surprising

There are apparently 55 languages spoken at the school (c1200 pupils)

Urdu on the currciculum when most of your kids already speak it is all about them league tables.

< waves to madambee >
I'm sorry that you are leaving us - or rather that we are leaving you

We don't have league tables in Scotland in the way that England has (although the newspapers try to create them ) and many of them are 2nd or 3rd generation Indian or Pakistani so don't actually speak it (and are even less likely to be able to write it. But it does mean that they can engage with their heritage.

And that highlights the issue perfectly. Is there anywhere else where this sort of thinking would happen

I was a school governor at the time. The headteacher was lets say interesting in her views. Fortunately she moved on before ds started there but it took time to undo some of her "reforms".

knowledge of a foreign language is a crucial part of education is unfair in some circumstances

only a view propagated in the UK

A monumental shift is about to take place across the pond: Brexit is happening Friday. Luke McGeeee_, a journalist at CNN in London, told us what’s ahead:

“It's been a quiet week, Brexit-wise. But tomorrow at 11 p.m. GMTT^, the U.K. will finally exit the European Union, and enter its 11-month transition period. Then, the real drama begins. The U.K. has until the end of this year to sign a deal on its future relationship with Europe. Both sides have drawn hard red lines and, if history tells us anything, it's that London usually backs down before Brussels.

“Complicating matters is the fact that the U.K. also wants to sign global trade deals — especially with the U.S..S. You can read hereere as to why that is going to start a global row about drug prices and food standards. Phase one of Brexit might be over; phase two is going to be much harder.”*

The Brexit summary from the USA in my in box this morning.

I agree with peregrina about the different status of Spanish in the USA and EU.
My dc go to an international school in the USA and I was surprised at first how little effort some Latin parents put into ensuring their dc had fluent Spanish. ( a lot of effort is put into everything else)
Particularly compared to the amount of effort we had put into ensuring our dc retained their Spanish acquired through living in Mexico.
French seems to be the aspiring language of choice followed by Mandarin.

The really sad thing is that learning a foreign language even a "dead" one - any language - helps you learn the next one and the next one.....

It also had knock on effects within the brain that help with maths, music....

It also opens up new horizons and helps you see that the world is full of opportunities and potential. Maybe that's why the UK is so poor at it

Symptomatic of Brexit really

Thanks for all the discussion about Scottish ed Prettybird et Al. I've a P6 Ds and it's all been really useful. He's learning Mandarin and despairs of it to the point where he's announced he's proudly monoglot. I've been trying to show him other languages, particularly French which he can do at Academy.

As a dyslexic Scot I was also shunted out of languages and believed myself to be incapable of ever learning one.
I discovered when I had to live in a country with another language that this wasn't true.
I maybe never learned the grammar by rote but I could communicate ok after a couple of years.
Learning a language was hard but I was perfectly capable of doing so when I had to.

It also has knock on effects within the brain that help with maths, music....

I also discovered that having Spanish meant I could follow Italian and helped with both Portuguese and French.
Both of my dc are learning two languages.

If familiarity with foreign languages marks one out for suspicion (it does) then familiarity with numbers is equivalent to witchcraft.

A few years back, when Sainsburys were running their "round up your bill for charity" initiative, I found myself with a bill of £x.67. Feeling unusually charitable, I said yes to rounding up, and when the checkout operator asked "How much ?" I said "33 pence, please".

"Ooh" they said. "That's lucky it's exactly £20.00 (or whatever)".

"No luck", I said. "I worked it out".

"No" they said "no one can do that."

I was just about to say something more when an older gentleman behind me in the queue gave me a stern rebuke for lying to the young person and it wasn't a nice thing to do.

Discretion being the better part of valour, I apologised.

The problem with MFL teaching in the UK is the chronic shortage of teachers. Strangely enough Brexit isn't helping.

I also discovered that having Spanish meant I could follow Italian and helped with both Portuguese and French.

If you have a smattering of Italian, French, Spanish and Latin (passim ) then most mainstream European languages are certainly within "What way to the station" levels. Especially if you are reading (and don't forget Google Translate can render almost any text into English in real time ...). The key thing (I believe) is attitude.

For a few years my browser homepage when I worked in an office was either the French or Italian MSN news pages. Hence my comment about being regarded with suspicion.

A question my DH tried out on me, after getting the wrong answer himself:
If a bat and a ball costs £1.10 and the bat costs, £1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

It's mental arithmetic so no cheating with pen and paper.

I also discovered that having Spanish meant I could follow Italian and helped with both Portuguese and French

I had the opposite - because I did some French and did Italian GCSE at evening classes, I can read Spanish fairly easily - to a vaguely intermediate level. Enough to be able to read one of ds' GCSE mock exam papers and understand what he wrote!

And then the German helps with Dutch (being in the Netherlands is like being in Germany in the fog, I'm mentally translating everything into German all the time and when I cross the border into Germany the fog lifts). Also Swedish and then to a slightly lesser extent Danish/Norwegian.

I spent two summers in Finland so know a few words but not enough to be in any way useful. The first time I was there I read all the Swedish but by the time I went back I had picked up enough Finnish to understand road signs, ingredients on sides of packets etc.

Especially now it’s compulsory in primary, missclimpson. If you’re lucky the class teacher might have a GCSE in the target language.

5p

Just looking through the SQA timetable for this year: there is actually a Nat 5 for "Non native speakers of English".

There is also a Nat 5 called "Applications of Mathematics" (also in Gaelic). I think this is the modern day equivalent for us oldies of the old Arithmetic "O" Grade

My dc spent a lot of time helping their class teacher with the Spanish she was teaching when they were at primary school in the UK.
Usually they pronounced the words first and she took it from there with them stepping in if she needed more support.

You got it Elements. Apparently a lot of people get caught out and say 10p.

Apparently a lot of people get caught out and say 10p.

Well 50% of the population and all that ...

I admit it felt like 10p, intuitively (and possibly not accidentally ). But checking my working by reversing the sum revealed it was wrong ...

And of course, if it felt like 10p then that should have been the correct answer!