At Home with Kids? Learn a Language Together!

With schools closing around the country, millions of parents are suddenly confronted by the problem of what to do about their children's educations.  The prospect of having the kids at home for weeks - perhaps, months - presents a daunting challenge.

It could also present a rare opportunity.

As an old history teacher who has delved pretty deeply into educational policy, here's my suggestion:  Learn a language together.

The advantages of language learning are enormous.  Most Americans - including college graduates and professionals - are effectively monolingual.  We might know enough to order food or wine in a French or Mexican restaurant.  Or find a restroom or get back to our hotel when travelling abroad.   If our jobs require it, we might be able to speak enough of one or two languages to communicate with co-workers on work-related issues.

But few of us are truly fluent, and - in a once and future global society - that's a handicap.  It's also a national embarrassment.

When I was teaching high school, in my early 30s, I used to take groups of students on three-week tours of Europe in the summer.  One summer, I let the kids fly home with a colleague so I could stay for a few weeks on my own, bumming around on a Eurailpass.  One day, I found myself on a train, in conversation with a pretty woman sitting across from me.  She was Swiss, a secretary, no more than 20.  I complimented her on her English - which was, in fact, very good.

She smilingly demurred.  Her English was not that good, she said.  Her German, French, and Italian were much better.

This young woman was obviously intelligent, but she wasn't a college graduate.  But she spoke at least four languages fluently.  I was at least twelve years older, and had a BA and a law degree from one of America's best public universities - and I spoke my native English and slightly rusty German.

I've never forgotten that moment.  It was humbling.  We are citizens of a super-power, at a time when the world has become one community - and most of us can't speak to anyone who hasn't taken the trouble to learn English.

And neither can our kids.

Now, I could go on and on about why this must change.  But we all know this.  The problem is, our educational system is not set up to make that change.

Our schools operate on the basis of short classroom sessions - 50 minutes daily, or 90 minutes on alternate days - with 20 to 30 students in a class.  Language learning works best when it's immersive.  You can't learn a language very well when it's just a box on a schedule.  You have to live with it.

For language learning, the class period or block is basically a waste of time.  Likewise the large, standard class of 20 or more students.

And, of course, one learns languages most easily as a young child - not a teenager.  The older you get, the harder it gets.

Which is what makes the present moment so ideal for language learning.

If you're at home with a child, or several children, learning a new language is something you can all do together.  Unlike other subjects, the younger children won't struggle to keep up with their elders - they'll probably excel.  If anything, you'll be the slow learner.

The other great thing about language learning is that there are so many ways to go about it - most of which don't feel much like work.  There are lots of on-line programs for basic instruction.  I personally enjoy Duolingo, a free app with short lessons and lots of little incentives, like a video game.  My favorite thing about Duolingo is that it doesn't let you finish a lesson until you get everything right.  There's no shame.  You just try again until you get it - and then you're congratulated.

There are a lot of low-tech ways to learn a language, too.  When I learned my German, it was in an eight-week immersive summer course.  I was 32, and I achieved decent fluency, with a very good accent, in eight weeks.  One of our first-day exercises was to label everything in our residence house - doors, windows, tables, refrigerators, floors, etc. - with hand-lettered index cards.  Within days, these nouns were ours.

We also did a lot of non-work-like things.  We watched movies in German.  We sang songs.  We talked to each other - clumsily, at first, looking up words in our dictionaries as we went.  (Our program's rule was, no English, from Day One - so we started with baby talk, but we quickly got better.)

During this enforced time out-of-school, a lot of parents will try to keep their kids on track with the curriculum of the school they were attending.  There's a case to be made for that, and if your kids' school is offering meaningful distance learning, you might try it.

The problem is, not every family will do that - or do it in the same way.  When the kids eventually get back together, there will be marked discrepancies - and a lot of the curriculum will have to be re-taught, to get everyone back on the same page.  Those kids who've worked hardest to "keep up" will likely have to suffer through it all a second time.

Rather than subject your children to sitting through a repeat of what they've labored to learn while school was out, why not take the opportunity to learn something together - in a way the schools can't possibly match?  It's a lot more fun - and it would bring the family together in a new and exciting way.

A little exploration will do for finding the necessary resources.  They are almost infinite.

Looked at optimistically, this time is yours.  Why not seize it?