Boy do I hate people!

Well, it looks like the NB government has decided to scrap the early French Immersion program. They seem to think that enhancing the late immersion program will help to increase the number of bilingual students graduating from high school. Since the percentage of students who are currently graduating and are functionally bilingual is too low, it is the belief of this government that scrapping Immersion from grades 1 to 4 will make it better!

Does this really make sense?!?

This is why I HATE POITICIANS... again!!!

I was surfing the internet the other day when I came across a CBC report on literacy in New Brunswick. The report stated that between 1994 and 2005, the literacy rate in New Brunswick was hovering around 60%. The report goes on to say that this is among the lowest rates in Canada.

Perhaps the geniuses in the NB legislature should come up with an "Intensive literacy" program starting in grade 5 and scrap teaching reading and writing in grades K through 4! Hell, let's take it a step farther and scrap grades k through 4 all together and have an "Intensive F#$%ing Education" program in grade 5 to catch them up!!! I am sure that will lead to greater competency!

It amazes me that the government, who want to make grand claims about New Brunswick being a bilingual province would decide to scrap early immersion in favour of a quick fix in grade 5. On top of this, they claim that they want 70% of students to be bilingual by 2012 (when they can't even get the literacy rates above 60%).

The reality is that after 5 years of schooling (K through 4) in English, many students who may have taken early immersion (and done very well in it) will not bother with French Immersion at all because it will be too much of a change for them and those that do take it will have missed out on years of French training that simply cannot be replaced in one year of "intensive" training. I grew up in Northern NB and never had the option of early French Immersion. My attitude when I could have started French Immersion was that I didn't want to change what I was doing. To this day, I regret not being able to speak a second language. As an adult, I tried to learn a second language and I found it very difficult - as opposed to when I was younger and had nothing to worry about but school and I picked up everything relatively easily.

Maybe the NB government should be looking at ways to make the early immersion program work (if it is truly not working). What about having a K or a pre-K class that parents can choose to put their children in that has a focus on language? What about continuing the early immersion AND bulking up the late immersion?

I am sure there are much better solutions than cutting the program.

Oh well, it seems that the Anglo society of redneck, backward, inbred idiots are going to be celebrating a victory over the evil French language! Francophones better start learning English (although most of them can already speak it), because pretty soon, there will be less competent unilingual people graduating from high schools across the province and government jobs requiring bilingualism will start to disappear as the resources to fill these jobs will not be available East of Quebec.

Way to go NB Government!