Subject: L2M update (think “zen”)

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:07:06

Greetings, parents:

It’s my aim to try to communicate with you all on a more-or-less weekly basis to keep you informed about where we are, what's happening in the school at large, and so on.

Before I get to the heart of today’s missive, a couple of time-dependent announcements:

1. Mrs McDougal will be in the CDI (library, up one floor from the LCI main entrance) covering books tomorrow (Tues) from 9 to 12 and on Thursday from 11 to 13h15. Anyone with a little time to spare is cordially and strongly urged to come help. 

2. There will be a “rencontre parents-professeurs” (parent-teacher meeting) night on Monday, 22 Sept, for parents with children in 6th and 10th  grades. Please note that this meeting is *not* designed for you to discuss your child’s progress with his/her teacher, but is rather an informational meeting wherein you will find out what topics are being covered in your child’s classes. Parent-teacher *conferences* will be held (I think) in mid-October. Meetings for the other grades will be held Oct 6-9; I will send you an update later on.

****

As for the main event, first, my thanks for your patience. La rentrée (back to school) is a hectic time at best, and add to that my inexperience and unfamiliarity with various rules, etc., ...well, let’s just say I’ve learned a lot. One rule that changed between the end of last term and the beginning of this term is that non-francophone students are no longer allowed to participate in core French classes (such as math, French, French history-geography) until such time as they don’t need in-class translation (roughly sometime a bit beyond the initial level of FLE II). 

What this means is that all of a sudden the majority of our 7th-grade and 6th-grade students were no longer going to be in any math class at all—a situation which no one would be happy with (least of all our U.S. accreditation board). I am happy to say that with the approval of the L2M board, we are hiring Mr Tom Craigie to take on 6-7 hours of math teaching. (Mr Craigie covered for Mrs Parker during her illness last year.)

In addition, we will be consolidating our two physics courses and using the time to provide more math instruction for college-age students. Thus we will be offering for college 4 hours each of 6th grade (6th-grade) math, 7th grade (7th-grade) math (pre-algebra), algebra I, and geometry. Algebra II, pre-calculus and calculus are this year’s high school offerings.

Parents of fully bilingual children, please note!! If your child is in 9th grade (3ème) or is otherwise going to take the brevet exam this year, he or she will *not* be included in the English-language math class unless you specifically request it. I strongly discourage adding these additional hours to his/her schedule, given the huge amount of work preparing for the brevet requires. Similarly, franco-american children will not take English-language math unless specifically requested or unless it is known that your family will be going/returning to the U.S. in the relatively near future. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me directly.

Finally, bringing in Mr Craigie means that, apart from adding hours to most of our students’ schedules (sigh), their emplois du temps (schedules) themselves will be changing somewhat in order to accommodate the shifting of various teachers’ hours. Barring unforeseen delays in the hiring process, I will have your children’s new schedules waiting for them on Monday, Sept 22. Most Monday start times will remain the same. A few classes will end a bit later, and I apologize in advance for this. Believe me, having spent this entire past weekend puzzling through how to accommodate everyone, any inconveniences will not be there for lack of trying.

My best to you all,

Olivia Kallner, Head of School

PS: The meeting with your child’s team teachers will be conducted nearly 100% in French. It is still worthwhile to come even if you’re not particularly fluent (or fluent at all), in that the teachers frequently distribute handouts that can be deciphered at your leisure later on. Usually the team teachers are willing to talk afterwards in however much English is at their command (which is sometimes considerable). I imagine that I will be on hand and will try to translate, as will other more-or-less bilingual parents from our section and the British section.