Senior class gift idea
Issue date: 2/5/09 Section: Opinion
The time of year approaches when seniors must ready themselves for departure from the Hillsdale College campus. In so doing, the class leaves behind a gift on campus as a legacy - whether an amphitheatre, a scholarship or a pair of benches. This year the senior class should choose to gift a language laboratory to the school. It will leave behind a practical teaching and learning aid, central to the learning process - not just a cosmetic addition to the campus. It will fill a desperately needed gap in our living language departments and thus affect not only language majors and minors, but also the hundreds that take an introductory foreign language per B.A. requirements.
Students and faculty both have been compiling research on the variety of options available to us. We have found that new technology can, for example, map out a speaker's intonation pattern and juxtapose it against that of a native speaker. Recordings can be paired with written sentences and paragraphs that place new vocabulary in a proper context - which often differs from the syntax intuited from English. Students, even non-majors, can learn about the culture and history through multimedia presentations or take an interdisciplinary approach, learning how to conduct business in a given language.
With such interactive learning, more students may take interest in language majors and studying abroad, a fruitful venture many are hesitant to undertake. The growth in language departments could only help interest more quality students in Hillsdale. In recent years students have transferred from Hillsdale due to our lack of language technology, a technology used by numbers of colleges and even high schools across the country.
A variety of different models matching a wide variety of price ranges should allow us to choose a system that matches our current financial capabilities. Although the senior class must work in concert with the administration for approval and fundraising, we encourage the administration to consider investing in these technological innovations to enrich our foreign language departments even if circumstances dictate that we are unable to do so this year. This gift could be as modest as a dedicated lab of four to six specially-equipped computers or even the purchase of such software for already-existing computer labs.
In our four years we have seen whole computer labs overhauled, new classroom buildings with state-of-the-art technology, revamping of science facilities, not to mention a new student union, and yet the college's last language lab in Kresge (remember that place?) was overtaken by classroom expansion decades ago. As was stated during a recent meeting between language department heads, this lack of resources is frankly embarrassing.
On the flip side, this cutting-edge equipment can showcase Hillsdale's true liberal arts education - what better way to learn languages properly and so study cultures from the inside? As it stands, those seeking to use foreign languages in the future, especially those unable to spend significant time abroad, have fewer opportunities to gain oral fluency or proficiency in contemporary compositional standards and practices than their peers.
As members of the senior class we encourage our fellow classmates and members of the administration to rectify this problem by making a language laboratory the senior class gift of 2009.
On behalf of the senior German, Spanish and French majors:
Thomas Leonard, Hannah Stone, Mary Dell, David Wagner and David Steffen
Students and faculty both have been compiling research on the variety of options available to us. We have found that new technology can, for example, map out a speaker's intonation pattern and juxtapose it against that of a native speaker. Recordings can be paired with written sentences and paragraphs that place new vocabulary in a proper context - which often differs from the syntax intuited from English. Students, even non-majors, can learn about the culture and history through multimedia presentations or take an interdisciplinary approach, learning how to conduct business in a given language.
With such interactive learning, more students may take interest in language majors and studying abroad, a fruitful venture many are hesitant to undertake. The growth in language departments could only help interest more quality students in Hillsdale. In recent years students have transferred from Hillsdale due to our lack of language technology, a technology used by numbers of colleges and even high schools across the country.
A variety of different models matching a wide variety of price ranges should allow us to choose a system that matches our current financial capabilities. Although the senior class must work in concert with the administration for approval and fundraising, we encourage the administration to consider investing in these technological innovations to enrich our foreign language departments even if circumstances dictate that we are unable to do so this year. This gift could be as modest as a dedicated lab of four to six specially-equipped computers or even the purchase of such software for already-existing computer labs.
In our four years we have seen whole computer labs overhauled, new classroom buildings with state-of-the-art technology, revamping of science facilities, not to mention a new student union, and yet the college's last language lab in Kresge (remember that place?) was overtaken by classroom expansion decades ago. As was stated during a recent meeting between language department heads, this lack of resources is frankly embarrassing.
On the flip side, this cutting-edge equipment can showcase Hillsdale's true liberal arts education - what better way to learn languages properly and so study cultures from the inside? As it stands, those seeking to use foreign languages in the future, especially those unable to spend significant time abroad, have fewer opportunities to gain oral fluency or proficiency in contemporary compositional standards and practices than their peers.
As members of the senior class we encourage our fellow classmates and members of the administration to rectify this problem by making a language laboratory the senior class gift of 2009.
On behalf of the senior German, Spanish and French majors:
Thomas Leonard, Hannah Stone, Mary Dell, David Wagner and David Steffen
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