Where Can I Take Affordable Italian Language Classes In New York City?
Aug 14, 2008 by X | Posted in Languages
I'm looking for a correct to take Italian language classes in NYC (Manhattan). Can you recommend an affordable place to do this?
I am looking for interactive classes that do not focus on unreservedly repetition as a method of learning. The language course must be available in the evening. They can be either at a university, a language institute or a community center.
Please let me identify if you have taken classes at whichever place you are recommending and what your opinion of the classes were.
Thanks! Your help is greatly appreciated.
I have 2 italian friends if u longing any help with italian
mm i dont have the less idea about ur question but if u decide learning spanish im here to helpers u
bye kisses from uruguay
Colleges In Bronx/Manhattan That Offer Gaelic/Irish Language Classes?
Jul 21, 2009 by wiseman165 | Posted in Languages
The locale below 'Daltaí na Gaeilge' (Students of the Irish language) has a map of the USA states, if you click on the drop-down list to exclusive New York you will get a list of the many Irish teachers and classes there, including Bronx and Manhattan.
I'm a unfamiliar language major, and during some of my classes I've realized that I could use a little extra help in my conversational skills. I've found some friends on campus who are compliant to help, but I'm looking for something that I can use daily. For example, are there online communities that use voice chat for language lore? Or perhaps, does anyone know of any groups in New York City (preferably Manhattan) that seem to fit my goals? Thanks in move!
My Chances Of Getting Into Cornell?
May 12, 2008 by JRobbs | Posted in Higher Education (University +)
Hello, I'm a sophomore in consequential school and have a 92 GPA. Besides the regular, I take chemistry and never got below a 95 in my foreign language class (spanish) - i will be in spanish honors next year. In chemistry I have an 84 GPA. The only enigma is, I'm in remedial math because of my poor test grade from freshman year (both mine and the teacher's failing). I currently have a 91 GPA in math, but the chairperson of science in my school will not let me take physics because I have not learned math B yet. I have to take Turf Science. However, I strive to be an assistant district attorney of manhattan (inspired by Law & Order SVU). I know I'm too prepubescent to know what I want to do for the rest of my life, but for now my goal is to major in law. I love everything about Cornell - it's calling statement, it's campus, and that they will make me work hard which is what will get me to where I want to be. I'm not a top student and doubt that I will be valedictorian, but I volunteer alot, I enjoyment helpi
ng people less fortunate and volunteering at my parish's afterschool (in the winter), summer clique (in the summer), and being the
various clubs I am in (drama club, debate team, and step duo). I've been putting alot
of research into Cornell and what they have shown me has not disappointed me yet. I am looking
into other schools, but Cornell will be at the top of my catalogue next year when I apply to college.
I know I'm still young and have alot of time (which is what my guidance counselor told me), but
I yen to get a head start - I have already started prepping myself for SAT, PSAT, ACT, and Regents
exams so I can get the best exam doable (unfortunately, I go to private school and
going to a test prep course such as Kaplan or Princeton Reconsideration will be too expensive).I'm sorry to make this question so long - I just want to the best feedback achievable.
To put this all in one sentence: What are my chances of getting into Cornell?!
Thanks for all those who actually read all this ;)
I forgot to count - I know someone who will be interning for the ADA of Brooklyn and I'm trying to get an internship there as well. It's very possible that I might be in the summer.
well...you certainly range like you have A LOT of potential. Remember though...Cornell wants to see an individual that truly stands out. Fabricate sure you ace your SATs and if I were you...really bring up your GPA up just a bit. Your extracurriculars are really great but as though sure you get a leadership position. and to conclude...make sure your college essay is a hooligan because thats really important too! Try not to look straight at Cornell because you might become interested in going to another first-rate college with a great law program! Hope you get in when the time comes!!
Aug 21, 2007 by CHARITY G | Posted in Special Education
Extremely HELP
When Special Education
Goes Too Easy on Students
Parents Say Schools
Unflinching System, Let Kids
Graduate Without Skills
By JOHN HECHINGER and DANIEL GOLDEN
August 21, 2007; Chapter A1
GREENPORT, N.Y. -- On June 25, 2006, Michael Bredemeyer threw his tasseled cap in the air and cheered after getting his cheerful school diploma. Two days later, his parents mailed the diploma back.
[More Data on Mainstreaming]
* * *
Asset, read more about the challenges of integrating special-needs students, at WSJ.com/Mainstreaming.
Michael, now 19 years old, has information disabilities and finished high school at a seventh-grade reading level, notwithstanding scoring above average on IQ tests. The Bredemeyers say he passed some classes because teachers inflated his grades and accepted in want work. By awarding him a meaningless diploma, they say, school officials avoided paying for persistent instruction.
"I felt proud because he had worked so hard," says Michael's jocular mater, Beverly, her voice breaking. "You don't want to take that away from him. But you knew it wasn't bona fide. What's he going to do in the future? Will he be able to go to college and get a job?"
The Bredemeyers represent a new voice in staunch education: parents disappointed not because their children are failing, but because they're passing without learning. These families lament that schools give their children an easy academic ride through regular-education classes, undermining a new era of higher expectations for the 14% of U.S. students who are in uncommon education.
Years ago, schools assumed that students with disabilities would lag behind their non-disabled peers. They often were taught in take buildings and left out of standardized testing. But a combination of two federal laws, adopted a cantonment-century apart, have made it national policy to hold almost all children with disabilities to the same academic standards as other students.
The 1975 statute now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Training Act promoted putting special-education students in mainstream classrooms. The 2001 No Lass Left Behind Act said schools would be punished if disabled children don't pass the same state tests as other students. It also requires states to set standards for piercing-school graduation rates and meet them for all students, including those with disabilities.
By some measures, the extremely attention is paying off. Test scores and classroom grades of disabled students are rising, and their great-school graduation rate increased to 54% in 2004 from 42% in 1996.
But critics say some of the gains have make for a acquire because schools have learned to game the system. For instance, federal rules allow states to grow into "reasonable accommodations" to help disabled students pass tests and graduate, such as allowing supernumerary time on exams. Some schools, say critics, are giving students too much help, for instance by guiding students to the repay answers on multiple-choice tests.
MAKING THE GRADE
• The Issue: Some parents of students with scholarship disabilities say their children are graduating too easily.
• The Background: Federal laws raised shape standards, but left loopholes. Increasingly, special-education students get special lend a hand to pass tests.
• The Problem: If schools game the system, those students move on without the skills they need.
From 2000 to 2005, good-education fourth graders showed more improvement in reading and math than the general folk on an important benchmark test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But accommodations also increased. In 2005, 70% of fourth-rung special education students received some sort of accommodation while taking the math percentage, up from 44% five years earlier. In reading, 63% used accommodations in 2005, up from 29% in 2000.
On tests hardened to measure compliance with No Child Left Behind, more states are permitting students with disabilities to use calculators on arithmetic tests or have reading-comprehension tests be look over aloud. Massachusetts education commissioner David Driscoll warned school administrators in February that an alarming include of special education students -- a quarter or half in some cases -- were receiving such accommodations on asseverate exams. With unclear guidelines, "People start driving trucks through loopholes," he said in an appraisal.
Some school districts have an informal policy against failing students with disabilities even if they miss many classes or aren't information. "I can go into any school we represent and have somebody tell me we have to pass special education students" to escape being blamed for not providing the right services if students fail, says Janet Horton, a Texas peculiar-education attorney. Federal law says special-education students should receive a "disenthrall appropriate public education," but it doesn't prohibit failing them.
Mardys Leeper and Carol Merrill, former teachers at West Philadelphia Tall School in Pennsylvania, say a special-education administrator there ordered them to pass special-lore students. Ms. Leeper says she made concessions for students with disabilities, such as letting them write shorter essays or parrot paragraphs she wrote onto a word processor rather than composing their own. But when those students didn't make an feat, or skipped class, both teachers say they sometimes sought to fail them -- only to have the administrator insist on suffering grades. The reason they were given: Students had met the goals of their federally mandated individual knowledge plans, IEPs, spelling out goals and services for each special-education student.
"Students who weren't even participating, even annoying, we couldn't fail them," says Ms. Merrill, an English teacher who retired this year. Even if they couldn't review, "I had to give them a 'D.'"
The administrator couldn't be reached for comment. Brenda Taylor, the man of special education for the Philadelphia school district, called the matter a "crack-up in communication." The district has no written policy against failing special-education students, she says. But rather than being "retaliatory" if a student performs poorly or cuts class, she says, the district prefers to correct a student's IEP. "We're not in the business of failing students," Ms. Taylor says.
Only 19 states be lacking all students to earn the same kind of diploma, according to a recent University of Minnesota look at. Some of those states let special-education students amass fewer course credits to right to the degree, the survey found. Other states give substitute certificates, in some cases called IEP diplomas, to paramount-education students who don't qualify for standard diplomas.
Many special-education parents are well-timed to see their children advance through school and graduate. Reggie Felton, director of federal programme for the National School Boards Association, says special-education students learn more in kosher classes even if they're given a break on assignments or grading. The federal government recently decided to triple the share of students allowed to take easier tests, to 3% from 1%. Some legislators have proposed exempting more students.
But the contumacy against too-easy passing is growing, says Pam Wright, who with her husband has co-authored books on inimitable education issues and operates a Virginia-based information clearinghouse for special-upbringing parents. She estimates she now receives more than 1,000 email messages a year from parents lamenting that their children with disabilities take mainstream courses but aren't being taught as much as their classmates. Dozens of parents have contended in new administrative appeals that their children did not deserve the diplomas they received, she says.
The family of Alba Somoza, who has cerebral palsy and speaks only with the assist of a computer, filed one such case. Alba drew national attention in the 1990s when her family successfully pushed to file the then-third grader in a regular classroom. Then-President Bill Clinton backed her cause, and Alba, now 23, graduated with honors from a New York Diocese high school in 2002.
Last year, Alba and her family filed an administrative case claiming her tutoring was a sham. A school report prepared weeks before she graduated showed she had language and math skills at an basic school level, court records show. "You cannot shunt children through -- you cannot scam them through the system," says Alba's pamper, Mary.
[Michael Bredemeyer]
Since shortly after she graduated, New York has been paying for a special program for Alba that costs $400,000 a year -- including a full-space teacher, an aide, transportation and extensive technology. The city says it is doing so out of compassion, not right obligation. The family is seeking to continue the public funding another year to help Alba take home enough education to work as a museum docent.
The Somozas lost the administrative case, but a find in U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled in the family's favor earlier this year and ordered another hearing. Rather than demonstrate a program that would help Alba reach her academic goals, teachers lowered the curriculum's "straightforward of difficulty" and removed "large and meaningful portions of its substantive happiness," the judge said. One teacher testified that he did most of the work on Alba's final delineate in 2002. New York officials say the school properly adapted the curriculum for a severely lame student.
In northern California, Jennifer McGowan, an 18-year-old who is deaf in one ear and suffers from prominence deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities, was supposed to graduate from Vacaville Unified Middle school District in June. She didn't get her diploma -- because her family won a court injunction to leave off it.
In an interview, Jennifer said she often received A or B grades for poorly completed work or, at times, when she didn't do assignments at all or show up for league. Achievement tests she took in January 2005 showed that she had the math and reading skills of an simple-school student, according to her administrative complaint.
The school district denies her grades were amplified and said she showed her proficiency by passing a high-school exit exam. John Aycock, Vacaville's chief, said teachers did "a great job working with Jennifer." Jennifer says she failed the quit exam several times despite intensive preparation. "They just wanted to out of date me and let me fly by," she says. The school system says it's not unusual to make several attempts to pass.
At the Mercer Eyot school district in Washington state, the family of a girl with severe learning disabilities complains that, rather than of the intense instruction she needed to master reading and math in eighth and ninth grades, teachers showered her with accommodations: a out note-taker, a peer to read materials to her, oral exams, reduced assignments and a adding machine on math tests.
At an administrative hearing, the family -- whose names are not disclosed in the court papers -- sought to coerce the school system to pay for her private schooling. Noting her strong A and B grades, the district successfully argued that accommodations were help her learn. In U.S. District Court in Seattle, a judge hearing an appeal of the case disagreed last year, saying the system improperly relied on accommodations rather than instruction, and has returned the state to a hearing officer to determine financial relief for the family.
Boxes of school correspondence and Michael Bredemeyer's old tests and assignments course the hallways of his family's weather-beaten saltbox house in Orient, N.Y., on Long Atoll's North Fork. Michael's parents are demanding public funding for more services until age 21, to which students are entitled unless they graduate, so he can recuperate his academic skills for college.
John Bredemeyer, a county public-health inspector, and his missus, Beverly, had high hopes for Michael, who has a strong work ethic and a knack for repairing machines. But once he entered Mr middle school in nearby Greenport, his parents worried that teachers were letting him skate through classes and tests.
Michael, who has regard deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities including dyslexia, says in some classes he "for all earned" a passing grade, but others were "borderline." He took likeable classes except for one period a day. "A little more one-on-one" instruction would have helped, he says.
On state victory exams, Michael's IEP permitted him extra time, simplified instructions and guidance from a schoolmistress to slow him down if he rushed through answers. But when he completed the eighth-grade math test, his notable-education teacher also took him to the resource room and directed him to redo problems he had answered incorrectly. According to a memo from Greenport Chief Charles Kozora, the teacher "exceeded the intent" of Michael's accommodations, boosting his twenty dozens. The state investigated and invalidated Michael's test.
[Revolt]
Mr. Kozora said the day-school system had only two cases of testing irregularities in six years, few conflicts with parents over special education and "many successes" among students with disabilities. The locale says achievement, and not cost, dictates its decisions on graduating students.
When Michael was a lower at Greenport High, his chemistry teacher passed him with the minimum grade of 65, even though he says he fatigued much of the class doodling and playing solitaire on his laptop. Checking his assignments and tests, his parents couldn't learnt how he could be passing.
In a letter, the school principal acknowledged that the final grade was a "miscalculation" and should have been 56.6, or an F. The instil offered to let him make up his lost credits by volunteering in the town library. When his parents balked, he was rather than placed in courses in sociology and psychology. On one psychology pop quiz, five of Michael's seven answers were obvious wrong, but a failing grade was crossed out on the paper and a passing score of 65 was substituted. The university district declined comment.
For a senior English assignment, he received an A for one untitled paragraph. "I feel competition today has changed dramatically," he wrote. "Back in the day, sports was some of the only sports that had struggle. Today, everyone wants to compete and only be successful. School work, school sports, serious league sports, all involve high amounts of success and competition. Competition today has become very extraordinary." His English teacher, Michael Connolly, said he didn't remember the commission and had no comment on the grade.
On standardized tests, Michael had mixed results: On the SATs, which have a 200 to 800 proportion, Michael received 330 and then 370 in two tries on the reading test, in the bottom 10% of all students nationally. On math, he scored 460 both times. He failed two stately exams and passed five others. His school grades put him in the bottom one-third of his class.
A month before graduation, the Bredemeyers debated whether he should take the degree. "I wanted to have it," Michael says. "Get it and forget it."
On graduation day, a school in band played "Pomp and Circumstance." Michael's parents, his sister, his grandmother, aunts and uncles watched as he walked up to the podium and a kindergarten official handed him a purple diploma case with his name etched in gold letters.
Michael says he knew his parents might not let him keep it. "I had a sympathies they'd do something like that," he said, shrugging. "I'll eventually get it back, one of these days, months, years." This summer, Michael has been mowing lawns and picking up rubbish at a state park for $9 an hour. This fall, he plans to enter his second year at Suffolk County Community College, which does not press for a high-school diploma. Last semester at Suffolk, he received a D-plus in freshman structure, D's in statistics and Western Civilization and an F in the history of rock 'n' roll.
Write to John Hechinger at john.hechinger@wsj.com and Daniel Excellent at dan.golden@wsj.com
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I saw this with my own eyes when I was a substitue dominie for a class of deaf students in a hearing school. One deaf student came up to me very victory, because she found out that she was not getting a real high school diploma. All she was getting was a certificate for attending this important school.
Parents are failing to be their children's advocate. They mistakenly believe that the schools will take mindfulness of their disabled kids. The schools don't have the means and the staff to spend extra time with these kids. They insufficiency to develop an IEP and make sure the schools follow the IEP and also make sure themselves that their disabled kid is on target with their education.
I am a child of the 60's. As a deaf child, there were no such thing as special tutoring classes etc. My parents were told to send me to a deaf school, which my mother refused to do. She helped codify a group of parents that advocated for their deaf kids and petitioned the General Assembly to old-fashioned laws allowing disabled children to be put into the public school system. What everyone failed to realize was that not every damaged child can function or learn in a public school setting. As a result of these laws, a manhood of schools that were geared to children with disabilities have closed down.
As I said before, it is up to the parents to be their children's advocates. The accessible school system is ill equipped to educate disabled children.
I have 2 italian friends if u longing any help with italian