Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance
By William M. Hartnett on Mar 30, 2007 in oddities
>German classes cut from last school (Palm Beach Post)
The only public school in Palm Beach County still teaching German will drop the class next year. Why would students take German in a metro area where more than one-in-three people 5 and older speak Spanish at home? Well, why not?
My very own wife, in addition to attending middle school with high-achieving self-asphyxiation enthusiasts, spent unaccountably vast stretches of her years in suburban Atlanta public schools studying German. Now, hardly a day passes during which she does not find herself happily conversing in German.
That’s obviously not true. She never speaks German, and, as it turns out, learning the language was a rather massive waste of time. Which is not to say I won’t be grateful for her German skills should we find ourselves in Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the two-thirds of Switzerland where the language is spoken, or, indeed, Germany itself. Then again, I rather rarely find myself in that circumstance.
The real question, I suppose, is this: Would you like to touch my monkey? Touch him! Touch my monkey!
