This is a copy of an email I just sent to Dr. Krashen and my high school team and principals as well. I’m just putting it out there and would like to suggest that if we can get this idea off the ground, maybe we could start chapters in some of your schools as well:
Stephen:
I know – FLTi – looks like a mistake but it’s not. I plan to begin, with help or not, a club at Lincoln High to raise money for one kid to go to college to study to become a language teacher in DPS. This will be a kid who has stayed with me or Annick for four years and who is really gifted at both language acquisition via stories and who has the human qualities to be really good at it, a kid who has everything except the money to succeed at a profession, to succeed in life.
I will announce the club on Monday the 21st at our language celebration and make a personal donation of $100 to start the fund off. Then I will try to get donations from my online PLC group and make a YouTube video to get donations to get this project started.
It seems to me very slack to not do this, as many kids at Lincoln are already bilingual and perfectly fluent in two languages and so all they need is the college education, which they could do at Metro to save money. A current 9th or 10th grader would be targeted for the scholarship since the extra years will be needed to collect the funds necessary in as many ways possible to make this happen.
FLTi is kind of cute, no? Future Language Teachers International, since your organization is iFLT.
So get on board with me if you want but I will do this fully alone if I have to. I know that it is a busy time of year to start a new project but so what – all we have to do now is get the fund set up through the school. I got a weak initial response from my team at school which pissed me off bc I am fangly determined to make this happen, even if ends up to be no more than that one donation of the $100 toward the kid’s college education four years from now.
Below is a very rough draft describing the plan in general:
FLTi – Future Language Teachers International is a group of high school language students who want to become language teachers. The inaugural chapter is based at Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver, CO. It hopes to grow to other high school campuses around the nation. Students in the chapter not only learn languages via the storytelling method, which is based on the work of Dr. Stephen Krashen, but they also practice telling stories themselves during weekly meetings of the chapter so that they start learning the method early and have time to get really good at it before arriving at college. Since most families at Abraham Lincoln High School live below the poverty line, a scholarship fund through the school will be set up to eventually send one child per year to college to reach this goal. As the fund grows, more and more students at Lincoln and across the country in other FLTi chapters will be able to attend college, studying to become language teachers.
Stephen if we could get your blessing on this it would be great. Just some kind of official stamp of approval since your other already established international organization is iFLT. I will take care of the details and work with our principals and business office to get this fund off and running. Diana let me know what you think. Maybe if we have any funds left over from iFLT this summer we could make a donation to FLTi. We can talk to Leslie about that.
Again, nobody has to go with me on this, but I will personally bust my ass on it hard over the next years. The fact that the kids are fluently bilingual is the kicker, really, and that they can learn how to do the method for four years just by sitting in class at Lincoln, and being coached once a week.
I will cc this to the Lincoln team.