My daughter was recently accepted into a Hawaiian language immersion preschool. As we have gone through the application process, orientation, child observation, and parent interview, it's become increasingly clear to me that I need to blog this experience, in particular as a non-Hawaiian parent who has not previously studied the language. Of course I have, in some ways, grown up surrounded by Hawaiian language--in place names; given and family names; concepts thrown around to promote and market everything from grocery stores to course management software; and loan words to English--but this has taught me only vocabulary. What I know about Hawaiian sentence structure is just what I know from Pidgin and reading the first chapter of the Hawaiian 101 textbook when my college roommate took it at UH Manoa. I've realized that I also have a lot of anxiety about attempting to use what little Hawaiian I know; I don't want to seem as if I'm assuming a Hawaiian identity.
Our school has made clear that it is not only our daughter who has been accepted into the program, but the family. Parents are also, for example, required to attend weekly Hawaiian language classes. As a result, this blog is as much about us as it is about her. This is a space for me to reflect on our experiences for my own learning and record-keeping, but perhaps it will be a resource as well for families curious about what to expect in language immersion.
4 Comments:
Yay for a new blog! Are you able to gauge if the other families speak Hawaiian (or are Hawaiian)? Do the kids have to have part Hawaiian blood to be accepted into the preschool? Perhaps I should read on to learn more!
Kids don't have to be Hawaiian ethnically, but I think most (almost all?) are. I get the sense that a lot of the parents speak Hawaiian to their kids as much as they are able. So like one of our coworkers, his older kids are already in immersion, so I think the younger ones hear it more.
I also realize how few Hawaiians we grew up with. Or, I wonder if maybe they were around, but we didn't know they were Hawaiian. Or they were around, but we didn't hang out with them.
Wow awesome! I wonder what percentage of the student body is Hawaiian descent. I think where we grew up is amazingly asian-centric, also, yeah we didn't really hang out with real Hawaiian people! Is that ironic?
yeah, i mean, i have heard it's easy to get into kamehameha from mililani, meaning there aren't a lot of hawaiians. i've been trying to think of people from high school, though, like kaneakua.... i wonder about others, like kimo k (c/o 99).--was the family hawaiian or was he just called kimo? also, pua v. (c/0 96)--same thing. oh pilialoha... yeah i just have no idea.
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