A bilingual seal of approval for high school graduates

Peter Kuskie and Maria Regalado are students at Hillsboro High in Oregon and are on track to receive a new bilingual seal on their diplomas. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

Read this post from Monica Campbell. Or listen to the podcast above.

Let’s take a trip back to September 1995, when Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole was talking about education on the campaign trail. “If we want to ensure that all of our children had the same opportunities — yours, mine, everyone’s — in America, alternative language education should stop,” he said.

“Alternative education” was a code for bilingual education, and Dole was speaking at a time when states like California banned bilingual programs. The idea was that learning foreign languages was fine, but not to the detriment of being fully literate in English.

A 2012 graduate of the Santa Ana Unified School District wears a medal honoring her bilingualism and holds her diploma with California’s bilingual seal. (Photo courtesy of Shelly Spiegel-Coleman)

But those days are fading — and fast. Just head to Hillsboro High School, near Portland, Oregon, and step into the Algebra 2 class. The concepts — open intervals, integers, logarithm rules — are already challenging for most students. Now learn them in Spanish.

From start to finish, teacher Moises Curiel instructs in that language, and the students plug away, asking questions and working through problems in groups.

Learning in another language isn’t a problem, because the students have two things in common: They all know English, and they’ve studied in Spanish for years. Many of the students here either grew up speaking Spanish with their families, or want to speak Spanish themsevles, like Peter Kuskie. He’s a sophomore who grew up speaking only English.

Yet Kuskie’s Spanish is good — really good — because he spends most of his school days moving between classes instructed in both languages.

And while dual-language learning been around for years in the US, what’s new is what Kuskie and many of his classmates will get on their diplomas when they graduate: an embossed seal honoring their bilingualism.

The effort started in California, spearheaded by a statewide coalition called Californians Together, and is now spreading to states like Illinois, New York and Florida. Along with Spanish, there are bilingual diploma seals offered for Mandarin, Vietnamese and other languages

“What we … have been about, really, was to try and change people’s perspectives as well as their feelings about bilingualism,” says Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, executive director of Californians Together.

Arturo Lomeli, Hillsboro High’s principal, hopes the seal will have more than symbolic value. “It’s so demanding, it’s so rigorous,” Lomeli says. “They’re walking in and they’re processing English, Spanish and math and inputting in Spanish what they’re hearing — processing in English, outputting in Spanish.”

Lomeli also points to how some — but not all — studies show that bilingualism slows the brain from aging. Students learning another language are also less distracted, and even earn higher salaries over time.

Hillsboro High teacher Moises Curiel teaches Algebra 2 in Spanish. To honor the students’ bilingualism, the school will offer qualifying students a bilingual seal on their diploma. (Photo: Monica Campbell)

Spiegel-Coleman says the United States faces real risks if it continues to be a monolingual culture.

“There are issues of national security,” she says. “You’ve heard from the Department of Defense over and over again that they are lacking professionals who can deal and communicate and negotiate in countries across the world in the language of that country. Going through an interpreter, you lose something.”

But while bilingualism is strengthening in some parts of the US, foreign language instruction is dropping nationwide. One reason is that the federal “No Child Left Behind” law, enacted 12 years ago, stressed traditional subjects.

Anti-immigrant sentiment in some parts of the country also doesn’t help. SEALS_language

Principal Lomeli says he can’t control the political rhetoric, but insists “we need to catch up with the rest of the world. We need to prepare students for a global society, and we haven’t been doing that.”

Some students aren’t worried about issues that are quite that big. For them, mastering another language is a personal matter. Maria Regalado, a junior whose parents are Mexican says, “I’ve had Spanish since I was born. So, I just get to keep it and not let it go, you know?”

She says now she can visit Mexico and “really talk” with her family, and she thinks her improved Spanish will also help her career. She wants to study criminal justice and become a police officer, and she knows some Latino families in the area can’t speak English and can feel distanced from law enforcement. She’s looking forward to bridging that gap.

Kuskie, her classmate, says it was his mom who convinced him to try and become bilingual. She was turned down for a job at a job at health clinic in Hillsboro, an area flush with new immigrants.

“She knows the people there and then they said, ‘Well, you need to learn to speak Spanish.’ So that’s why she couldn’t do that. So she’s been trying to learn Spanish, too,” he says.

Not everyone at the school is on the bilingual track. Kuskie says his friends who aren’t in the program ask him why he takes classes like Algebra 2 in Spanish, and he does acknowledge that it is “a little bit” harder.

But he’s up for the challenge, he say. And for students like Kuskie and Regalado, whose goal is real bilingualism, they’ll have a seal on their diploma to prove that come graduation day.

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A Soviet-era storytelling game trains you to bluff, lie and sometimes tell the truth

A tense moment during a game of “Mafia” in Kiev, Ukraine. (Photo courtesy of the English Mafia Club of Kiev)

Read this post from Alina Simone. Or listen to the podcast above.

The storytelling parlor game “Mafia” crosses borders, transcends culture and bridges the language divide in ways you’d never expect.

There are no game boards or joysticks involved in Mafia — just words — and a setup that’s probably as old as human settlement: An uninformed majority of civilians against an informed minority, the Mafia. One side has power in numbers, the other has the power of knowledge.

Since 1987, Mafia has become a television series in Latvia, a World Championship event in Las Vegas and a training tool for the Russian security services. But I was still surprised to learn that Mafia was actually invented in the Soviet Union by Dimitry Davidoff, then a psychology graduate student at Moscow State University.

Dimitry Davidoff in the 1980s (Courtesy of Dimitry Davidoff)

Davidoff tells me that even behind the Iron Curtain, he never doubted Mafia would become a global hit. In his day, games that were popular in the Soviet Union were all based on the idea of “us” vs. “them.” But in Mafia, as in real life, we ordinary civilians have no idea who the real enemies are — or whether the enemy is an enemy at all.

It turns out he struck a universal nerve. And once you get the hang of the rules, it’s also wicked fun.

But for today’s global entrepreneurs, Mafia has become much more than a game. “I think I use it all the time in real life,” says Sam Lundin, who founded a website named Vimbly that helps New Yorkers find cool and adventuresome activities. He even hosts as monthly Mafia meetup.

Lundin says he’s drawing on his Mafia skills “anytime there’s any kind of negotiation or problem-solving scenario going on, or someone is either bluffing or not bluffing in a business environment. Are they really telling the full story? Are they not?”

A Mafia meetup in New York (Photo: Alina Simone)

It also helps him expand his bag of tricks: “You might think of a new trick that would work really well to root out who the mafia is, but then everyone sees that you use that trick and you have to figure something new out genuinely,” he says. “I think the entrepreneurial world is like that in that it’s not structured. You constantly are figuring out new tricks.”

Sam was born in America, but he’s in the minority at a recent meetup. Most of the players are from China, Russia, South America or one of the many other places where Mafia is being put to strategic use. That includes Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.

“I believe in Kiev we have maybe 30 or 50 clubs. Maybe even more,” says Eugene Bazhenov. He started an English-language Mafia club back in 2010, and it immediately caught on with Ukrainians.

“The initial motivation is, of course, to improve English. But then they get addicted to the game because it’s really fun to play,” Bazhenov says. People have even found dates — and spouses — through the club. “It’s a really good place to meet people, whatever your purpose is.”

A Mafia game in Kiev, Ukraine. (Photo courtesy of the English Mafia Club of Kiev)

As for Eugene’s purpose? “At that time I was working for a company and I wanted to have my own business, but I didn’t have network, I didn’t have money to start the business. So it was totally nothing,” he says.

Nothing, that is, but a bunch of people crazy about Mafia, which is actually how Eugene achieved his goal. He ended up creating two companies with the help of expat Mafia players, one from Denmark, the other from Australia. Today, most of his closest friends, he tells me, are foreigners he met through the club.

It turns out, pretending to kill one another can really bring people together.

Meanwhile, back at Lundin’s Mafia meetup, a Chinese woman named Joy is killing it — pun totally intended — for the civilians, picking off Mafia one by one.

She keeps insisting her English isn’t very good, but she’s had a lot of practice at the game. About six years ago, Mafia — or the “Killer Game,” as it’s known there — became huge in China. Dozens of brick-and-mortar clubs sprang up across the country, complete with high-tech screens and audio systems blasting sound effects — all of which are completely unnecessary, given this is purely a storytelling game.

A Mafia game in China (Photo courtesy of Silvia Lindtner)

The game is known in China as "The Killer Game."Silvia Lindtner, who teaches at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, spent two years in China researching the Killer Game phenomenon. As she discovered, the Killer Game boom had everything to do with the booming Chinese economy:

“They were like, ‘We have to deal with people we are not at all familiar with. We sometimes have to convey a particular message to our customers, or to our clients, and you sort of have to sometimes pretend to be someone else in these settings.’” Lindtner says.

Playing Mafia wasn’t just a way to hone those skills: It was a great way to establish a competitive advantage. “These were skills they believed were utterly necessary in Chinese society, in international business relationships, and they were also saying that these were skills that would distinguish them from other people in China,” Lindtner explains.

These kinds of concerns weren’t on Dimitry Davidoff’s radar when he created Mafia. Having grown up in the Soviet Union, the thought of a business application for the game never crossed his mind.

He actually designed Mafia in part as a means of understanding the bloody history of the Communist regime: Change the word Mafia to KGB, and the game becomes a metaphor for the Stalin era, where anyone could be an informant and a lot of innocent civilians get killed.

But 25 years later, Davidoff is now living in the United States and he’s made a business out of Mafia. He licenses it for various uses, and even served as a consultant for a Mafia movie that will be released next year in Russia.

The youthful version of himself that invented the game back in the Soviet era might even point at the Dmitry Davidoff of today and call him “Mafia.”

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Eat your words

Where do the words “ketchup,” “toast” and “salad” come from? [Photos: Steven Depolo (l), Adam Singer (c), stacya (r)/Flickr Creative Commons]

Read this post from Alex Gallafent. Or listen to the podcast above.

I didn’t think too much about what food I stuffed into my mouth when I was a kid, so long as there was lots of it.

No longer. Now I often want to know as much as I can about what’s headed for my belly: what the ingredients are, where they came from, and how they were put together.

Something else interests me too — the words we use for food. Dan Jurafsky is way ahead of me on that one: He’s a linguist at Stanford, and the author of “The Language of Food.” [Listen to this interview with did with Jurafsky earlier this year.]

“It’s like we speak these words and we just look right past them,” he says. “And in fact they’re telling us the history of our culture and our globalization, and the way we’ve been interacting for a thousand years.”

But most of us do look right past food words, so I thought it might be fun to run a little experiment.

I took my friends Adam and Jenny out for dinner at a local burger joint in Brooklyn. I asked them: Where do common food words like “ketchup” and “salad” come from? What would they guess? Oh, and I had Dan Jurafsky listen in on their linguistic guesses, to see how good their hunches were.

We began our meal by toasting Adam, who just got a new job. So where does “toasting” someone come from?

Adam thought that it might have something to do with toasted bread, or breaking bread with people. Jenny countered with the idea that it came from a Latin root and morphed into “toast” somewhere along the way, possibly through misspelling.

“So maybe it’s from middle English,” Adam offered, “like toostare, or something, and it was something you did with mead. Maybe you toasted your hops.”

Dan Jurafsky, author of “The Language of Food” (Photo: Alex Gallafent)

The mead idea was actually pretty close, Jurafsky says. “We used to drink, in the Middle Ages, sweetened mead with toast in it,” he explains. “The drinks of the Middle Ages were much more hearty — people got a lot more of their sustenance from their wine and their beer than we do now. So toast in wine was a very common thing.”

That drinking tradition then gave rise to slang phrases. “Somewhere in the 18th century, it became the custom to talk about the society lady of the hour as if she spiced the party, just as the toast spiced the wine,” Jurafsky says. “So we talked about her as the ‘toast of the town.’ And then we began to raise our glasses to those people — the glasses which still barely had toast in them, for not very much longer. So that’s the story.”

Alright, next up: what about the word “ketchup?”

Adam and Jenny had no idea. “Catch up?” But they thought it might come from Vietnam, or “some sort of Asian-type cooking.” Like some sort of “fermented sauce,” Adam ventured.

Jenny added a piece of pop culture trivia: “Wasn’t there an episode of Mad Men when they were talking about ketchup as catsup? It’s ‘catsup,’ right?”

Not bad. “Ketchup comes from Chinese, it was originally a fermented fish sauce,” Jurafsky says. “You stick fish in a vat, put a lot of salt in, and you go away. It was made in Vietnam, Thailand, and in the southern part of China” — the region that traded with those two places.

“The fact that it’s spelled in two different ways is usually a hint that a word comes from a language that may not have had the same orthography as us,” he says. “So the fact that we spell with a ‘c-a-t-s’ or with a ‘k-e-t-c’ tells us that it was borrowed from Chinese, which of course didn’t use the Roman alphabet.

The different spellings were yet another by-product of imperial competition: “English, Dutch and Portuguese sailors and traders who first encountered the word had to figure out a way to spell it,” Jurafsky points out. “And so they all spelled it in different ways.”

Ketchup found its way to Europe and then, in the late 19th century, America. And that’s where the tomatoes and the sugar got added — of course.

And one more: how about “salad?”

Jenny began by sounding out the word: “Sal-ad. But ‘sal’ is salt. That’s not right.”

“Maybe it is,” said Adam in reply. “At another time, people probably salted a lot of things. I wonder if something salted that wasn’t necessarily cooked, but was cured in somewhere using salt, lead to the word salad.”

“Excellent!” says Jurafsky. “Salad indeed comes from salt. The Latin is erba salata, salted greens. And the word salt is there in so many of our words. Sauce and salsa and salami — they literally all just mean salted, as does salad.”

Low sodium wasn’t a big priority back in the old days, it turns out: “Before refrigeration, salt was our major means of preserving, so words like sausage and sauces [referred to] salting — ways to preserve foods.”

Jurafsky’s work is a reminder that food words signify much more than food: They reveal the ways people have borrowed from each other down the centuries, passing things along this culture to that, transforming foods and ways of life along the way.

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