My Thesis Pains

         Ok, so for one of my masters courses this semester I will be starting, you guessed it, the dreaded thesis that I have been hearing about since high school, but figured that since I had made it this far perhaps I had escaped all together. Insert long, melodramatic sigh here...nope, lucky me. On the first day of class our instructor basically layed it on the line like so, "make sure you pick a topic you are seriously passionate about, seeing as you will be working on this for the duration of your program." Huh? Pardone' moi? An education topic I'm passionate about?

         Now before you start wondering how someone in the education field could be having trouble coming up with a passionate topic let me remind you that I am a substitute teacher presently. I technically belong no where. I do not have a school to call my own or a classroom for that matter, but rather travel school to school, room to room playing what ever role may be required for the day. It is quite difficult to become part of all the drama and "passionate" topics surrounding any given school when you are in and out on an irregular basis. I am sure that if I was in the same place, day in and day out I WOULD in fact be able to come up with a list of about ten things that I feel very passionate about including the over testing of our students, the effectiveness of pulling children out of class for extra help and various other topics. But, I am simply not around enough to really get involved.

         After some thought, I had sort of an epiphany. I am a huge fan of teaching children from a young age to speak a foreign language. I spent a year teaching Thai children-ages two to four- how to speak English and was astounded at how quickly they were able to pick up the language many deem the most difficult language to learn. We spend so much time teaching speakers of other languages to use only English, but what about reversing this and teaching our little native English speakers some Spanish, Korean, or any other language used around the world? FINALLY! A topic I can stand behind and hopefully find a lot of pre-existing research to support the benefits of dual language education in schools. Remember, a thesis is NOT my opinion :) It is in fact a collection of a bunch of other individual's previous work put together in a new way by yours truly...what a ridiculous assignment. Anyways, back to the task at hand, how could the benefits NOT be greater for these students that start learning a foreign language in kindergarten verses the norm of public school starting foreign language learning around fourth, fifth or even sixth grade? Well folks I am setting out to prove just that! I have absolutely no idea where this will take me or even if it will be good, but darn it atleast I'm passionate about it!