Twenty-five Indian-American parents, dressed in green T-shirts that read “I Support Hindi in WW-P,” attended the board’s May 22 meeting and spoke during public comments. The parents consist of West Windsor and Plainsboro residents whose children attend Hindi USA language classes on Friday evenings at Grover Middle School from approximately 7 to 8:30 p.m. Hindi USA is an external language learning program. The parents directed a request to the school board for WW-P to consider implementing Hindi as part of the district’s world languages curriculum.
Several parents said that learning Hindi in school would help children be better prepared to work in the global economy and connect with those in India and the diaspora of the Hindi-speaking population.
Mamta Puri, a volunteer teacher for Hindi USA’s classes at Grover, spoke about a Hindi initiative from a teacher’s perspective. Coincidentally, Puri studied under Martin Smith, WW-P’s assistant superintendent for curriculum and assessment, to become a language instructor.
Puri says volunteer teachers with Hindi USA aren’t well-trained to teach a foreign language as it should be taught, and that can hinder the students’ learning of Hindi. The parents want the district’s educators to provide Hindi instruction.
“Most of our volunteer teachers are parents with very little time in the evening, just doing their best to teach the language. I was fortunate enough to be trained as a foreign language teacher at UPenn, and that changed my perspective on teaching. I would like to emphasize that if you have Hindi in our schools’ curriculum then a well-trained teacher will be instructing the students. Kids would have a more structured form of learning a language, and they would be better taught than parents or volunteers who may not have a definite lesson plan to teach them,” Puri said.
Rohit Mehra presented some facts about Hindi for the school board to consider.
“Hindi is one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world. A Hindi course has been offered in more than 100 colleges and universities in the U.S., and most recently it was introduced in schools in Bensalem, PA, to start in September. Many high schools in Texas have been offering Hindi, as does Edison. Based on that, and considering that we have a large Indian community, we would like Hindi represented and introduced in elementary schools in WW-P,” Mehra said.
Board President Hemant Marathe told the group that their request will come before the curriculum committee soon. The next scheduled meeting of the curriculum committee is Monday, June 4, at 10 a.m. at the district’s central office. Some of the parents indicated that they will attend that meeting.
