Lowell High School offers nine languages: Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Latin, and Spanish. A student may pursue a given language for
three years, and with sufficient enrollment, a fourth year language may be offered.
Lowell has an Honors program in Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish. An
Advanced Placement Program is offered in Chinese, French, German, Italian,
Japanese and Spanish. This is outrageously better than any high school we have heard
of in the United States. Never satisfied to let well enough alone, we'd be inclined to
recommend adding Arabic and Farsi and Portuguese.
The bad news is Lowell is the only high school in the San Francisco Unified School
District that has a comprehensive language/computer laboratory. The worse news is
that there are no annual or quarterly STAR tests for these languages, let alone any
organized elementary school curriculum.
So, were we asked by Steven Poizner, Meg Whitman or Jerry Brown, or any Governor in any state,
we'd say tell your state's children to study any language that can be written. That means a student
who wants to read a one thousand year old story in a language used by 250,000 people world-wide in
order to understand Aud the Deep Minded, daughter of Ketil Flatnose, should be able to. Ketil was a
Norwegian Viking who had conquered the Shetlands and Orkneys. Aud left the Orkneys after her
husband was killed, and moved to Iceland. One of her freeborn Celtic servants was a man named
Vifil, to whom she gave a portion of her land. Vifil's grand-daughter was Gudrid Thornbjornadottir,
who traveled to Vinland and there gave birth to Snorri, the first child of European descent born in
the New World. The highly esteemed J.R.R. Tolkien was of the considered opinion that the tenth
century sagas were literature worth studying so he started the Kolbitar (=coal biters), a
lighthearted term for those who lounge so close to the fire in winter that they bite the coal, at
Oxford. We suspect Tolkien would be pleased that once again, nearly forty years after the first epic
battle between chess grandmasters Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, Iceland and the Icelandic
language are once again in the news. In these days of the internet it shouldn't matter if a student is
at Lowell in San Francisco (API 949) or Mission (also in San Francisco but API of 555) or Rocklin
High (API 859; the top API in the Rocklin Unified School District and in Plumas County). We don't
mean to disrespect Mission - Carlos Augusto Alves Santana graduated from there in 1965 after
James Lick Middle School and, despite a lack of geometric art on his album covers so far, he is one
of our favorite guitarists.