About three weeks ago, the special needs teachers at my son's school called a meeting because my son refused to attend French classes. Even though he gets straight "A"s in French, he no longer wanted to participate in class. I could see the logic behind this - after all, when would he ever use French? We live in a province in Canada that has very few French speaking people and he had already taken the subject for 5 years, mastered enough of the vocabulary to ask directions, say "please and thank you", so really, what is the point of spending 40 minutes a day learning a language that he will never use? Hence, the difficulty the teachers were having in getting him to French class.
What they didn't know prior to calling this meeting was that my son has decided to learn Japanese. He thinks it will be more beneficial in the future and has already taught himself how to write certain words in Japanese from the Internet. This is where his interest lies at the moment, and being a child with Asperger Syndrome, I have no doubt that he will research this language as much as he can before he moves onto something else that catches his interest. He will probably never forget what he has taught himself.
We went into the meeting prepared to do battle yet again for our son. When the question of "Does it matter to you, as parents, if your child learns French" came up, we said "No, it doesn't matter to us what language he learns, as long as he enjoys it." We then introduced the subject of Japanese. Upon being asked "Should we force him to go to French Class?" we responded "No, we don't force our son to do anything." We suggested ways that the teachers could get at the root of the problem, told them that our son feels he is wasting his time learning a language that he won't use and suggested that a few lessons in Japanese might go a long way towards gaining his co-operation in attending French class, but it didn't really matter to us if he attended.
After the issue of French class was resolved, then came the issue of "How far should we push your son?"
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