by Alastair Pearson ’14
Mandarin Chinese classes for juniors and seniors will be offered in 2014-15 following a donation by Cleveland Indians owner and class of 1950 alumnus Larry Dolan. The gift will fund the hiring of a Mandarin teacher for the new elective course, which will not receive credit for the three-year language requirement.
Saint Ignatius currently offers Mandarin through an online program, but the new classes are intended to provide face-to-face instruction with a fluent speaker. Principal Bradesca said the Mandarin classes will be structured to build a viable long-term program on campus.
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MANDARIN CHINESE FACTS
- Approximately 20% of the world population speaks Mandarin Chinese.
- Unlike European languages, Chinese grammar is free of tenses, plurals, cases, or genders. No conjugations!
- While the number of Mandarin Chinese programs in high school has grown, fewer than 70,000 US students study Mandarin each year, compared to over 6 million studying Spanish.
Source: American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages
[/pullquote]“What we have to do is simply offer and experiment and learn the program, “ Bradesca said. “What’s unique about the way we’re doing it is we contracted with the Columbus School of Chinese.”
The school will integrate the program into the foreign languages department with the assistance of the Columbus School, which will provide an entire curriculum for teaching Chinese, as well as a framework for teacher development and evaluation. The principal said he had high hopes for the program.
“I want it to stoke the fire of global awareness in the Saint Ignatius community,” Bradesca said. “Mandarin Chinese is just a welcome addition to the foreign languages curriculum.”
The financial resources for the Mandarin program became available when Dolan made a donation in the name of his classmate and friend, Allan Goebl, who is the namesake of the rededicated Allen J. Goebl ’50 Department of Languages.
Dolan said at the unveiling of the program to the student body on September 13 that he made the donation in honor of Goebl, and what he characterized as an unlikely friendship that began in 1946 during their freshman year.
“Two guys who had never met before, one from Rocky River and one from Cleveland Heights. One was an elegant language student, the other was a dumb jock,” Dolan, who bought the Indians in 1997, said. “You figure it out.”
Although Dolan said the two first bonded over lunch and in classes, Goebl said that their relationship gained an added boost because the two lived on opposite sides of Cleveland, Goebl in Rocky River and Dolan in Cleveland Heights, and traveled to visit girls at schools nearby each other.
Goebl, a former priest who lives in Madrid with his wife and performed service work in Guatemala and Peru, said he believed Dolan’s donation could give Ignatius students valuable skills.
“The international business consequences of this can be enormous if you speak the language of the people you’re trying to influence,” Goebl said. “They will go out of their way to help you when they hear you speaking the language that makes them who they are.”
He said the ability to speak foreign languages—he speaks French, Spanish, Aymara, and Q’eqchi’, and his wife speaks five languages including Filipino and Mandarin—had changed the course of his life, and he said he believed that Dolan’s gift contained the same potential for future generations of Ignatius students.
Dolan said he envisioned the program as providing Ignatius students with the capability to communicate with people from around the world. He said a possible example could be a discussion between an Ignatius student and a Chinese native.
“Because they can talk to each other, maybe they can come up with an idea,” Dolan said.
Goebl said the gift represented a precious opportunity for Ignatius, and emphasized the possibilities represented by the program and the need for students to make careful use of Dolan’s philanthropy.
“It’s like a football game. You’re standing on your own 10-yard line, the two teams are trying to kill each other, and all of the sudden there’s a fumble and you’ve got the ball in your hands. Be grateful,” Goebl said. “Because it’s a gift. It’s almost a miracle. For God’s sake, don’t drop it. Use it well. But realize, you’ve still got 90 yards of hard work ahead of you. Just don’t run in the wrong direction.”
He said that that Dolan’s decision to focus on building a Mandarin Chinese program was made because of his commitment to modernizing language education at Ignatius.
“It’s because of this world of languages we live in now,” Goebl said. “Chinese is the language of the twenty-first century.”
