In just a few years, all Parkway Central High students taking German will have either finished or dropped the course, which will bring an end to its presence in the foreign language department.

As of now, German classes still exist, but are only available to people who enrolled in the language prior to the decision. Similarly, Parkway West’s German program stopped accepting new students in 2023, roughly a year before Central would follow. At the time, their German 4 and 5 classes had four students in total.

In both cases, the main cause is a declining number of students who pick German as a foreign language. With Parkway Central, the middle school’s removal of German education cut down the already lower number of students who decide to take it in Central High.

The plan to phase out German has led to Christie Staszcuk, the German teacher for Central High, to teach English 1 in addition to the German. Staszcuk has seen the thinning number of students firsthand, as well as the gradual removal of both Parkway Central and West’s German curriculum.

“I think Spanish has a reputation of being the easiest language and there is obviously some horrible history with the Germans from World War II,” Staszcuk said. “I don’t think that it’s any easier and also, I just feel like German has always had a smaller but different population because it has a reputation of being harder.”

Jason Lovera, the head of PCH’s English Department, took German classes throughout his time in high school. Lovera observes a similar pattern in its decline.

“I think back when I was in high school, Germany was more of a major world power than they are today. And so I think in that regard, I’m sure there’s a lot of other reasons,” Lovera said. “But I think Spanish is what’s increasing, especially for the United States because our population is increasingly speaking Spanish. So it makes sense that that’s an increasing part of the reason.”

Staszcuk was introduced to the English department because of her certifications to teach the subject, specifically English 1 after discussions between Lovera and PCH Principal Tim McCarthy.

“We just decided that just the needs of the department, and just starting off in English 1 or English 2 is probably the best place to start when you’re new to a department, and we had the most need in English 1, so that’s why she’s teaching English one this year,” Lovera said.

Staszcuk has taught German since 1998, giving her extensive experience in the subject. This makes changing from one subject to another, while having years worth of resources in one, and basically starting from scratch in the other, a difficult aspect of teaching English.

“So when I’m prepping for some of my German classes, because I’ve done it for so long, I have lots of ideas and I have lots of materials that I can kind of fall back on. I had nothing for English,” Staszcuk said. “Thankfully, my English teaching colleagues are amazing and have been sharing lots of their materials with me, which is good for me and the students because I don’t feel without their help, without their assistance, I wouldn’t feel as confident knowing that I’m teaching what I should be teaching.”

In Lovera’s experience, joining Parkway Central’s English department had difficulties as well, despite already being an English teacher at that point.

“You’re still learning the curriculum, you’re still learning the expectations of the department, you’re still learning the expectations of the school when you’re new to the school, so it was very hard,” Lovera said.

Though, education for native and foreign languages share some similarities, especially since German and English are closely related as they both fall under the Germanic category. This means that the two share many words and cognates.

“Because I was a language teacher for so long, it’s made my transition easier. Vocabulary acquisition is definitely something we’re working on in English, and I feel like I have a lot of good tools to help with that because of teaching German for so long,” Staszcuk said. “If some kids ask me a question, there’s something about commas that I used to be, oh, just ask your English teacher. So I guess that doesn’t work for me anymore. I have to actually figure out those rules.”

As a whole, learning a new language can involve practicing the same skills that are used to improve upon students’ English, but at different skill levels.

“So obviously our biggest goal in both languages, both curricula is to help kids learn how to communicate better. They have to communicate in English in writing and reading and listening and speaking just the same as they do in German,” Staszcuk said. “So the big change is I used to have to teach the very simple things like what a verb is and how to conjugate it.”

Giving students personalized feedback to help them improve is extremely important in English classes. The pandemic and virtual learning would hinder teachers from providing advice or corrections, therefore writing and reading were the most vulnerable to setbacks.

“I was not really expecting to have to do that as much as I am doing it in English. I think we’re still seeing some definite gaps, learning gaps from when we were in virtual school and post COVID,” Stazcuk said. “So, I’m teaching a lot of the same stuff on my board back there. We have prefixes in English and in German or suffixes in English and German. So a lot of it’s the same type of stuff.”

Additionally, teaching different grade levels and subjects comes with a varying amount of strictness. Freshman Sophia Seys takes two classes taught by Staszcuk, English 1 and German 3.

“I definitely think, German, it’s more fun and she’s more lenient with talking in our German class than my English class,” Seys said.

Even with the struggle of adjusting to a new subject, English does not suffer from the lack of demand that German has.

“And this is one of the things that I am excited about because I have always been the only German teacher in the building or almost always been the only German teacher in the building,” Staszcuk said. I was never able to have that kind of team to work with and bounce ideas off in the building.”

This story was originally published on Corral on November 26, 2024.