<p>Hi
I was wondering if any one on this site has done the Middlebury-Monterey High School Summer program. I am currently a junior in high school, and am in my third year of chinese (after taking 2 years of spanish, 1 of which overlapped w/ Chinese). A friend and I are looking into the MMLA program to potentially skip the Chinese IV class we would be in next year and take AP Chinese. We are looking heavily into this program, specifically on the Swarthmore Campus, but there is one problem: of the few online reviews that we found, some stated that older high schoolers/teens found themselves bored in this program, and that it is more suited for younger kids. Similarly, some of these reviews claimed that they speculated the positive reviews were fabricated, though I am not sure the legitimacy of these claims. Is there anyone here that has done this program and can comment? Obviously, this is not the only program that could do this for us (others include NSLI-Y, after which we would request a placement exam). We have no problem going to China (even tho this would be on someone else's dime :D), and we both spent a week there doing a foreign exchange program last year. Obviously summer is a long time away, and I made my decision for last summer towards the very end of May (got 3 college credits though :D). I am probably forgetting to say something, even though I have written way to much, and most of you won't even read this far...
Thanks</p>
<p>I did MMLA at Green Mountain College as a rising junior in the summer of 2010, and it was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. My language academy (French) was full of very strict followers of the pledge, and we all became quite close and came up with numerous inside jokes. I was in the second-highest level class, and we spent the summer reading, analyzing, and performing bits of classic French plays in order to further our understanding of the language. I went in a decent French student and came out almost fluent; I went on to take AP French and scored a 5 (only around 5% of non-native speakers accomplish that, so it’s huge). I wouldn’t say I was ever bored. I got homework, though not enough to make the summer un-fun; the kids in the very highest class often had a lot more work, though! The age distribution seemed pretty even. Some young kids, some middle kids, some older kids. Everyone found his/her niche. </p>
<p>HOWEVER, I wouldn’t necessarily take my experience as a typical one. Not every academy every year on every site creates a culture where speaking the target language is accepted/“cool.” A friend of mine went for French the year before me and experienced a lot more pledge violation than I did. In my year the Spanish academy was the worst offenders, and apparently it’s usually like that. My sister went for Spanish in 2011 and gave me a reason for this: some parents force their kids to go to MMLA if they do badly in Spanish class. Obviously those kids are going to be more resentful than enthusiastic. When I was there the Chinese academy spoke a fair amount of English as well, just to warn you, but I know there were at least some dedicated non-native speakers who were pretty damn proficient by the program’s end. </p>
<p>In the end, MMLA is what you make of it. There are no grades, just end-of-program evaluations. If you do the best in your class you get a little gold star on your certificate. That’s all. It means the learning is all on you, and you get what you put into it. If you want to get better, you can work hard and stick to the pledge and you’ll get results, I assure you. If you want to goof off on your parents’ dime, there’s plenty of room for that as well (though they have some strict rules you have to follow). It helps to have friends with the same mindset as you, because it can be hard to form bonds with people who refuse to speak the target language. I will tell you, though, that MMLA is more relaxed than its adult equivalent, the Middlebury Language Schools. We visited those once… I tried sitting in on a high-level class about culture in the Antilles and boy, was I lost. The adult version is also a better value since it goes for longer and isn’t that much more money, so that’s something to consider when you make your decision.</p>
<p>WOW I am rambly today. Good luck with whatever choice you make!</p>
<p>Hey Metsrule, you should keep pursuing MMLA as an option if you’re interested in language immersion. Yes, the Middlebury Language Schools have strong programs, but they are available students who have graduated high school. If you are going into 8th through 12th grade, the “Middlebury” language experience at MMLA may be a great way to jumpstart your language study for a few reason:</p>
<p>MMLA is a growing program, and you are now able to earn credit by completing its courses. In fact, in 2011, 97% of students achieved the equivalent of 1 year of high school credit in the 4-week program. That’s a pretty amazing jump. A lot of students from that year went back to high school and took two simultaneous language classes. MMLA not only teaches you the grammar and vocab of the language but also sharpens your overall study skills and puts you on track to real fluency. </p>
<p>You should also check out the campuses where MMLA convenes. Pomona, Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Green Mountain College are all great colleges and unforgettable place to spend a summer. If you’re looking to preview a college campus, this the way to do it. You’ll be comfortable living the campus life before you even arrive at your college of choice.</p>
<p>And let’s not forget the opportunity to meet some really cool people. MMLA students are a diverse group from all over the US and beyond. The faculty and staff are awesome, language experts and educators who truly want to see you succeed. </p>
<p>Check out the MMLA website,
[Middlebury-Monterey</a> Language Academy](<a href=“http://mmla.middlebury.edu%5DMiddlebury-Monterey”>http://mmla.middlebury.edu)</p>
<p>There’s a ton of information on the site.</p>
<p>I’m helping my sister research summer high school immersion programs to prepare for Spanish AP next year. Both MMLA and Concordia Language Villages seem good. MMLA costs substantially more. Can anyone comment on whether it’s worth the difference?</p>
<p>This past summer (2012) I attended the Spanish Academy at Swarthmore College and can truly say that it was a phenomenal experience and one of the best summers of my life. Not only did I make tons of awesome friends who I still keep in touch with, but the curriculum and teachers were also interactive, entertaining and (of course) intense. </p>
<p>Contrary to what ohreally877 said (though I guess what she’s saying might be true of a different campus), the language pledge was strictly enforced and there was a very committed and passionate culture of respect for the 100 year old pledge. Only very rarely did I experience or hear of people breaking the pledge and it was certainly very much looked down upon by staff and students alike. </p>
<p>I was in the second highest level of the program and, even then, was amazed at how much my abilities increased. Through MMLA, I went from being a good Spanish student to being a good Spanish speaker- even able to speak in Spanish without realizing it was a foreign language by the end of the four weeks. Dreaming in Spanish for the first time was one of the coolest experiences of my life. </p>
<p>Yes, you go to school for 5 hours every weekday (3 on the weekends), but classes are not like classes at your regular school (or, if they are, I’m seriously jealous). Instead, the classes are small (there were 13 kids in my class and multiple classes of similar sizes for each level as needed. I think the classes are capped at 14 students) discussion based and the AMAZING* teachers take into account the interest and personality of the group they are working with as they plan the lessons. </p>
<p>*Not only does MMLA recruit some of the best Spanish teachers in the country, but it trains them extensively in the Middlebury method of teaching.</p>
<p>Another great aspect was how close we got to be as an academy-students, teachers, counselors, and administrators. We all ate together, learned together, played together, and lived together. </p>
<p>I can truly say that each and every day at MMLA was enjoyable and would strongly recommend the program to any interested person!</p>
<p>I attended the French MMLA Swarthmore program in summer of 2011. I would say it was very effective, but far from fun. But if having a fun summer isnt what matters to you, i would say go for it; its likely that you’ll learn a lot of your target language.</p>
<p>I understand there will be an online placement test in May, but what level (I~V) should I expect for a student who has completed Honors Spanish 3 with an A+ grade? </p>
<p>bump</p>
<p>Bump…Has anyone taken the Chinese immersion program? Would love to hear what you think!</p>
<p>My children attended MMLA. Worst program ever. Don’t go there. Kids hated. Lots of alcohol, sex and ecigaretts. </p>
<p>Could you please be more specific about which program your child attended? Thank you</p>
<p>ohreally - Thanks for sharing your experience and insight. Another poster (a parent) has written that MMLA is a drunken orgy (with smokeless cigarettes). Methinks he/she overstates things, but could you comment - how wild do things get at MMLA? I’m sure the rules are strict but I also know it matters whether the counselors are actually around and care about enforcing the rules. </p>
<p>Also, is there time just to have fun, hike, play sports, etc? Thanks.</p>
<p>My D loved it! Did not report anything like. What you are describing!</p>
I don’t know which program “xubixubi” is referring to but I believe it might be the Green Mountain College program, as I had friends that attended the MMLA Spanish program at GMC (and hated it) this summer and said similar things about alcohol, ecigs and sex.
I have heard both positive and negative things about the MMLA program and have also experienced it firsthand, and I will try to provide as candid and detailed a review as I can.
I’ll start off with positives. Before attending MMLA I talked to a girl at my school who had attended the MMLA French program at Pomona two or three years ago and loved it. She and I are very different people, however, so I took her review of it with a grain of salt knowing she and I want very different things from our summer experiences. However, I definitely don’t deny that MMLA could be a program that is an all around positive one for some students.
Another positive is that the program really did help me learn. I was in the second highest level of the program and although I honestly really spoke French a little over half the time (which I will provide an explanation for) I went from barely getting an A- in my French III class at school (as a freshman) to skipping French IV and French V to do French AP. I am currently doing well in French AP and I do credit MMLA for being a large part of this improvement.
In addition, two of my friends attended the Spanish Academy at Pomona during the same time as me, and they had quite a good time. However, I don’t think the Spanish Academy was quite as effective in advancing language skills as the French.
I think one thing many reviewers forget to mention is what kind of person they are like/the kind of people they think might enjoy the program.
- I am a 16 year old girl, currently a sophomore (and I was a rising sophomore when I attended the MMLA Pomona French program).
- I am a dedicated French student and I have spent many summers in French camps and many hours outside of school with French “tutors” of sort (that I go to cafés with or visit museums with, etc. basically days out but all in French to practice my conversational skills) and actual French tutors to advance my grammar and vocabulary, but I also believe that summer programs, educational or otherwise, should be rigorous but fun and not overwhelming. I really put a lot of importance on the “fun” part of it because summer should provide respite from school - I am at a very demanding school and I want to be able to come back from summer refreshed, not fried.
- I’m also outgoing, easily bored, experience seeking - I’m a typical extravert, but I’m not a risk taker. I also have been told I am quite mature, responsible and independent (that’s not to say I don’t want or need people around me but that I can take care of myself and my parents trust me a lot and give me a lot of freedom) without ever compromising how important having fun is for me.
Now, I’ll move onto the negatives of the program.
I’ll start off with something that seemed to almost unanimously be agreed on within my program and, from what I could grasp, within the programs my friends attended. The administration and staff this year were pretty atrocious. We were treated with much less respect and much more condescension than I would hope or expect to be. In addition, we were given very, very little independence and freedom. Although there was one stand-out teacher in my program, most of the teachers in my program treated us like toddlers and/or were unenthusiastic. My teacher actually said to us one day (in French so this is a rough translation), “Look, I know you’re tired and I know some of you really don’t want to be here and honestly neither do I, at all. I can’t wait to get home and watch Netflix. But this is just 4 weeks of your whole lives, you can suck it up.” I understand this may have been an attempt to motivate us somehow but the exhaustion in her voice reflected how I was feeling and the generally sad feeling of the program. My RAs (Resident Advisors, like counsellors) were not good. We were constantly told we were the worst academy they had had in years/as far as they could remember. One of my RAs told me one day “(student at my school) attended MMLA last year and gave me such a high regard for your school, and you’re completing destroying it.” The RAs generally seemed quite miserable, crabby and tired alongside the students. Higher administration was generally quite rude - one of them was constantly very crabby and rude, and very easily offended. One day while we were talking I asked her where she was from and she very defensively responded (again, translation from French) “why does it matter to you? If I say I’m not from France do you think I’m not qualified to teach French?” I had said absolutely nothing to garner this reaction and my friends and I were very surprised by her reaction.
My program’s housing was also not optimal. It was very hot in the house (no AC, you had to bring your own fans if you wanted any kind of cooling) and we had recurrent ant infestations. One time I reached my hand into my backpack after leaving it sitting against the wall next to my bed and it came out covered in ants - by that point I didn’t even flinch because I had become so used to dealing with ants. However, I received only one or two mosquito bites the entire time I was there, which was nice.
Although I think all of the students in my program would agree their French skills improved, I think the students at the highest levels definitely benefited more. Most of my friends were low/lowest level and there was very little motivation among them to stick to the language pledge. Although not sticking to the language pledge didn’t damage my progress very much for whatever reason, I think it did damage my friends’ progress.
There were a couple of kids in my program who honestly liked it, but mostly people seemed quite unhappy with it. I think around 5 or 6 kids left early.
Also, I know this is a controversial aspect to comment on and may offend some people or may even turn some people off of my review but I promised to be completely candid. I found very, very little in common with a large majority of the students in my program and I found most of them to be, honestly, very weird. My best friend there, we both bonded originally over how miserable and lonely we were because every single person we had become friends with we absolutely did not enjoy spending time with, and because our school experience was so intensely different to our experience at MMLA. We had both had a good (but stressful) year at our respective schools and had been looking forward to MMLA, thinking we would be learning French but also relaxing and having fun in California. Instead we found ourselves with no freedom in a really, really unappealing social environment. Not only were classes painfully boring but almost all of our (little) free time was as well
I could honestly write a book about my experience at MMLA and I wish I could recount all of the experiences I had this summer. I understand that my intense feelings about the program may not seem entirely warranted but if I were to give a day-by-day review of my experience I think my feelings would be more understandable. MMLA undeniably impacted me deeply and catalysed some positive changes in myself as a person post-program, but I have never felt as low as I did while I was there and a number of my friends have said the same. It was a really negative experience and although I appreciate the skills I learned there I would NEVER repeat the experience and I strongly encourage anyone considering MMLA to look into other programs. I have heard great things about immersion programs in France (or Spain, or Costa Rica, etc for Spanish speakers, or China for Chinese speakers, and so on) and personally, I think those would be a better investment.
My child hated the program. He’s a pretty talented language student, self-motivated and driven. The classes were boring, the language pledge a joke, the activities/residential life woefully inadequate. The money would have been much better spent sending him to live with a family in the target language. All of the kids referred to it as MMLA prison and several left midway through the program.
My child did the program at MMLA. She was a great language student and enjoyed new things but hated it here. They sat in class and after class they were forced to do a certain activity, which definitely was not included on the schedule on the website. The website basically said that you had classes and then free time for the rest of the day to hang out with friends, explore campus, play a sport, and just have so fun. Explore the campus? My child told me if they walked even five feet away from the dorm hall during there 45 MINUTES of free time, they would soon find an RA trailing behind them and probably have a report filed on them that they didn’t even know about. No one spoke the “target language” and in-fact my child told me that one or two Residential Educators/ RAs would gossip about other students with them IN ENGLISH. Yes my child did learn, but not as they advertised. As CindyLWho said everyone called it MML penitentiary and when they got their phones for the 45 minutes, everyone would post about “Green Mountain Penitentiary.” Hopefully this place shapes up because it seems to have been good every other year, but went down hill. Also “hooking up” at camp seemed to be a popular theme! Please, do better next year, MMLA.
@mildred23–I’m sorry that your child had a similar experience as mine, but I’m happy to have his validated by your comment. I had a BIG issue with the nanny-state mentality. The trailing RAs (looking to “catch” people), the supervised phone calls home (what the heck? the kids can’t talk to their parents privately??), the under qualified RA’s who yelled at the kids in English. Mine ended up learning quite a bit, but the experience itself was pretty awful.
Obviously, he won’t be returning next year (he told me that the retention rate is abysmally low–something like 3 students in his language had gone the prior year) and his younger sibling won’t be attending next summer as planned.
Has anyone had a child/been to the Granda Academy for MMLA? I’ve a talented linguist (does French and Mandarin already) who is looking to jump Spanish 4 over the 2016 summer and am trying to find options!
I am writing this review with the hope of helping some parent out there who is on the fence about this program. I sent my sons to the high school MMLA Spanish Academy this past summer. They would agree that their spanish skills improved but that this came at a high price. My sons echoed many of the sentiments above - no freedom during the day, a feeling of captivity and oppression, lack of community building, poor accommodations, and terrible communication with parents. One of the inside jokes among the kids was to comment on the ‘facilities’ as they walked past the gym and recreational areas. The brochure for the program claims that the kids get access to a college campus and all of it’s amenities. This is not true…they were not allowed to use the gym, recreational areas, weight room, or play on the full sized soccer fields unless they were supervised during very limited times. Similar to the review above, my kids referred to it as ‘spanish prison.’ Several kids left the program mid-way, but the general misery was apparently pretty universal. If there was an upside, this created some camaraderie among the boys…which is nice, but not exactly what we paid for. This is not a place to get a ‘pre-view’ of the college experience…it is far too rigid for that. I did get very positive feedback about the quality of the other kids in the program (which saved the experience) and also some good feedback about several of the classroom teachers. The problem is with the program’s administrative structure and overall approach to managing the kids.
On the second to last day of the academy all the parents got an email that our kids would be receiving their phones that night in order to charge them and arrange for parent pick-up the following day. This never happened and the following morning most of the kids had very little charge on their phones. All the flights out of Albany were canceled and there was no way to contact my sons to make alternative arrangements. My calls to the academy that morning were never returned. The scene at the airport was chaotic with stranded kids and no adult in charge of helping kids negotiate changed flights or contact their parents.
I didn’t hear about any e-cigarrettes or hook-ups but there was quite a bit of rascally behavior which you can expect when you impose an ‘authoritarian’ regime and lose the respect and loyalty of kids this age.
I stumbled onto this site last year when I was considering sending my kids. I was concerned about the negative reviews but went with the assumption that the parents complaining on here were outliers. Unfortunately, this is not the case and I hope my review can bolster what has already been said. This program has a great reputation and it can afford to churn out a miserable group of new kids each summer, cut off communication with parents and get a fresh crop the following summer. My sons agreed that there is tremendous potential from this program - if it was run more intelligently, with respect for the kids and a better understanding of adolescents it could be a great experience. I would have been happy to share my concerns in a less public format but the parent reviews they promised to send out never came. If you are a parent and you are here to address some last minute concerns about this program I would encourage you to talk to program directors about these concerns as this may be the only venue they have for getting feedback from parents.