School Courses

What should a student competent in English know and be able to do? After three years of internal debate--and against a backdrop of growing political division over national education goals--two English teachers' organizations on Monday offered a set of national standards described as their profession's vision of 21st century literacy.

Students are about to begin a program on the Holocaust which has left the school district at the center of a bitter controversy. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is running the program, designed to teach students about the systematic killing of more than 6 million European Jews and millions of others by the Nazis before and during World War II.

When Fred Miller started his new assignment as a Los Angeles Police Department community relations officer in South-Central Los Angeles, he could not understand how the feud between blacks and Latinos in the 8800 block of Orchard Avenue had become so vitriolic.

In all her 11 years of life, Nahal Pirian had never eaten ravioli, let alone cooked it. "I've just made cookies and stuff," the dark-eyed youngster explained after she made the little spinach-stuffed dumplings that have been a staple of Italian cuisine for hundreds of years. The cooking lesson, held at Rosti, a Tuscan eatery in Encino, was part of Lanai Road Elementary School's Kids' Cooking Week, which also included visits to Chevy's restaurant and tours of nearby Ralphs and Mrs.

Eighteen schools in the Capistrano Unified district will share grants totaling more than $670,000 for innovative course development, trustees announced this week. "This is the first time we've been able to give schools what they've asked for," Board President Sheila Benecke said. The biggest share, $75,000, will go to Capistrano Valley High School to develop a computer network center.

Our heroine is a tall lady with a familiar voice, and if you want to hear the ultimate European cooking school success story, hers is it. In 1948, the U.S. State Department assigned her husband to Paris. Encouraged by her gourmet mate, our heroine figured she'd make the most of her new location. So she signed up to study at the famous school for chefs, Le Cordon Bleu.

I'm sitting topside on the beautifully renovated barge, the Julia Hoyt, sipping vin de noix, a walnut wine, while floating through a leafy golden canopy of plane trees. I have taken this opportunity to ponder my itinerary for the next five autumn days. We are three guests, a couple and me, and we are here to study and consume the food of this region on a float down the Canal Lateral off the Garonne River. We will journey 55 miles, through 21 locks, past 19 medieval villages.

At one time, attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris was every aspiring cook's dream: to stand before the hallowed stoves and learn to make a proper stock, a perfect hollandaise, a flawless genoise. But also to awe your friends by producing a towering croquembouche or letting the names of wines such as Echezeaux and Chassagne-Montrachet roll effortlessly off the tongue.

Last spring, state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin sounded like a no-nonsense field general, marshaling her troops for an assault on reading test scores that are the worst in the nation. She convened a task force of educators, reading experts and business leaders, and gave them four months to produce a "strategic battle plan" she could champion. In response, the task force delivered in September just what she'd asked for--marching orders for fixing a "crisis . . .

To meet the needs of their fast-growing Asian populations and to prepare students for jobs in the Pacific Rim, many schools are expanding their foreign language programs beyond the traditional European languages. Spanish is still the most popular language by far, accounting for more than a third of the state's foreign language enrollment. But Japanese and Chinese are the state's fastest-growing foreign languages, and other Asian languages are gaining ground.