Recently, U of M Flint decided to turn down a request from a student that would allow her to fulfill her language requirement with American Sign Language. The student had grown up in a house with deaf relatives with whom she used sign language to communicate and therefore became fluent.

This really shouldn't even be an issue since ASL is the third most common language in the US after English and Spanish, but it's U-M Flint, so we'll give them a little grace period for their brains to comprehend the vast depths of their own ignorance and change their policy.

But this raises another issue however that's bothered me for some time. If a person is raised in a household with two languages, should they be allowed to fulfill a language requirement with something they are already fluent in? How come my Chinese friend can sleep through Chinese class and get straight A's because his parents were born in Beijing, but I have to suffer through two GPA killing years of B minuses in Italian because I was raised a white kid in Vanillaville, USA?

Maybe I'm just jealous because I know I could never posses the mental capacity to be fluent in more than one language, but something just seems a bit off. I mean it's great that my friend was raised to be fluent in both, and I credit him for that, but it's like being brought up Catholic and being able to easily fulfill a mandated "religion requirement" while your athiest-raised friends struggle to keep up.

All I'm saying is that it's enough of a gift already to be fluent in two languages, no need for a GPA boost to boot.