About five years ago I was invited to put on a slide presentation on birds for a Dallas area school teaching Junior & High School age children English during their summer class programs.
When I got there at the school they had set up an entire auditorium and there were 360 plus students, then their teachers and interpreters. Dallas is home to many high tech companies.
Of these 360 students they came from a total of 117 of the 190 or so countries and six different continents. Their parents were normally the most brilliant college graduates from universities from all over the world. Lured here by high wages as compared to their home countries.These children were expected to pick up enough English in just one summer to be able to compete with the local population of children. MOST of them will graduate at the top of their classes if they have all four years to catch up. Every child from any country knows what birds are but few of them understood a word of what I was saying.
In 1952 Texas had a population around 6 million. Due to immigration from all over the world they are guessing we will top 24 million in 2012. At the Dallas Daffodil show it being held at the Arboretum there will be about 1/3 of the people you will have to communicate with by sign language walking through unless they have learned English or you can use the universal language of flowers.
The Arboretum was built on land donated by a wealthy Dallas couple on the shores of their first and only water reservoir back then called White Rock Lake. They bragged that the new power plant producing 120 mega watts of electricity and the 3 mile long lake would provide enough energy and water for the next fifty years. There were 40,000 people in Dallas when the lake was built. Today they are pumping water nearly 100 miles from every direction to get enough water to the millions of people in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex.
I live 125 miles from the Dallas Arboretum. My county burns 36 million tons of coal a year to pump electricity from our 6 power plants to keep the lights burning in Dallas:-)) The folks in Dallas are trying to build a lake that will cover 40,000 acres in the north end of our county and another 30,000 in two adjoining counties on the Sulfur River. This will be the fifth of the seven lakes planned on this one East Texas river. Keith Kridler Mt. Pleasant, Texas Temperatures dropped to 24*F this morning or -6*C