Vincent Aluise is used to the road less traveled because his chosen course of study is early childhood education, making him one of three males in a group of 35 students at A.W. Beattie Career Center in McCandless.

Now, the Avonworth High School senior has added something to his resume that stands out even more.

"Nee how," instructor Zhang Yancheng greets Vincent, 18, at the start of a recent class in Chinese, the first time the language has been offered in the nine school districts Beattie serves.

"Sheh sheh," the teen from Ben Avon responds as he exchanges head bobs, which for the next hour take the place of handshakes, high-fives or other American salutations.

From there, the tongue-twisters and the timid stabs at calligraphy get more tedious, which is par for the course.

"I'm not afraid to embarrass myself, obviously," said Vincent, as he belly flops into a two-language chat over what it means to play football in America (da gan lan giu) compared with playing it in China (ti zu giu).

"If I hear an American say 'football,' I think soccer. In China, soccer is football," Mr. Zhang tells his student, eliminating any doubt over whether the World Cup or the Super Bowl reigns as king in Beijing.

Eleven students are enrolled in the class, six at Beattie and five through a videoconference hookup at Upper St. Clair High School. Eleven might not sound like much, said Matt Roberts, Beattie curriculum coordinator who led the effort to land the class. However, by the time the Chinese course was finalized, students had already registered for fall classes.

"I was always interested in the writing. I think it's a beautiful language," Vincent said.

"Jobs nowadays -- if you know a different language, it's so much better, especially if it's a hard language like Chinese. It definitely looks good on the resume," he said.

The Beattie course is the result of a multi-prong partnership sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's Confucius Institute, a new offshoot of Pitt's Center for Asian Studies. Funding is provided through the Chinese Ministry of Education and academic support through Wuhan University.

The course is accorded the same credit as Beattie's other academic offerings.

Mr. Roberts is a dual master's student in Asian Studies and education administration at Pitt, which made the Beattie tie-in easier to set up.

"Here, they can put a teacher in one building and teach to nine districts, and the resources become available to nine districts," Mr. Roberts said.

Michele Heryford, Pitt's assistant director of Asian Studies, calls the pilot at Beattie a win-win. It opens the door to students in Beattie's nine school districts -- Avonworth, Deer Lakes, Fox Chapel Area, Hampton, North Allegheny, North Hills, Northgate, Pine-Richland and Shaler Area districts. At the same time, it forges the credentials of Pitt's program for teaching Chinese as a second language.

Ms. Heryford went to China this year to interview visiting scholar candidates, including Mr. Zhang, who has a doctorate in Chinese linguistics from Nanjing University, where he also taught English.

The unusual partnership involves the Chinese education ministry's Hanban, which has provided funding for 144 Confucius Institutes, of which 22 are in the United States. Pitt's is the newest, Ms. Heryford said.

"We're quite lucky to have one here," she added, explaining that Hanban pays the salaries and helped to secure immigration papers for Mr. Zhang.

Much of the credit, she said, goes to Mr. Roberts.

"Beattie is a really unique situation because what you have there is Matt. He could prove to us he could bring in other schools, and that was really essential.

"It's very complex to bring someone from the other side of the world ... but Beattie provides the environment plus a buy-in from the superintendent and the board. Matt had all that lined up."

As it was between Pitt and Beattie, a classroom-level connection between educators brought Upper St. Clair and Beattie together.

Upper St. Clair High School Principal Mike Ghilani said the school had a Chinese class of its own in the spring and had 18 students signed up for it this fall. However, the district did not pick up funding for the class, the costs of which originally had been nominal because the teacher had been a Pitt intern.

Mr. Ghilani had to cancel the class, but then Catherine Luke, a former assistant superintendent who is now a curriculum consultant at Beattie, steered Upper St. Clair to Mr. Roberts. Upper St. Clair was able to use its state-of-the-art Internet network to tap into Beattie's classes.

It's unusual for Upper St. Clair to partner with a vo-tech school outside of its own consortium, Mr. Ghilani said, "but this is something we wanted to do because the next step may be us teaching a class here and broadcasting it to Beattie."

With Japanese, Chinese and an Arabic class next year, "I think we could be a model for other districts," he said.

Setting up a Chinese program is complicated, although finding students isn't a problem.

"The initial response is, 'Yes, we'd all like to teach Chinese,' but how are you going to make it work and who's going to teach it?" Mr. Roberts asked.

According to the Allegheny Intermediate Unit, few Chinese classes are being taught here because few qualified instructors are available. The intermediate unit's online database of 22,534 education professionals looking for employment indicates that only two are certified to teach Chinese.

The paperwork for the project came together more quickly than anticipated. Mr. Roberts made his presentation to the Beattie board more than a year ago with an eye toward launching the pilot in January 2008.

"All of the timing just happened to be right. Everything sort of fell into place. It came in so fast that we had to make a decision in the summer -- can we actually start instruction in the fall?"

The answer was yes, he said, as "long as everybody knows it would be on a very limited scale."

That's fine with Mr. Zhang, who's on board for two years. Plans call for Beattie to perhaps offer an evening Chinese course for adults or to serve as a base for a distance-learning network.

"I feel very good, better than I imagined," Mr. Zhang said. "I thought I'd encounter more difficulties from the challenge, but I can get along well with the students and teachers.

"It's very challenging, but I can provide the students with some use of my knowledge ... so in the future they can more easily communicate with the Chinese people."