La Profesora Loca

a new year, a new level of slowing down

2010-08-30T20:01:00.000-06:00

I think I am finally learning how to go slowly. Or maybe, I already knew how to go slowly, and I’m finding a new level of understanding in it. Part of it is probably that I feel more comfortable with myself as a teacher and with being the odd man out in the department. But, part of it is students who are willing to be honest with me. I’m starting the second week of school now, which means I am going on lesson three (block schedule), and every day I find myself slowing down again and again. I have been using TPR with my level Is (TPR and circling with balls with level II), and one of my classes has been very slugglish in response. I was just chugging away and suddenly I heard Susie, or Ben, or some wise sage whispering in my ear that boredom means they don’t understand. I stopped then and there and asked for a show of fingers – not for how much they understood, but to see if I was going slowly enough. Man, I was getting one’s and two’s all over the place. I slowed down, got through half of what I thought I would, but at the end, there were mostly four’s and five’s (I do a count of five fingers, not ten, so this was good.)

In another class I heard somebody grumbling. It sounded like a complaint about having to do the actions all class period. So, again, I stopped. I asked the class if they felt like they were learning and if I should continue working like this, or if they would prefer a more traditional approach. A resounding reply to keep going. So, I slowed down again. I’m checking for comprehension two or three times a class period. I’m not quite in the range I am aiming for yet, and it really does feel painfully slow. I keep reminding them that I’m the only one in the room who speaks Spanish, but I keep forgetting that. I use a word ten times and I think they have it. I think I can speed up. They don’t and I can’t. A student hesitantly volunteered today, and somebody chuckled and said that I should give her “hard ones.” I stopped. I put on my concerned teacher face, and a Time Out signal to speak in English. I told them that I would never try to trick them. That I am not trying to see how much they have forgotten, or how much they didn’t learn. I told them that my job is to make learning so easy that they don’t even realize they are doing it. I don’t think I was imagining the look of relief on people’s faces, or the more relaxed atmosphere in the class. I am shocked by how little people were understanding me, even when I thought I was going slowly, and I thought I was recycling my words enough. Back to the drawing board for me!

On Going S-L-O-W in a GT class

2010-07-08T21:57:00.000-06:00

The point was made that if I slow down my delivery to the point that even the slowest student in my class can understand, then I am hampering all of my other students. Is that really fair for me to do, especially considering I am trained in teaching GT students and am working towards my master’s in GT education?

Yes, it is. Because the underlying assumption is that if I slow down my delivery there is nothing left for the advanced students. But therein lies the beauty of TPRS. In any traditional class, during the direct instruction all the students are learning exactly the same information at the same time. Or at least, they are being exposed to the same information. The students at the top of the curve have already mastered the material, and they are now bored. The students at the bottom of the curve aren’t ready for it and they react by looking bored or uninterested. But really, they are just overwhelmed.

In a TPRS class, however, this is not true. Although the teacher is standing in the front of the room talking (sometimes), this is not direct instruction in the way we have always envisioned it. The teacher is leading a group into a collective effort, but each student is focused specifically on the information that is new to him/her. Slower processing students are focused solely on the words and trying to construct meaning. Faster processing students are focused on the underlying grammar behind the words, and how to construct meaning. Faster processing students are honored because they are often the students who can think of clever new scenarios in the stories the class is creating.

There have been a few studies that have shown that mixed level TPRS classes have been the most effective. I know that Michelle Whaley has posted about the results of her mixed level Russian classes on Ben Slavic’s blog, and Blaine Ray has referenced another teacher who had astounding results with her levels I-IV in the same class. When the vocabulary and the speed were not an issue, students could truly acquire some of the more subtle parts of the language. These kids often nail grammatical points that usually stick out as the immediate flag that a person is not a native speaker (in Spanish the use of the subjunctive, por and para, ser and estar) and they do this because “it sounds right” and because the many pop-up grammar lessons infused throughout every class stick.

As a teacher, I can pop-up anything I feel my students need to work on. So, for my slower students I pop-up, “Why did I put an –n at the end of that verb?” (It’s plural) and for my students who are beyond that I will point out that although this is an –ar verb, it ended in an –en, why is that? (It’s a plural command)

TPRS in a non TPRS department

2010-06-27T15:09:00.001-06:00

TPRS in a non-TPRS department

There are 9 teachers in my department. I am the only teacher who is trying to use TPRS. I have taken a softer, gentler approach this year. Meaning, I have not advertised my use of TPRS, nor have I chastised the other teachers for using the methods they do. Instead, I have sought to find places and times where what I believe can be shared in an open way. For instance, I shared a participation rubric that Ben Slavic posted on his blog. I have shared strategies for reading skills.

I discovered that in my case, it is not that my department is anti-TPRS, it’s that the bureaucracy of the district I teach in requires a high degree of lock-step teaching. We are expected, district wide, to be on the same chapter as every other teacher within a few days.

It is also a lack of familiarity. When I have made comments, such as referencing the top 100 words used in spoken Spanish, or that “even stupid kids growing up in Spain learn to speak Spanish” that my ideas are listened to. I even brought up the topic of homework not having an impact on learning. One of the teachers decided to try an experiment with her students – and she is the most traditional teacher in the group. Not everybody agrees with me, but that’s ok. I didn’t become a teacher to have everybody agree with me. It’s enough that we can all listen to each other with respect.

Now, I don’t share everything. In part because TPRS sounds so fuzzy and not well prepared if you don’t SEE it. I mean, telling other teachers that you aren’t too worried about grammar just rings all sorts of alarms. And it isn’t even true. But, it’s hard to put into concise words what we do. So, mainly I share in small bits and pieces.

Towards the end of the year I gave up and taught the old way. The kids had to have a certain amount of information in order to be able to pass the standardized exam, and I didn’t have enough time to cover it all in a traditional TPRS manner (we lost 11 instructional days this year to snow just for starters) and the amount of vocab and grammar just cannot be acquired in that time. So, I used all the time-worn strategies of language teachers everywhere. A lot more of my students failed the second semester than the first, and my exam grades were consistent with first semester grades.

Sooo... now that I am on break I am plannning to use Backwards Designing to map out my own personal TPRS curriculum that aligns with the district pacing guide by semesters next year. There is a rumor that we might be able to keep our students for the whole year, which would ease some of the stress too. I would have a whole year to get students to where they “belong.”

Homework - can I judge?

2010-06-27T14:54:00.001-06:00

In another post I commented implied that homework was a waste of time. To be fair, I was referring to a student who has already mastered the material and is now failing because he cannot force himself to do work that he has already surpassed. It would be like taking an advanced mathematics student and failing him for refusing to do 100 problems of single digit multiplication, simply because all the other students were doing the multiplication problems. But, if this kid can do trigonometry, why are we failing him because he got bored of problems that read 4x2=? Come on, sure it’s easy for him, but how intellectually challenging is it?

Be that as it may, I was reminded that it is not fair to judge another teacher’s assignments as being a waste of time. It’s true I do not want others to judge me harshly, and there have been times over this past year that I have worried my teaching style is being judged by many. But, I *do* think that most of the homework assignments are worthless, and not just for my brilliant yet autistic student.

There is a lot of research out there right now that shows most homework has little to no bearing on a student’s actual success in acquiring the desired information. Little to no bearing. If I have 86 minutes approximately 3 days a weeks in which to teach as much Spanish as I can, why am I going to waste precious minutes of that time with work research, supported by my personal experience, will have little to no impact on the actual learning of my students?

In Which I Rant Again

2010-03-05T05:30:00.001-07:00

There was a kid in my class first semester. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Brilliant, but autistic. He excelled in class, even with the language barriers that autistic children have. (Thinking in pictures tends to slow down the speaking, social "niceties" are relatively meaningless, plays on words often don't make sense because of very literal thinking, etc.) He had a few quirks, for instance he would be reading his textbook chapters ahead of the class, but if I called on him, he knew exactly what we were doing and could provide an answer. He even did unthinkable things. He would volunteer to act in our stories! He would volunteer silly answers to our story lines. He would even, sometimes, smile. Great kid.

He switched classes at the semester. And now, he is failing.

His new teacher recognizes that he is brilliant, and that he knows all the information. But she is still failing him because he hasn't turned any of the assignments in. She wanted to know how he did in my class. Are you kidding me? He was the ace! She is concerned. He has an IEP, and he is failing, so what should she do?

I took the time to explain some of the little things about autism. That's great. The problem is, she doesn't see how that has anything to do with his missing work. So, I told her to talk to his counselor, or his special ed teacher.

*GROWL*

We have a CHEETAH here, and we're going to fail him because he is refusing to walk nicely with the elephants. We're just going to reinforce the idea that he is different, and wrong, and he cannot succeed in life.

Am I really so out of touch with reality? Am I really so different than the rest of the academic world? The other teachers in my department are all about the all mighty homework assignment. This, they say, will prepare the kids for the rigors of college, for the rigors of life. OK. Sure. But, not all the kids are going to college. Not all the kids will study languages in college. They say, try missing deadlines at work, see where that gets you. Fine. Except, we tend to pick our professions because of our personal quirks. Math is hard for me, I mean I can do it just fine, but I have to spend a lot of mental energy making sure the numbers don't move around the page, and that they stay the same. I'm "good" at math, but it isn't fun for me. I didn't go into a career where math is a strong prerequisite. I cannot stand staying still, and being boxed in. I didn't go into a career where I am sitting in a cubicle or an office all day. I stand up, I walk around, I get to talk a lot. I get to interact with people. So, my ability as a student to sit still and be quiet actually had no bearing on my future ability in a career. And you know what? I still refuse to do work I deem boring or unnecessary. So, I've missed a few deadlines in life. Nobody has fired me for it, I still have a 4.0 in grad school. I have learned to pick my battles. But please, don't make me feel like I am wasting my time. I have too little of it to waste it on useless stuff. Which is why I refuse to waste my students' time.

Again, this kid, this wonderful, brilliant, funny kid is going to fail, and he is going to have all of society's messages reinforced by his teacher, simply because he is not doing work that is a waste of his time. He doesn't need the practice. He just needs to fill in the blanks in a spreadsheet to prove to a calculator that he can do the work like a good little robot. *growl*

In Which I Rant

2010-03-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

I have a student. Actually, I have many, but that isn't the point. I have a student who is a really nice kid. He isn't going to be awarded any prizes for great intellectual prowess any time soon, but he is a really great kid. He is nice. He is fun. I'm sure the girls think he's cute. And I've never had a single problem with him. But his dad is a bully. And despite academics not being his son's strongest suit, the dad wants the kid to go to Harvard.

The kid has an IEP. Not a problem. I meet all of his accommodations except one in my normal instructional delivery. He's bringing home A's and B's in Spanish. But, now, Dad tells me I've done too good of a job accommodating his child, because he was unprepared for the rigors of a standardized test. He got a C. The average score was a C, just a few percentage points above the kid.

Is this a darned if you do, darned if you don't scenario or what? Dad tells me at the beginning of the year, the parents are very concerned that he keep up his gpa so he can get in a good school. The kid has a good gpa, at least in my class, his exam score doesn't even change his grade because that was solid, he is speaking Spanish, and now... now I'm told I need to stop accommodating him so he can do well on standardized tests???? Never mind the part where average kids who don't have IEPs are scoring in the same range as this kid?

*GROWL*

End of rant

brain research and language acquisition.

2010-02-26T04:10:00.002-07:00

This is really cool. I don't have much time, and not sure what if any the applications are, but it's really cool. Basically the brain learns nouns and verbs differently and in different parts of the brain. Follow the link!

building blocks

2010-02-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

I have an image in my mind of language as building blocks. Maybe it's because my own kids love building towers, castles, and race tracks with these brightly colored and oddly shaped pieces of wood. There are squares, rectangles, triangles, arches, cylinders and quarter circles of various sizes and colors. Depending on a person's creativity and skill, a person can build many things. We have had towers that have reached as tall as fingertips stretched over head. We have also had race tracks that have been half an inch high. "Don't knock over my castle" I am told as I walk into the bedroom and see an outcropping of blocks. A few minutes later, the castle is a jail for misbehaving race cars. So much of what my kids create is based on what they can imagine. But there are also very strict rules governing their creations. For instance, no matter how hard they try, they cannot reach above their own height to place blocks, unless they use a tool. So, the height is limited. Even stricter (since there are chairs and step stools) are other laws of physics. Balance and placement become so important.

But, I never sat down with my boys and explained these laws of physics, balance, proportion, placement... I never told them, practice stacking two blocks together until you get them perfect, and then practice with three... No, their understanding of the rules of building blocks has come about through play. They have built, and toppled, and built again.

I never told them that before building we had to take an inventory of every block and study its characteristics. Although, the grammarian in me has taken inventory, and does want to organize the blocks into nice neat categories...

Teaching a language is a lot like playing with the blocks. I can teach my students to inventory all the blocks - the words, the morphemes, the grammar... We can study the characteristics of each one. And then we can practice putting two blocks together. Once we get that right, we can move on to two new blocks, or string three blocks together. Or, we can just build. Yes, we will make mistakes. The blocks will fall down. But, when we let creativity take over, the things we can build if we just try!

Cereal again?

2010-02-20T08:36:00.001-07:00

I was just talking about how some of my former students still discuss events from our classes last year, and even years before. Then what happens? These very same students started a debate about a word we had used in one of our stories on my facebook page.

The basic story is this:

Mike Tyson is famous. He is strong. Lots of people like him. But, he has a problem. He likes to eat people's ears. It is illegal to eat people's ears. The police come and arrest him. He goes to jail.

While he is in jail, he has an idea. He has to wait, because he can't do anything about his idea when he is in jail.

When he gets home, he makes Tyson Puffs - a cereal shaped like people's ears. Now he can eat ears and it isn't illegal. Now he doesn't go to jail. Now he is happy.

The debate was about the word "Puffs". One girl said it was Pufs, another thought it was Poofs, and one boy said it was Puffs. It turns out, they were all right. In the English translation, we had written "Puffs", as we asked the story, we pronounced it "poofs" and when we wrote it in Spanish, we wrote "Pufs" to keep the pronunciation. But really, it has been more than a year and a half, and here they are debating, literally the semantics of our story about cereal, body parts, and jail.

And, it's on my facebook page! Which means one - these students have become autonomous learners of the language; two - they are making connections and using the language outside of school (ACTFL standards); three - we have succeeded in building relationships with each other; four - the students have truly acquired some of the language; and five - I now have to explain to my family and adult friends why my students think a story about eating ears is hilarious. :)

Oh! The connections... this all came up because I told my son I was going to eat his ears. :)

Back to basics

2010-02-19T21:57:00.000-07:00

I started back at work this week with fresh resolve to get back to the basics in my classes.

I had a story script I followed in three of my four level one classes. (In the fourth class, our discussion about the blizzard was too interesting to leave.) I made sure the script included lots of repetitions of the key structures.

But, where I really focused my energy was on only adding one detail at a time, and circling a structure until I was getting a strong response. I think I totally blew it. But, I was much more conscious of the entire process than I have been up until now. I would say a sentence, ask one question, add another sentence... And then I'd realize "Oh no! I've just added four details back to back. I'd better slow down."

And then I would go back and circle. I have formally asked students in several of my classes to be my barometers and to slow me down whenever I go too fast. I told my principal (who is scheduled to observe me next week) to expect me to call on the same student multiple times, and why. I told him that I observe my students, and then I select the student who is processing information the slowest, but who is still trying, to be my "barometer." So I ask that student for comprehension checks, etc.

It's amazing. When I am concentrating on slowing down, I am looking in their eyes. I am thinking so many thoughts, and that slows me down too. Because I have to take the time to select the thoughts I want to entertain, and then watch their faces. And then circle.

I completely bombed in one class. I decided to tell an anecdote, in English, that had nothing at all to do with the story. It fell flat. And all I could think of was Ben's no English project, and how breaking into English destroyed the class.

Things I have really focused on this week:
*I have been adament about being respectful of each other. And also that nobody talk while I am talking. I am trying Susie Gross' idea, just looking at the kid until he/she is quiet and then saying thank you and continuing with my lesson.
*Comprehension checks. I've done a fist to five several times each class period.
*Spontaneous assessments of acquired knowledge (pop quizzes).
*Prompting students on my expectations, but in a non-judgmental way. "I know this is a new class, and we haven't seen each other much because of the weather, so I'll remind you that when somebody says hello, the polite response is to say hello back. Let's try that again." "I expect everyone to answer the questions. That's part of how I know you understood what I was saying. If I don't hear everyone answer, I'll assume you didn't understand, and I will repeat the information."
*Circling. I still suck at this. I know from my experience with Mandarin this summer that there is no such thing as too slow or too repetitive. And yet, my mind balks at asking too many questions. I ask two or three, and then I feel I *must* go on.
*Adding one detail at a time. Again, even though I know I cannot go slow enough, I just get these urges to move on. The kids must want more.

Today, I slowed down more than I thought possible. And I almost felt students following what we were reading. We got almost nothing accomplished... but I felt this invisible pull where students were engaged in the reading and understanding what was being said.

Not a complete success. And yet, a success. Next week I go back to the drawing board, I teach to their eyes, and I circle the crap out of the structures. :)

The conversation in the hall

2010-02-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

I was going through last semester's paperwork this morning. I was sorting through the student interest surveys recycling the ones belonging to those who are no longer my students, refiling the ones who are in this semester's classes. I ran across the survey belonging to the girl who I overheard being berated in the hall the other day.

And what did I see? Her favorite musical group is The Beatles. What is significant about that? Well, the teacher who was telling her how worthless she is, etc... her favorite group is also the Beatles.

So, when I saw her this morning, I mentioned this fact to her. It was completely non-confrontational. We were just talking about music. I didn't say anything about classroom management or discipline. Just, "Do you remember the girl you were talking to in the hall the other day? Well, I just came across some of her old papers, and her favorite group is the Beatles." She smiled, and said she would mention this to the girl. And since we were having such a lighthearted conversation, I slipped in a thought that I think this child has some big things on her plate beyond school. She agreed with me.

I don't know that anything will change. But, on the other hand, maybe I helped her see a part of this girl she may not have seen on her own. Other than that? I smile when I see this girl in the halls, I say hello to her.

honoring our students as people

2010-02-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

I posted the following over on Ben Slavic's blog a while ago. If you want to see the original discussion, click on the link in the title to this entry.

I had some truly amazing students last year. Amazing intellect, amazing creativity, amazing personality. Truly, I was blessed as a teacher to have some of these kids. One boy borrowed a grammar workbook to study at home. He came back to me a few weeks later to report that “I’m not quite sure I understand the subjunctive.” This was in the 8th grade. As far as our stories went… out of this world.

I have moved on to another school, and so have they. And, I am seeing what they are saying about Spanish. Oddly, they post about Spanish frequently on Facebook. Sometimes, they quote random lyrics or story lines from our classes last year. More often I see complaints about how boring and endless the verb conjugations are, powerpoint vocabulary lists that never end, worksheet after worksheet on topics they already understand, and homework.

These brilliant kids who could write novelettes in Spanish with minimal errors last year, who voraciously read through three Blaine Ray novels and Mira’s Piratas, are now defeated by the monstrous verb conjugation task at hand. They report that they are only now beginning to understand the preterit (although they were successfully using the preterit and imperfect in class last year) and they are feeling dumb that it is taking them so long. Two of them discussed their recent mid-term exams and how they spent so much effort trying to remember the rules for i->y and “basement verbs” that they were unable to answer a simple question “How do you say ‘they are singers?’”

And, oddly given all the complaints I got last year about how “boring” the Ana books were… they are begging to read “Real Books” like Pobre Ana again.

At first, reading through this recent discussion of theirs I too felt crushed. I didn’t prepare them properly for high school. I should have taken the time to explain the grammar… Then I felt angry. Who are these teachers who crush these absolutely brilliant kids? Why must we take these confident children who can speak and communicate in Spanish and force them to pay attention to such minutiae as whether or not they spelled a word correctly with an i or a y and thus convince them that they have not learned what they thought they had, and that they are not good at it. And then I felt pride too. Here they are, a year later (some more than a year later) posting to each other from multiple high schools, IN SPANISH, talking about Spanish, remembering our stories, reading Ana…

Then I wrote about a conversation I overheard in the hallway between a former student of mine and her new Spanish teacher, my colleague. It broke my heart. This girl is habitually tardy, she draws on herself in Sharpie, she smokes, she probably drinks, and she doesn't do homework. She has been suspended several times this year, which doesn't help her spotty attendance. She is also very introverted. It took me weeks before I got a glimpse of the beautiful person she is inside. The person waiting inside like a butterfly in its chrysalis. She was never a superstar student of mine, but she did have a role to play in several of our stories. She is amazingly creative, and I honored that whenever I could.

So, there I was working madly during my planning period (back in the days before the double blizzard when I still went to work) and I heard a heated discussion in the hall. I glanced up. This girl was standing there, head hanging down, and her new teacher was telling her that she should go withdraw from the class because maybe a foreign language wasn't for her. She was telling this beautiful person that she could not pass if she did not try harder, that she was guaranteed to fail, that she wasn't cut out for languages, she should withdraw before it affected her transcripts.

And, it seemed to me that I could see her retreating back inside of herself to a place of safety and warmth where before I had seen this beautiful person near the surface ready to spring forth. It seems to me that this child has something much bigger on her plate right now than her grade in Spanish class.

What does humiliating children do to them? Does it make them want to try harder? Do they respond by showing their brilliance? Or do they retreat to somewhere we can't reach? Do they withdraw and then decades later tell others that they never could learn that new language, they must not be good at languages?

I just want to call bull____.

I know how I respond to humiliation. I threw a pen at my professor and withdrew from a class I loved.

TPRS

2010-02-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

I woke up in the middle of a dream. Not quite sure what the dream was about, probably my thesis. But the first thought I had was this: TPRS is not really a methodology, it's a philosophy!

TPRS encompasses everything: how to handle classroom management - we never humiliate children, we relate to them as human beings, we never allow them to put other students down, etc.; what to do with the use of L1 (students' first language) - we don't allow it to be spoken in the classroom except for brief grammar lessons lasting no more than a few seconds, we use L1 to translate new structures on the board, etc.; every facet of second language acquisition in a classroom setting is covered.

Which leads me to another rambling thought. I love Dr. Krashen's work. I think he hits the nail on the head regarding second language acquisition. I love his newest thoughts about transparent language rather than 100% comprehension, and about the organic growth of language rather than planned structures in stories. I believe these are ideal situations for language acquisition. But, I don't believe they are ideal in a classroom setting. If I were to truly follow Dr. Krashen's beliefs, I would not be able to teach in a public school. Because, in a public school, I have a curriculum I am required to follow, lesson plans I must write, I have colleagues who inherit my students every semester and an expectation that they be at similar places as far as the language they have been exposed to. I have 32 students in each class, maintaining +1 for each student while ensuring that the class is comprehensible to all the others, is a daunting task.

The use of students' L1 in a second language class

2010-02-16T08:05:00.001-07:00

Over at Ben Slavic's blog there has been a discussion of using English (L1) in a second language class. We all know L1 is to be avoided. It says so right in district, state, national standards, research, methodology textbooks, etc. But, it's that 800 pound gorilla. How do we get rid of it? The students speak it. We speak it. It seems so easy to just slip into English for a few seconds, share a story, explain something, go back to Spanish...

Ben is discovering that, as he experiments with a radical expulsion of English in his French classes, his students are paying more attention, they are using less English themselves, and in fact they are happier and more engaged. We always slip into English thinking we are adressing *their* needs. But, what if we aren't? What if English just kills it all?

What if the answer to kids speaking in English is simply for the teacher to speak more in L2? (while maintaining complete transparency, in other words staying always in bounds with the class.)

classroom management

2010-02-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

One of the things I have struggled with the most since starting TPRS in my classes has been classroom management in general and specifically the no-negativity rule. The no-negativity rule or the no-put-down rule is that we do not allow students to express any negativity towards each other or the class. It has been my Achilles Heel.

I have an image in my mind. TPRS is like paddling a boat. If the students are positive and participating, we are paddling with the current and we go amazing places. If the students are being negative and fighting the process, we are paddling against the current.

So, back to my revelation.

Karen Rowan wrote in the "Green Book" that if a student is negative towards one of his/her peers we simply point out that he/she *must* be mistaken. Obviously he/she is thinking about a *different* student in a *different* class because this student is obviously very smart.

I love this approach. It doesn't humiliate the offending student, and yet it allows no room for negotiation. No wiggle room. Way better than me getting mad and huffing and puffing that I will not tolerate this kind of behavior.

Backwards Design

2010-02-10T12:35:00.003-07:00

I am thinking...

This whole year I have felt so hampered by the requirements of my pacing guide. What if I use Backwards Designing to plan out a TPRS curriculum? I can use the exam dates as my points in time from which to work, figure out what material is actually expected to be learned by then, and build those structures into my stories.

With that and the slowing way down... I should be able to cover the same material in a similar time frame. I can place my stories in the countries that we are supposed to be studying. Make sure my structures use the grammatical points I am supposed to be teaching...

The only problem is the ridiculous vocabulary we are expected to teach. Yes, there is an insane amount of vocabulary to cover, but it's not even practical vocab most of the time. Heck, I don't even know some of the words.

School is closed until at least Tuesday because of the blizzards (another one being forecast for Monday) so maybe I have time to work on a plan here.

Back to Basics

2010-02-10T12:06:00.003-07:00

I am reading "the Green Book" Fluency Through TPR Storytelling by Blaine Ray and Contee Seely. I picked it up again to begin researching in earnest. (My thesis topic has been approved!)

I am amazed by how much the basics have been escaping me. In my quest to get a story going, to grab the students' interest... I have been going way too fast for many of my slower processors.

The biggest thing I have not been doing is circling enough. But just behind that one is the idea that we should never introduce more than one new fact at a time. I introduce a fact, ask a question, then introduce another fact. I don't give anybody the time to savor the new idea, to truly acquire it.

So, whenever this blizzard ends, I'm going back to the classroom with a renewed sense of purpose. S-L-O-W.... I don't care how many times people say it, it always applies.

I think "slow" and I slow down my speech so students can hear my individual words. I point and pause at the board. But I don't go through the story slowly enough. I rush through as if the end of the story is the goal. As Blaine points out, it isn't the end, it's the journey.

Fun in the classroom

2009-11-03T21:20:00.002-07:00

Has anybody ever read anything by Alfie Kohn? He's somewhat of a radical. His research suggests that homework is actually detrimental to students' acquisition of the material. And then there's this article http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/feelbad.htm about having fun in the classroom.

Why is it that our classrooms are filled with such quiet desperation?

race issues in the classroom

2009-11-03T21:09:00.004-07:00

When I became a mother everybody laughed and joked with me that babies don't come with instruction manuals. And yet, I found that raising a baby was not quite so hard as everybody made out. A lot of it was intuition. A lot of it was talking to other people, watching other parents, making mistakes, correcting...

Sadly, what I find much more difficult is dealing with students. At least, on the human level, not the professional one. I had five years of instruction manuals before ever setting foot in a classroom. And since then, nine more years with one on one relationships, conferences, meetings, more instruction manuals... and yet, certain issues were never addressed in any of those books or meetings. Or, if they were, I didn't get the lesson.

The issue of racism was certainly addressed. At least in the historical context. And in the context of this is unjust. We cannot allow bully students to use race as weapon. But, I can't remember anybody ever sitting down with us and levelling with us about how to talk to students about racism. Nobody ever talked to me about how to walk the tightrope between acknowledging injustices and cultural differences without watering down expectations and crippling my students through accomodations.

How exactly do I even the playing field, and give my students all the tools they need to succeed in life without furthering the injustices already there?

And how do I do all of that while still addressing the curriculum? Do I put the Spanish on hold to discuss racial tension in the classroom? Do I reprimand the offending student and continue with the lesson thus holding everyone to the same high standards?

More thoughts on racism

2009-11-03T20:45:00.002-07:00

I never really thought about racism as pertinent. I also never really considered the idea of white priviledge. If anybody had mentioned it to me as a child, I would have laughed at them. After all, I grew up in a single parent home. I attended ten different schools by the time I graduated high school. I remember the shame and the stigma of wearing clothes that were out of style and didn't quite fit because they were bought at Good Will, or donated as some act of charity. To this day I cannot stomach the thought of powdered milk or Wonder Bread, they were staples in the food the local church dropped off on our porch. And I hate using coupons, they remind me of the food stamps my mother used to purchase our groceries.

Racism wasn't really discussed in my family other than to say that it was bad. Most of my friends were white, but not all of them. My friends were chosen more from the demographics in my classes than any other reason. And I do remember thinking quite clearly that I could not be racist because my best friend was black. That was in 9th grade. So, as much as racism was not discussed, obviously the idea of it was a part of my consciousness. Dating a black boy later in high school proved to be disastrous. But again, it never occurred to me to think any more on the subject than that my father was anachronistic.

It wasn't until I lived in another country and was surrounded by another language and another culture, that I began to think critically about my own culture in terms of race. There I sat, in a cafe speaking in English with an American friend. I don't remember what we were talking about, but the rest of the events are burned into my memory. A stranger came and sat down at the table with us. He asked us if we were American, since he heard us speaking in English. We told him that yes, we were. Then he asked us if either one of us had ever met a black person. We were both shocked. It offended our sensibilities that 1. a stranger would sit at our table and intrude into our conversation and 2. that he would blatantly talk about race. We told him that yes, we both knew black people. He was intrigued. He wanted to know what they were like. If we were friends with any, etc. I told him that some of my best friends were black, and he actually physically recoiled. He asked how I could be friends with a black person, they were all gangsters, they all carried guns, cussed, etc. Then I asked him, if he had never met a single black person, how he knew this to be true. His answer shocked me, and still has me thinking years later. See? He knew all of this was true because he watched American movies.

I came home, I spoke to my classes in the university about this. I started watching movies and television more critically. If I didn't know this culture, what would I think watching this? What images are we broadcasting to the world about our views, our beliefs, ourselves?

Then this summer I was taking a course for grad school. I had to interview professionals about ethnic and cultural minorities in schools and how we can better serve our gifted students who are minorities. The woman I interviewed told me that growing up she was raised never to hate white people. Her father had always told her that without white people, there would still be slaves.

Just like the comment made to me in that cafe, and the book I read after completing the interview, this comment has stuck with me. It was a complete paradigm shift for me. I'd never looked at the race issue from that side before. But it was very liberating to hear. I find that since that conversation, I am less hesitant in opening dialogues and talking to people. It is almost as if I am not ashamed of being white, which comment sounds very odd because I am not ashamed of who I am, but I don't know how else to explain the change inside. It was also a burden. I hear racist ideas and views in things people say without even thinking. I see racist images in the media. I see racism in the classroom. And now I ask myself, am I behaving in the manner of an abolitionist? Or am I being part of the silent majority who believes something is wrong but who will not speak up out of fear?

gifted education in the high school

2009-10-29T20:12:00.002-06:00

I'm researching the state of gifted education in my district. I was shocked to see that after 5th grade, no services are provided. The idea is that the "gifted" kids will take the honors classes and the AP classes, and go to the magnet schools and get the services that way. That might work for the high achieving kids, but it leaves many of the gifted students out in the cold.

Not only does this reasoning fall short in assuming that every gifted student will take honors courses and thus receive accomodations, it falls short in at least two other critical areas.

First, in order to be able to take upper level courses, students must take lower level classes first. Thus, even if gifted students who are on the honors course route will still need to take non-honors classes first. I see this in my own classroom as would be honors students are in level one courses hammering out the basics.

Second, not every honors teacher is trained to teach gifted students or uses appropriate accomodations for these unique kids. Honors is often seen as harder, more rigorous... but not necessarily more creative, more flexible.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that honors classes as the sole outlet for gifted and talented students is not an adequate solution.

the joy of reading

2009-10-29T19:00:00.003-06:00

I think it is so important that our kids read just for the sake of reading - no workbooks, no tests, just time to read something they want to read. I wrote in an earlier blog that this kind of reading in our classrooms in a key to reducing the achievement gap, and I truly believe that. Which is why it is so sad to me that both times I have been observed this year my administrators have commented on how great everything was, but I should perhaps have a follow-up activity to the SSR, so the students recognize the academic rigor of it.

How do we teach people to love something by testing it?

Racism

2009-10-29T18:17:00.004-06:00

As part of my coursework, I read the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and other conversations about race by Beverly Daniel Tatum. The book is written on a very conversational level, it's not very difficult to read in that sense. But, it was difficult to read on another level. The author points out that we are conditioned not to talk about race, or even to acknowledge differences in race.

Since I have read it, thoughts just keep permeating and percolating through my consciousness. Mostly though, I see and hear racism everywhere now. Once I thought that racism was nearly non-existent in our modern society. Now I am surrounded by it. Innocuous comments that people say without even thinking reek of it. Comments about "ebonics", comments about customers in restaurants... it sickens me, it saddens me, and in large part, it leaves me feeling confused. What do I, as a white woman, do to stand up to what I see as wrong? How do I point out that these things are not right? That they are racist slurs?

Two thoughts have really stuck with me since I read the book this summer. The first is a conversation the author had with her young son about why some people are black, and how to acknowledge racial differences without being offensive, even with young children. As I talk with my own young children, I think of the conversation she had with her son, and I hope I am teaching him well.

The second thing that really sticks in my mind is that white people don't mean to be racist. The context for this was hiring practices. She writes that often white people will hire white people over other equally qualified candidates without ever realizing that this could be racist. We like to be around people that are similar to us, and so without even realizing our internal biases, we perpetuate old patterns. She went on to say that white people often don't intend to be racist, and if the intention of diversity is clearly made to be a priority at the outset, then this pattern of preference for white candidates is often mitigated.

I was asked to select a student of the month for September. I had two students in mind, when the above thought came ringing through my mind. And then I thought of the board downstairs with the pictures of the students of the month for all the different departments. Most of them were white. Considering the demographics of my school, that isn't too surprising. But, the black students on the board were up there for the vocation and sports, not for the academic classes. I thought about my two students again. They are both fantastic students, with bubbly personalities. They both help their classmates out, are willing to try things they might get wrong, and are happy to play along with my eccentricities. In short, they were equally qualified in my book. One girl is white, the other is black. One girl is an honors student, the other is in AVID (a program designed to help students who might otherwise not be college bound). It doesn't take a genius to guess which girl I picked.

And it has meant so much to her and her family. She told me that it has given her confidence that she can succeed even if she isn't as smart as everybody else.

Top 100 words in a language

2009-10-29T17:59:00.002-06:00

In TPRS, we focus heavily on the words that are most often used in communicative language. There is a frequency dictionary for the Spanish language. Blaine Ray tells us that if he had it his way, he would design the curriculum around the 100 most frequently used words in a language, and once those were acquired, he would go on eventually to the 1000 most used words. Of course, he does throw in the silly and unexpected words too, like blue cockroach and flying elephant. These words are mostly to keep interest high - I tell my students the crazy stuff is mental super glue - they make the rest of the words stick in our minds.

The first time I read through the frequency list for Spanish, I was shocked at how many of these words that are used daily are not found in our textbooks. Some, like algo (something) are found in upper level classes. And many are just too common to omit, like el (the). Still, I am wondering how far down the word itinerary is, and why oh why I have to teach it as if it were vital to communication. Most of my students don't even know what an itinerary is in English!

TPRS vs standardized teaching

2009-10-28T20:10:00.002-06:00

I am in a quandary. I am convinced that TPRS is the best way to help students truly acquire the language. I am so convinced, that this is the primary focus of my upcoming thesis. And yet.

And yet, I am not teaching with TPRS at the moment. Why not?

It just feels like such a fight. I have to give quarterly benchmark exams in which students are expected to have mastered banalities of the language. I lose my students at the semester and will have to retrain them all to TPRS. I am tired of defending myself to my colleagues. I am tired of fighting students who want the "easier" way of filling in blanks from the textbook rather than sitting back and doing the "hard work" of listening to a story.

I am in the process of giving the first benchmark exams, and it seems that even had I not stopped the stories, my students would have succeeded phenomenally. So, it's back into the trenches I go.

more thoughts on the achievement gap

2009-10-28T20:04:00.002-06:00

Of course, by closing the achievement gap, we aren't saying that all students have to score the same, or that we have to hold our brightest students back.

What we are saying is that we have to find a way to make sure that we are not imposing glass ceilings on students. When we look at the data and we see that African American and other minority students score two standard deviations below middle-class Caucasian students, we have to see something other than just bright students scoring well. We have to see a system of ingrained racism. We have to find a solution.

But, that solution also cannot come at the expense of holding bright students back.

the achievement gap

2009-10-28T15:15:00.001-06:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of how to close the achievement gap lately… it's a hot topic both in my graduate work, and in my school district and I’m thinking that a TPRS classroom is a wonderful solution.

First, we do not expect students to come to us with certain pre-set study skills. They do not need to know the typical classroom game to succeed.

Second, we expect each student to come to us as he or she is, and it is incumbant upon us to get to know them. When we personalize the classroom, we are breaking down some of these stereotypical role models that have been forced upon us as a society.

When we allow our students to have input into the discussions, class is relevant to them. I cannot begin to explain how much I have learned this year alone about different artists. Lil Wayne is the cutest thing many of my students have ever seen. The fact that I do not care for him is of no importance in a TPRS classroom, my students do and so we talk about him.

In a TPRS classroom we don’t have all the preformulated activities in which we ask students to discuss and write about the physical appearance of all the white students with different colored hair and eyes.

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to convey culture and language. Stories are universal - every culture tells stories. We are able to step outside of the boundaries of school and step into something familiar.

And, I think, TPRS is an excellent way to sneak in some of the skills our students have missed along the way. Critical thinking skills? Sure, let’s talk about what is going to happen, or why did this event happen, what could have happened instead, how did the other person feel, etc. Reading comprehension? Sure, let’s go so slowly that everybody knows exactly what we are doing. Here’s how we read. Pleasure reading? Well, if we are doing SSR or kindergarten day, then our students are exposed to reading for the sake of reading. No exams, no notes, just reading. And on a simpler level than what they are expected to do in other classes. Here we have pictures, and props, and we circle until everybody understands everything. Here we don’t allow for failure.

Does it solve every problem? I sure wish that teaching through TPRS could solve all the world’s problems. Sadly, problems and tensions still exist. But how much more compounded would those problems be if we asked students to sit still for 86 minutes at a time and open their books and complete activities 4, 6, 11 and 17 in their workbooks without ever asking them who they were or how they were and never caring if they failed? If we just assumed they were failing because they are too lazy to study?

textbook vocabulary

2009-08-23T20:23:00.002-06:00

I'm wondering exactly who it was that decided what was "essential" vocabulary for a Spanish I student to be exposed to. Amazingly, this list is almost identical from book to book and publisher to publisher.

I created a spreadsheet with the top 100 words in Spanish, a list of good TPR words, and the vocabulary from various textbooks I have used. Now I am adding the words from my new textbook, and there are very few words that I have to add to the list, mostly I am just noting where in this book they are found.

And who figured out it is vital to teach the word autito chocador???? (bumper car)

New Teacher Orientation

2009-08-14T06:34:00.003-06:00

I am sitting here trying to wrap my brain around what was discussed during our New Teacher Orientation this week.

Apparently, Grammar Translation and ALM "don't work anymore" and the cutting edge theory is the Monitor Theory. So, we should adjust our teaching style to reflect this. We were also asked if we had ever heard of "the Natural Approach."

I am feeling like I have been in a time warp or something. Because, I swear, that the Monitor Theory is at least twenty years old, and that the results of Grammar Translation and ALM were never very positive, so to say they "don't work anymore" is a bit hard to swallow. Cutting edge is a 20 year old theory???

And then, when I mentioned a strategy I use to lower students' affective filters on day one, they looked at me like I had three heads. I thought for sure if they were referencing the Monitor Theory and the Natural Approach, they must be at least passingly familiar with Dr. Krashen's work. But, sadly, they didn't understand what I meant with affective filter.

We have pacing guides which spell out exactly how long each lesson should take and in which order we should teach them - 1 day to establish classroom norms; 2 days to teach greetings and basic introductions; 2 days for... etc. And we MUST have a warm-up activity because kids "thrive on routines." Great. I asked if my Free Voluntary Reading time could be considered their warm-up activity. The response I got? "That sounds like a private school thing." Because, obviously, public school students can't benefit from the thing that research shows is the best indicator of language acquisition? It isn't in my curriculum and it's a little dangerous for me to use it. I wonder if I show them copies of my books, which all have Dr. Krashen's name on them, if it might make a difference? See, here is the Monitor Theory, that was Dr. Krashen 20 years ago. Here is the Natural Approach. That was Dr. Krashen too. Here is what Dr. Krashen says about reading...

One other disturbing thought for me was when we were asked to be self-reflective and ask "what if" questions of ourselves, such as "what if I were to teach the subjunctive using TPRS?" At least I know they've heard the acronym.

another student comment

2009-08-02T08:55:00.002-06:00

I spoke with a former student who is now a college freshman. He told me that he learned more in his one year of 7th grade Spanish in my class than he did in four years of high school Spanish (except for his year of study abroad.) What a cool compliment!

Free Voluntary Reading

2009-08-02T08:50:00.002-06:00

I just spoke with one of my former students. She's still on summer break and enjoying every minute of it. She is also reading Laura Ingalls Wilder in Spanish for fun. Another student of mine is happy reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Spanish.

They carefully selected books that they knew the story line to and that they enjoyed.

They said that the libraria looked at them very strangely who asked if they were *sure* they wanted the Spanish version of the books.

The girls also have mentioned that they sometimes encounter words they just don't understand, and they simply read past those words hoping the meaning "fills in" later.

a comment in my yearbook

2009-07-21T13:45:00.002-06:00

I asked my students to sign my yearbook at the end of this school year. And now that I am packing my house up for a cross-country move, I finally took the time to read what they wrote. One student literally brought me to tears.

She wrote, "Thanks for see me as a person, not just as a student."

I posted about this in another forum. But it still just blows me away. I tried really hard this year to personalize my classes and to honor each and every student regardless of how "good" they were as students. It was hard sometimes, and I failed at it more often than I would have liked.

I completely gave up on one particular student, only to realize what a deep, thoughtful and caring person he is two days before the end of the school year. That stung. I mean, I had completely written him off. As far as I was concerned, he was a lazy, thoughtless loaf who was taking up space in my classroom. And then wham he comes at me with both barrels and I realize he is this amazing person who happened to not be my best student. And was I really his best teacher? I mean, I was so willing to buy his act and believe so little about him.

And then comes along this other student. The one who signed my yearbook. I can't honestly say she was a superstar in my class. Or that I spent tons of one on one time with her. I can't say I ever selected her answers as part of the class stories, or even noticed much about her.

Except, obviously I did. Whatever I gave her, she noticed, and she cared. For a little while, at least, she recognized that I was trying to see beyond that student/teacher facade to each person.

Excellence

2009-07-21T13:27:00.002-06:00

It seems to me that our culture holds up this ideal of excellence, but then we are constantly told that the ideal is not for us to reach, it is for others. How many times have you heard somebody say, "I don't want to be a saint." Why not? Why can't we reach for the stars?

I felt this when I was applying to my last teaching position, it was at a school for gifted and talented students. I was asked during the interview process if I were gifted and talented. Rather than simply saying "Yes" I hemmed and hawed and tried to find a politically correct answer. It's ok for our students to be gifted, but it's pride if we claim the same ourselves.

Last week I was at a Fluency Fast teacher training seminar in Denver. The goal of the training is to actually be able to teach for Fluency Fast. When I applied, I thought for sure that I was not qualified at all. I was surrounded by people I have been looking up to for years. And, I was awful. The first day I bombed completely. I got in 9 repetitions of a verb, when the goal is closer to 30. Ouch. On Wednesday evening, I went to an immersion dinner with the Spanish students. I spoke with the owner of the company. She said that she always hires teachers who are better than she is, because she wants the best. Duh. On Thursday I told one of the coaches that I couldn't understand why I was so nervous. "In my classroom," I said, "I am an excellent teacher." It was the first time I can remember articulating that sentiment quite so clearly. And I didn't mean it pridefully, just truthfully. I am an excellent teacher. It was so liberating to say that and to realize I believe it. I kicked butt on Friday. What a shame I had to spend the whole week scared of being too good, thinking I couldn't possibly compete.

I had a conversation with another teacher later on Thursday about the role of the teacher. He said that it isn't about the teacher. It's about the kids. The teacher should basically disappear in the classroom. And, he's right to an extent. It is about the kids. The kids are the most amazing people in that room. But if I don't start with the knowledge that I am excellent, than I am not going to reach excellence, and neither will my students.

Playing with language

2009-07-18T07:28:00.004-06:00

A few weeks ago my four year old was practicing new and unique nicknames/gentle insults. I had explained to him that we sometimes make up names for people we like and it's ok. He decided to practice on me.

A few names in, he called me a "CarHead." Wow. I couldn't pass that one up. We stopped then and there and I "parked".

What does a CarHead look like? Do they walk or do they drive around on their heads? How do they see?

Pretty soon we came up with a visual image. A CarHead is a person but they have an upside down car for a head. When they get tired of walking, they stand on their heads and drive around. Can't you just see that imagery there?

A few days after that I was struggling with angst - lots of decisions to be made in a very short time frame. This same kid of the CarHead fame looked at me and said, "Mommy, you're a "Conundrum Head." I had to laugh, because no other word or combination of words could possibly draw a better picture of me in that moment, and it took a four year old (albeit with a precocious vocabulary) to be able to create that image so well.

Laughing Out Loud

2009-07-17T20:02:00.003-06:00

I was in a Mandarin class all this week. What a hoot! We laughed so hard that our sides literally hurt. We laughed so hard that the teacher had to give us a ten minute break so we could gather our thoughts. We laughed so hard that I will NEVER forget the word for meat in Mandarin.

And then today, I was reminded that this is not the standard impression we have of foreign language classes. Learning a language is supposed to be HARD work. We are supposed to suffer to gain this priviledged information. We are not supposed to be laughing about sexy airline pilots, meat, and America Idol try outs. We are supposed to be stressed about tones and tenses (no tenses in Mandarin, btw) We are supposed to feel STUPID. And when the teacher has repeated the same word for three days, and I stop her to ask what that word means, the entire class is supposed to turn on me and remind me how stupid I am for forgetting.

Nobody told that to my teacher, Linda Li, this week. I did make that mistake, and she stopped talking, reminded me what the word was, and then slowed down her story until she was sure I was back on board. And when we accidentally said the teacher kissed the student instead of the teacher asked the student, she didn't tell us how we were awful students because we couldn't hear the tones after four days.

input vs. output

2009-07-17T19:46:00.003-06:00

As much as I believe that we learn through input and not through output, we are scored on the output of our students, and our students are judged by their output. Dictations and Free Writes my way of appeasing those who believe spelling and grammar are the be all and end all in foreign language education, and it is one less thing to fight about.

TPRS students, and the method itself, are frequently judged by how well the students can jump through these hoops that have nothing to do with communication. As I explain to my students at the beginning of the year:

When my toddler tells me "Mommy, look my foots." The fact that he is missing a prepositional phrase and has incorrectly conjugated an irregular verb does not impede my understanding. In fact, my comprehension is not bothered at all. In fact, a foreigner can come up to me on the street corner and ask, "Where hotel?" And although the questions contained no verb, I can understand the phrase completely. On the other hand, somebody could approach me and with perfect diction say something like, "Appear! It is ruling on the west! We should take blankets now before it strikes us and we are watered." The verbs in this section are conjugated correctly. The pronouns are correct. There are no missing words. And yet, communication has been lost.

Students in output oriented classrooms are lauded for their diction, for their conjugation, for their flawless subject/verb agreement. But those things are worthless if the underlying message doesn't make sense. (2 extra credit points for the first person to figure out what I was trying to say in that quote above).

Students in comprehensible input oriented classrooms, on the other hand, are encouraged to stay silent until they are comfortable. They are allowed to make mistakes without fear of reprisal. They say things like they have two foots. But, they say things (which is probably yet another blog).

And then, when they leave my classroom, and they go to Mr. Grammar's class, they are told that they have not learned Spanish because they cannot conjugate and they cannot spell. (Mind you , they can write a 120 word essay in 10 minutes flat and they aren't scared to put themselves out there and try to communicate). And then, Mr. Grammar goes back to the teacher's lounge and says something like, "See? I told you this TPRS thing didn't work. Can you believe these students still say two foots in their second year?" And then, sadly, the kids are slowly weeded out of foreign language.

So, I give dictations, and I use the vocabulary from the textbook, and I teach them their verb charts (kind of), and there are a lot of good things that come out of these activities, but I wonder if I might not see the same gains in spelling and grammar if I just let the kids have fun and read?

Dictados

2009-07-17T19:05:00.002-06:00

I want to make it very clear that I stole everything I know about dictados from Ben Slavic. I also want it known that this is NOT TPRS. It's pretty much very focused output. There is a lot of comprehensible input going on here, and I have seen a lot of gains (especially in confidence) from it, so I will keep doing it, especially since it really doesn't take up more than ten-fifteen minutes of class a week.

I keep my dictados to 5 sentences. They are always recycled from the stuff (stories, readings, etc.) we do in class, so there is no new information in them. The students can focus entirely on writing the information, not on comprehension. It lowers the affective filter a lot. I tell my kids that I only expect them to give me ten minutes a week of undivided, focused work time for spelling and grammar. (Which is really a lot, but that's another blog entirely.)

As in any dictation, the students have a piece of notebook paper, and they copy what they hear me say. However, I have them leave two blank lines between every line they write on. So, there is a line of text, then two blank lines, then another line of text.

I read through the five sentences very slowly. I usually read them through two times, although I will offer more, especially if there are complicated structures or long sentences in there. After I have read the dictation through and students are ok with it, I project the correct version of the dictation on the board. (I was lucky enough to have an interactive white board last year which made this all very fun.) At this point I go through the dictation again, but letter by letter, accent mark by accent mark. I point out all the tricky things, but I do it via pop-up lessons and circling. "Class, Did you notice the accent mark here? Why do I have an ía at the end of this verb? That's right! It's in the past tense." Then I keep going.

While I am going over the correct version of the dictation, my students are following along on their papers. Their assignment is to underline all their errors, and on the line immediately below the error they are to copy the correct spelling of the word. I print out hard copies of the dictation for students who have difficulty changing their focus from the paper to the board and back.

When I grade the papers, I only grade on what has been corrected. So, every single student regardless of his/her ability to spell can earn an A+. Talk about lowering that affective filter! I just removed all possibility of failure.

But it isn't just an easy A.

First of all, I am picky about accent marks and punctuation, because I am giving them the corrections visually and orally. So, the first mistake brings them to an A. After that, every second mistake drops them a letter grade. I write the new corrections directly beneath the mistake, so either on that second or third line.

Second, I am differentiating my butt off here, and I'm not even breaking a sweat. Every student is getting a spelling lesson and a grammar lesson in EXACTLY what he/she needs to learn.

Third, I am getting true assessments from this. When I look at the dictations, which I do, I am noticing where students are making mistakes. If a word or phrase keeps popping up, and it is a high frequency word, I make sure to recycle it into future lessons. If it's a "throw-away" word, one that isn't used often but was in that story, I don't pay much attention to it.

As the year went on, I noticed that despite (or is that because of) the lack of fear about grades, my students were making fewer and fewer mistakes on their spelling. That was in the dictations, and in the free writes. They were nailing words that are often spelled incorrectly.

weekly schedule and dictations

2009-07-09T09:24:00.000-06:00

Desiree said:
This will be my 3rd year teaching and 2nd year doing TPRS. I love your idea of a routine and wanted to get some input from you. You said Mon & Fri is free reading, Tues free writing and Thurs dictation. What did you mean by no normal class on Wed. (do you not meet)? I see my students for 50 min Mon-Fri so I was wondering how this would work. How long do each of these activities take each day? Also, do you give them a grade for dictations? In my first year I did a dictation every 2-3 weeks but I would do the dictation on Mon as practice and they would rewrite the correct version afterwards and Friday I would do the same dictation but this time taking it up for a quiz grade. I didn't know if you do something like this. Thanks for any advice you can give me. Thanks for your blog....it is great learning from master teachers.

I have really loved the idea of a routine. The kids always knew what to expect when coming in to class. My administrators loved it too. As much as TPRS is a fairly organic process and is not as easily planned as other ways of teaching, it always *looked* very organized and planned. Administrators would look at my board and see that today we were going to do Free Writes, and then a class story, and they never asked me for more detailed lesson plans. The students were happily writing, so obviously is was a well-planned and organized classroom. Heh. If only they knew.
Wednesdays were not a normal day because out here they have one day a week that is an early release day. That is, school lets out an hour and a half earlier and that’s when teacher meetings and staff development are scheduled. This past year we had all the normal classes, but at a much smaller clip. It was perfect for reading the novel, because we could spend the whole class time reading without getting overwhelmed. I don’t know how I will adjust my schedule this coming year now that I am on an 80 minute class every other day.
I’ve never thought to give the dictation again as a quiz grade later in the week. I do give a grade for dictations, and I counted it as an assessment. But, the way I did that was to give students a grade based on what they were able to turn in correct. I read the dictation straight through twice. Students wrote what they thought they heard. Now, I based my dictation on the class story or the novel we had been reading. As students were writing, they left two blank lines after every line of their text. When I posted the correct version on the board, students underlined any words they had not spelled correctly, and copied the correct version on the line underneath. This focused their attention specifically where they needed it. I actually really like the low-stress atmosphere of kids are only scored on what they are able to correct. Everybody can get an A, even if they are not the world’s best spellers. What a way to lower that affective filter, while still sneaking in that scary subject like spelling. By the way, I stole this idea in its entirety from Ben Slavic.
And, even though this is an output activity, and focused on spelling and grammar, I still think it is a valuable activity. For one, it reinforces the stories we have been asking or reading all week. For two, it builds the students’ confidence as they see that each week they are making fewer corrections on their papers. Students who have difficulty writing still get to build their confidence because they can earn A’s, even if spelling has never been something they’ve been good at in English either. The first few times, I had students staring at their papers in surprise, they couldn’t believe they had gotten a good grade. By the end of the year, their dictations were a source of pride. And finally, I know that when they leave my classroom, they have to transition into a traditional class where spelling and grammar are the focus of a lot of their grade.
This lets me focus instruction on spelling and grammar, but still doing it through comprehensible input – I just do pop-up spelling and grammar after the dictation. So, I don’t interrupt the dictation with the grammar or the spelling, but when I’m going through the corrections, I will often have the class translate the passage, and then I’ll ask why for instance, the verb ends in –amos.
I would print out a few hard copies for students with visual processing issues, so they had a person copy and didn’t have to keep changing their focus from the board to their paper. I was also very pleased with the whole dictation process because it naturally differentiated for every student’s individual needs. Each student only underlined and corrected the words that he/she needed to work on. And if when grading the dictations I noticed a pattern, I would make sure to incorporate those words in future dictations too. You know those tricky words that always catch up all but the best students (and even those students sometimes) we spend all year correcting students’ work and yet on that final exam they still make those mistakes? Well, my students nailed those tricky words this year, and they were able to grasp basic spelling patterns. I think part of that comes from the dictations.

end of year reflections

2009-05-20T10:15:00.002-06:00

At my school the graduating students have a final project that is a reflective presentation about their experiences at the school. It is partly an exit interview, partly a presentation, partly a way for the students to gain perspective and closure, and partly a way for them to express themselves as individuals.

I sit here watching these students, who I have taught for the last two years, realizing that as much as I talk about wanting to know them as people, at some point I reverted back to the "teacher." These beautiful, young, inquisitive PEOPLE stood before me speaking to me about their hopes, their dreams, their silent torments. And I realized that I have no idea who they are. Oh, I know their student personas. "John" sits quietly at his table and doodles when he thinks I am not watching. "Amy" talks to her friends and rarely listens to me as I speak. "Sally" studies hard, is fun-loving, tells jokes but gets straightA's. "David" has not done a lick of work in two years, I'm not sure if the messages are getting in past his ears.

It's sad. Really. They are wonderful people, and we could have all of us gotten so much more out of our relationships if only I had taken the time to really learn this and remember it all year long. Time after time these people stood up and spoke about their experiences at theschool. And the academics were mentioned, sure. But the focus was on all the other "stuff" that happens here. They felt safe. They felt loved. They were part of a community. They were respected. Here they were allowed to grow and be their true selves.

It's time for me to reflect back to, and to gain perspective. In the last few months I have forgotten so much. I have forgotten to teach to their eyes. I have become enamored with "finishing" before we leave for the summer. The curriculum has become more important than their lives.

The truth is – they won't remember the plot of this last novel I am cramming down their throats. But they will remember that I loved them and cared about who they were as people.

Is education killing creativity?

2009-04-12T14:46:00.002-06:00

Here is an interesting talk by Sir Ken Robinson about just that:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

No comments from me. At least, at this time.

It's been a long time

2009-04-12T14:08:00.002-06:00

I've been swamped with grad school this semester. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of work that teachers expect from their students all in the name of learning. Why do we turn something so fun into so much drudgery?

And why, oh why, do teachers assign an entire book when the assignment deals with the last three pages? The whole time I'm reading I keep asking myself if I missed something somewhere, if I got the assignment wrong... and no, it's the last three pages. Bah Humbug!

an apology

2009-01-31T15:05:00.002-07:00

I have a student who has barely turned in an assignment in two years. He falls asleep in class. He falls down asleep while standing. Often the only way to know he has been in class is to look around and see all of his belongings there after he has left. Sadly, this is his m.o. in all of his classes.

Each week on Thursday we do a dictation. I read five sentences in Spanish and students do their best to write what they hear. I read the entire passage two times, and then I project the correct version on the screen. Students are to then edit their paper, underlining their errors and writing the entire correct word directly beneat the original error. To that end, I have students skip two blank lines between every line of text. One blank line is for their edits, and the second one is for my eyes, and also to give me a space to write further edits should they need it.

Well, this particular student only left one line between each line of text. And then, at the bottom of the page he wrote "Lo siento por no tener dos linias blancas." Almost flawless Spanish. It means: I am sorry for not having two blank lines.

So:
1. He noticed he hadn't followed directions.
2. He cared enough to apologize.
3. He did it in Spanish!

It's ok if you make a mistake

2009-01-31T14:59:00.003-07:00

and write in Spanish.

????

Yes, I actually had to say that to my Spanish students. So many of them were erasing entire sentences because they had accidentally written in Spanish for a rare English assignment. I had them create a Venn diagram comparing three homes: theirs, and two from a book we just read. Because I wanted them to make the cultural connections I asked them to write in English. And, as they were writing many of them realized that they had accidentally written in Spanish instead.

I am so upset. Really. How dare they acquire what I am trying to teach them?

On a similar note, we were reading from the class novel and I was having students translate the paragraphs out loud. At least one student in each class "translated" a word right back into Spanish.

Again. I am so upset. Can't you tell? Livid.

LOL

English -> Spanish -> Persian?

2009-01-31T14:51:00.004-07:00

I have posted before that some of my students are endeavoring to teach me Mandarin in exchange for my Spanish lessons. And I am loving it. I treasure the CD one child gave me of pop Chinese music.

I have another student who has not chosen to share her first language with me. That is, until recently. She is Persian. And she has not fallen in love with my class. Again, at least until recently. She is in the 8th grade, which means this is her second year with me.

Suddenly two weeks ago she exclaimed in the middle of class, "What did they just say?" I showed the video clip again and was met with incredulity. "Did they say 'bale'? That's Persian and means OK"

No, the characters had said "vale" which is Spanish for OK. So, I promised her I would find out if the two words had any common ancestry - we have discussed the Arabic influence in Spanish before, so it was a possibility. They don't. At least, not unless you go back to proto-Indoeuropean languages. Vale in Spanish comes from the Latin.

She also asked me about the word basta. Again, no apparent connection between the Persian and the Spanish.

But, that's not the point. The point is: She is noticing. She is caring. She is drawing comparisons between now three languages and cultures. And she trusts me to find out information for her. :)

It's not always about having the right answer. Sometimes, it is all about how we see the world and how we interact with our fellow human beings.

books I have read

2009-01-31T14:23:00.003-07:00

I saw this list on another blog I sometimes read, and I was curious about my own literary habits. I don't normally participate in anything resembling a chain letter or mass forwarding of emails, but I got a real kick out of doing this, so I decided to share it here.

This was a list of the top 100 selling books published by (some publishing house). The original post said that the average American adult had not read 10 of these books. So, I wanted to check. I have read 52 and have serious plans for at least two more of them.

1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
**4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (I’ve read them in two languages)
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible (the whole thing too, all 63 books)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
**14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
*21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
**25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
*29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
**30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
**33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (I was confused by this one until I remembered the list is compiled of top selling books published at this house. This book is sold separately and as part of a series - it makes the top 100 in both forms go CS Lewis!)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
*41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
#42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I read it in Spanish, but was still singularly unimpressed)
*43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
**44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
*46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
*48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
%51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
*52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
**57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
**58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
*60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
*64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
*67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
*70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
**72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
*73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
**81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
*83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (all of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
**91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
#92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
**94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
%95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
*97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
**98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (And I have played 5 different roles in this play as well)
**99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
**100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

bragging

2009-01-26T16:18:00.002-07:00

I had parent-teacher conferences just a few weeks ago. And some of the feedback I got really helped to put my teaching back in perspective.

I had one student tell me he finally understands his grandmother when she speaks to him.
Another family was telling me about their exchange student from Colombia, and my student listens to him on the phone and understands what he is saying to his family (although I told him to stop eavesdropping - LOL)
Another student told me she has decided to go to Mexico this summer to see how good her Spanish really is.
Three parents told me that their child has been watching installments of a BBC program we've been watching in class at home.
A few more families told me that their kids are speaking in Spanish at home just for fun.
The math teacher told me a few of the kids are speaking in Spanish during math.
One boy who struggled so much last year was so excited to be going to high school to take more Spanish and asking me which language he should add as his third language.
And two parents told me they have asked their children for help communicating with somebody at work and have gotten that help!

I've been feeling really down about my teaching lately. Which makes this so much more special. I have not been as creative or energetic or as into the kids as I should be. The non-teaching parts of the job just drain me so much. I was so excited to hear all these wonderful things - especially where the kids could talk to their relatives. What else matters?

Wow!

Oh, and I spoke my little bit of Mandarin to a few families and that was so much fun too. One father just looked at me all wide eyed and asked his son if he had understood me then answered me in Chinese. Another mother asked me as if she hadn't quite caught it, "Did you just speak to me in Chinese?" Heh. And that's because my students are sharing their language with me. And that thrills me to no end too. And I FINALLY learned how to say one students name. With the correct tones. Hopefully I'll be able to remember it come June when I read her diploma out loud.

why I blog

2009-01-25T14:04:00.002-07:00

In my husband's grad program they were asked to debate the relative merits and demerits of blogging. The biggest complaint against blogging was that it is such a self-serving and self-aggrandizing vehicle. And, I can see that point.

I don't blog just to see my thoughts on the screen, and neither (I think) do the people who's blogs I tend to read. I fell in love with blogs when I realized how much we can reach out and form communities across space. I read a handful of blogs fairly regularly and I love that I can be invited into these communities in such an intimate way. OK, that sounds corny.

But, teaching is such a lonely profession in so many ways. I have colleagues for sure. But we all teach different material. And we all teach at the same time. I can't pop into somebody's room just to see what they do. My students come in, my door closes and its just the 26 or so of us. But with the few listservs and blogs that I read and participate in, suddenly that door is able to open again. I love talking to people about the things I love doing - teaching, speaking different languages, theology... I get "jazzed", to quote my husband, and I need that interaction to be at my best. So I blog to keep the lines of communication open, even if it sounds corny. :)

The tree

2009-01-25T13:52:00.002-07:00

Shel Silverstein wrote a great book called "The Giving Tree."

That is me these days. I don't have any apples left - I gave them away. I don't have any more branches from which you can swing. I don't even have a trunk left for you to climb. I am nothing more than a stump.

If you want to sit on me, you are welcome. Otherwise, please don't ask me for anything else. I don't have anything left.

This is of course, directed to my school and my administration. I am asked if I want to be on this committee or that committee or to do this or that, and frankly, the answer is no. I don't have any more time or energy to commit to a project that will be voided out with the next administration or board or project du jour.

S-L-O-W Down

2008-12-10T08:09:00.001-07:00

I have two boys who together are just bad news.

The one kid, I hate to admit, I rarely expend much energy on. At his first parent-teacher conference last year the parents explained to me why my class was completely useless and that he would never pass it. I figure between his parents' attitude, and his it is just way too much energy away from the kids who actually want to be there. So, as long as he behaves and appears to be doing what we're doing, I don't do much with him. I ask that he be polite and that's about it.

The other boy is actually a really great kid (so is the first, but he doesn't let me see it often) as long as he is kept away from his friend. First trimester this year I saw amazing progress with him over last year. But in the last few weeks he has gotten totally attitudinal on me. Every chance he gets, he goes and sits next to his buddy - abandoning his partner. I've been out a bit and he has refused to work with his partner for the sub. He sits with his friend every day until I finish attendance and correct him. The power struggle is draining - really it is. The other day as he left my classroom he shouted loudly, "Spanish sucks!" I spoke with him, and he got that sheepish grin as he denied having done anything wrong. (8th grade is soooo charming :D )

So, yesterday we were reading the class novel as a class. I had just explained that tiene miedo means she is scared. I mean, [i]just[/i] finished speaking. I have a policy of never calling on students who don't volunteer - something about being utterly embarassed and humiliated by a language teacher in college (and dropping the language forever because of it). But, I called on the second child. He gave his trademark sheepish grin and said he hadn't been paying attention. I told him I knew and we would wait. After about a minute of waiting, he started going word by word through the sentence. He didn't get it 100% correct, but I helped him out a little. I called on him again, and he at least knew which sentence we had read.

Then I called on his buddy - again I had [i]just[/i] translated the word in the sentence, and he didn't have a clue. I told him we would wait. His partner tried to rescue him, she helped him find the correct page and sentence. He shrugged and said he didn't know. I said it was ok, there was a glossary. So, we waited. A long time. Finally he was able to tell us what the sentence had said.
I spent the rest of the class calling only on my behavior and barometer students. We went REALLY slowly. By the time the bell rang the first student, the one whose parents tell me it's a waste of time and he won't pass, was volunteering for sentences. He may have been doing that just to get control of when he was called on, but at least I know he was reading with us, paying attention and participating. And he got to see some success.

I try to go slowly in that class. I really do. But apparently I do not go slowly enough. As soon as I slowed down enough to wait for these students, and really let them process the information, as we went through and circled the new words over and over and over I saw lights turn on, and some of that 8th grade "we're too cool for you" attitude started to fade.

I still don't like putting kids on the spot like that. But maybe if all the tools are in front of them, and I'm not asking for grammatical accuracy (I got a case ending wrong in Russian when my professor told me how stupid I was), then maybe it isn't so bad to call on students who don't volunteer. Maybe it is a way of keeping them involved in the class and keeping them and me accountable. By not calling on them I feel like maybe I am giving them permission to check out and not care or try.

Color me green

2008-12-06T15:50:00.003-07:00

Years ago we did a personality color test at a Team Building. There are four colors/categories:
Blue - empathetic
Yellow - organized, linear thinking
Red - improvised, fun loving
Green - researching

Now there is more to it than that. And the idea is to see that each person has levels of each within themselves, that we balance ourselves out but also that we each bring diverse skills to a group.

A group that is composed of all blues will spend a lot of time thinking about what they are saying to avoid hurting each other's feelings.

Yelllows will accomplish a lot, but they won't stop. They also might find themselves arguing a lot as different people all try to be the leader.

If a group is composed of nothing but red they will have a lot of fun, but not actually accomplish much.

Now, the greens will spend so much time researching and reading about the problem they will learn tons, but they won't ever get around to solving the problem - writing the paper, etc.

Now when I took that quiz I came up mostly blue/yellow.

Well, color me green these days. My references pages are longer than my actual papers. I have a paper due tomorrow and I am still searching out more references rather than just sitting down and writing. That's it. I'm cutting myself off. In half an hour.

assessing the standards

2008-12-06T13:58:00.001-07:00

I am doing a curriculum map for my school - part of the purpose of this map is to get a schoolwide gap analysis - to see which standards are not being covered and where throughout the school. This is shown through attaching standards to each of the activities in class. Each skill I am teaching has to be tied to an activity and an assessment and I must show that I am covering all of my standards.

I am having a great amount of difficulty with this because the 5C's are not all assessable at least to my way of seeing, and because TPRS itself is so flexible and spirals so much.

Communication - This is the easiest one since we speak primarily in the target language nearly everything we do ties into either interpretive or interpersonal communication. But how do we work on presentational communication?

Culture - We work on perspectives and practices as well as perspectives and products through some of our readings, but I am not very good at assessing that.

Connections - This is fairly easy we study so many other topics in our classrooms - history, geography, etc.

Comparisons - Other than having students make the requisite venn diagrams for holidays and discussions of explicit grammar, I'm not sure how to assess this. This is one of those areas that I usually cover fairly improvisationally. Students mention that this works just like in their native language, etc. But that is something that develops organically in each class and cannot be put into a predictive map.

Communities - I have no idea how to assess this standard. The first substandard is that students will use the language within and beyond the school setting. The second substandard is that students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using language for personal enjoyment and enrichment. Now, those are laudable goals and I'm sure that is where we are all aiming for. But, I don't know how to assess that students are using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment, or that they are using Spanish outside of school. Even if I could think of how to create assignments that would have students doing these things, I believe that the standard is pointing towards students should begin doing these things because they can and they want to - not because it is an assignment so the activities would be pointless as far as the standards go.

I would love any thoughts/suggestions/input on this.

context is so helpful...

2008-11-30T14:22:00.000-07:00

Last week I gave a pop quiz that had 5 sentences in Spanish and asked students to translate the sentences to English. The average score was an A, out of 119 students only one student got less than a C.

Now, compare this to our average quizzes where I have short phrases orindividual words - on those I do not always make the 80% - 80%.

I am thinking that the difference is from the added context carried ineach sentence.

my new student

2008-11-28T11:25:00.002-07:00

My new student who just transferred into class is doing well. I have slowed down the pace of my delivery for her, and am back to translating many, many structures and pointing to the question words so that she can follow what we are doing. But, I am continuing with instruction for the rest of the class, we are covering new structures and asking new stories. I think we will all get through this ok.

I did realize on Tuesday that I have forgotten to explain certain class policies/procedures to her. For instance, on Free Writes students are only scored against themselves. The biggest thing is going to be making her feel comfortable in class to ask questions before she becomes overwhelmed.

Native Speaker update

2008-11-28T11:04:00.003-07:00

My native speaker has been doing her self-study for one week now. So far all is going well. She seems to be much happier now that she can work at her own pace and not be caught up in the class, and it has helped my management of the class she was in. The other students are no longer comparing themselves to her either consciously or sub-consciously. And her negative attitude is not spilling over onto the other students.

A few students have asked why she is no longer in the classroom with us, and I have just explained that having her in the room with us and doing the work we are doing is similar to having one of them sit in on a first grade classroom and being asked to do that work. No complaints when it is explained like that.

I made a weekly worksheet to keep her accountable. On Mondays she is to predict her work for the week. Each week she is to work on her reading, writing, and grammar and she can spread that work over the week as she sees fit. She reads books at her grade level, then summarizes each chapter in basic Spanish that would be accessible to her peers. She also has a native speaker grammar workbook that she works in. She turns in her work and worksheet to me at the end of every week.

woohoo! My observation

2008-11-28T10:45:00.002-07:00

I had my "annual" observation two weeks ago now, and we sat down to my post-observation meeting this Monday. I don't think it could have gone better. (Other than throwing my back out in an effort to show I really do know how to walk through the classroom and check-in with every student.)

I had two administrators doing the observation. They both caught all sorts of things that I try to use in my class, so that was cool. They both had Spanish in high school, and asked me about two things they caught in my class. 1) el problema - it is an irregular masculine noun meaning that it looks like it ought to be a feminine noun. 2) bve largo vs. bve corto - the letters "b" and "v" are homophones in Spanish and I clarify this the way I learned in Chile. "B" is bve largo (long bve), and "V" is bve corto (short bve). The really cool thing is that I apparently repeated both of those items enough times that both administrators caught them.

My one administrator told me in the meeting that he had really been enjoying the dictation because he was just starting to feel like he was understanding what was being said. He was sad when that was over and we went on to the next activity. And then he was happy because the story we read had all the same vocabulary and structures in it, so he really did understand! And that is really the woohoo moment for me. That I was going slowly enough and had enough repetitions that he actually "felt" that comprehension!

Both administrators also commented on how engaged the entire class was. They did ask why I checked in with the same students more often than others, but when I explained the concept of barometer students they were pleased with my answer. (A barometer student is a student who is really trying, but processes information slower than most of the class - I check in with these students often to make sure I am pacing myself well and that every student can understand.)

dilemma

2008-11-17T16:14:00.002-07:00

Three months into school I just had a student transfer into the school and thus into Spanish class. I have no idea how I will catch her up so that she can understand what is happening in class.

somebody needs to tell my brain to shut up

2008-11-15T12:19:00.002-07:00

I have covered exactly 1/6 of the required material for my paper this week. And yet, I have already hit the minimum page requirement. I think I continually make way more work for myself than necessary. Somebody, please tell my brain how to shut up and just let me do what I need to do.

my native speaker

2008-11-14T06:16:00.003-07:00

I spoke with my student, her mother, and my administration. We are all set to begin a self-study course for native speakers next week with the beginning of trimester 2. Woohoo!

My goals are:
Reading Comprehension - she will need to be reading grade level novels.

Writing - I want her to summarize what she reads in simplified Spanish so that a. I can verify her reading comprehension, b. we can work on her accuracy in spelling and grammar, c. we can work on circumlocution skills, and d. these texts can become more accessible to my other students

Grammar - She has a Spanish for Native Speakers workbook that she will continue to work out of.

I have a few concerns though:

Accountability - How will I ensure that she is making productive use of her time and progressing through the material? I'm thinking I can make a log of activities to be done and have her mark how she used her time each hour.

Engagement - All the work I have at this point is rather dry. I would like to find something interactive that she can do regularly. This is a very social girl and I am isolating her physically and emotionally here.

overachievers

2008-11-14T05:52:00.002-07:00

Sometimes an assignment is exactly what it looks like and nothing more. And sometimes, gifted students need help seeing that and breaking down this huge monstrosity into a manageable project. Actually, I bet all students could use that help to a degree.

Here I sit at my computer struggling to write this paper for my class. It is this HUGE paper of epic proportions. I have to write about three people who have made significant contributions to the field of gifted education and what those contributions were. The more research I do, the more lost I feel. I can never write a cohesive paper about this - it is too big! Where do I start? How do I tie it together? In my mind, it is three research papers tied together in name only. The teacher said 3 - 5 pages, but really that won't do, she must have been underestimating...

And then comes my husband who says, it's a 3 -5 page paper. Tie it together with the introduction and the conclusion and separate the body with subject headings. Simplify it. And stop overthinking. Get off the computer, take out a piece of paper and put some form to it be it an outline or a cluster map, get it out of your head onto paper.

Duh. And suddenly, in my mind it is a manageable 7 - 10 page paper. Which is an improvement, if not accurate yet.

And that brings me back to that overachieving slacker phrase my student created. Because that's exactly what I was doing. Because I was making this so MONUMENTAL, I could not even begin.

synthesis

2008-11-13T21:21:00.003-07:00

At my school each of the core teachers also teaches an "elective" class. This is a class which is loosely connected to our core curriculum that we are highly qualified to teach ... but which is also designed to show the students that the teachers are also lifelong learners, and to allow the students to investigate passion areas, etc. The science teacher teaches electives in forensics, herpetology, etc.

My current elective class is Ghosts and goblins in the Latin American world. We looked at the chupacabra, la llorona, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. For all of my planning, or lack thereof, I ended up with one extra day to teach than I had material. I have already had the student write and perform skits, create their own version of a legend, make annotated timelines, and create artwork. I was at a loss for what to do today. Thankfully I was in the library this morning talking about the essay I am supposedly writing for my class, and I mentioned my lack of brilliant ideas for this morning's class. And angels came singing.... or rather my friend asked me why I didn't tie in today's lesson with what the students have been doing in Language Arts - they have been studying heroes, gods and villains while reading the Trojan War. My friend and I even came up with a brilliant idea that students would create the story of Juan Diego, but from his perspective as he walked up the hill, pointing out all the allegorical items, etc. One of the things I loved about this idea was that it wasn't superficial, it was higher order thinking with purpose and that it made CONNECTIONS (one of my 5 standards) between two classes.

Well, that's not what happened when I began my class. Nope. We talked for an entire hour. I tried some PowerTeaching strategies for getting animated discussions going, and that worked well. But, the basics were, we discussed the nature of gods, heroes, villains, anti-heroes, etc. We talked about the elements in mythology. What kind of situations heroes find themselves in - does it have to be as "big" as the stuff the Greek gods put the heroes through? And then in small table groups students analyzed each of the three stories. What kind of character was the main character? etc. Finally we came back together as a big class and kind of reported out on what each of the small groups had discussed.

The class came to the conclusion that the story of the chupacabra has some factual elements and some mythological elements, and that the creature itself is a monster - it does what it does not out of maliciousness or a sense of greater good/evil, but out of a need to survive.

With the story of la Llorona, most groups went back to the original story of la Malinche. The discussions about her actions and motivations were astounding. One group decided that she was actually a hero, because she sacrificed her children for the greater good of her people - there was a prophecy that if she allowed her children to leave Mexico they would be the undoing of the Aztec people. One group decided that she was an anti-hero - she was in the same impossible situation a hero is put in, but she reverted to a lower nature by killing her children, rather than rising above it. Another group decided that her sacrificing her children came too late - that it was her betrayal of her people that had been the undoing of the Aztecs and she could not redeem her past actions. Yet another group decided that she was a monster because her ghost continues to haunt people and to steal young children.

The bell rang before we were able to conclude our discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but we were in serious discussion about whether or not Juan Diego was a hero in the legendary sense of the word or not. The thought I most appreciated was that Juan Diego was a hero because he was sent on a quest by a god, he performed his tasks dutifully, even though they were difficult - an Aztec getting an audience with the bishop at that time, and that as a consequence of completing the quest he was given a new quest to fulfill. His actions redeemed the Aztecs in the minds of the Spaniards, so they saved a people, thus meeting all the qualifications of the term hero. I wish we had had more time to discuss this - maybe two years from now when I can teach the class again... :)

"overachieving slackers"

2008-11-13T21:07:00.005-07:00

That's a quote from one of my students. I love it. So do the kids in his class.

But it's a real issue. My students tend to have such high expectations - either of themselves, or imposed on them from an authority (parents or school) - that they often cannot or choose not to live up to them.

I'm supposed to be writing a research paper right now, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where to start. I'm researching three influential people in the field of gifted education and writing a paper discussing how they have impacted the field.

I selected Renzulli, VanTassell-Baska, and Rimm. Renzulli because everything I read has his name cited somewhere - it seems like he is the foundation for everybody's thoughts whether they like him or hate him. It hardly seems like I can consider myself educated in G/T without being familiar with him to some degree. VanTassell-Baska I originally looked at because my professor recommended her. But having done some preliminary research, she has done some amazing work with curriculum development. Which is one of the directions I want to move towards. I am finding her work very interesting. I was not going to write about Rimm. I wanted to write about Carol Ann Tomlinson instead. But everything I was reading, including my textbook, was either written by or cited Rimm. And she focuses on one of my passion areas: underachievement. Which is how I am finally bringing my thoughts back to what I began with: overachieving slackers.

I find that I cannot skim when I am actually interested in the material. So, I have read now several studies, entire chapters, and even a book just to try to get my head around these three people. And what do I have to show for it? A well-polished essay ready to email to my professor? Not even close. I don't even have a page of notes on each person. What I have to show for it is a mental list of students who are underachievers and fomenting thoughts about how to use the material I have just read to help them suddenly become achievers. My brain is churning about ways to help these students set reasonable goals, show them that effort = achievement, etc.

And the funniest part of this is that I am modeling everything I am trying to get these kids to overcome: overachieving slackerhood. I am so caught up in trying to be a good student, a good teacher, a good parent - in trying to reach each of these students individually, etc. that my paper is due in three days and I have not even begun it yet.

Overachieving slackers are us.

teaching is hard to put on paper

2008-11-13T20:58:00.003-07:00

I heard a very beautiful thought yesterday, that I will struggle to put down here.

We were in a curriculum mapping meeting kvetching about how difficult it is to put "gifted" onto paper. By that we meant all the little things we do every day to teach our students, but that don't make it into the very linear, uncompromising map. *bleah* In the end, if you read a map, it often looks very flat and lifeless, there is very little there to show all the myriad things we do to bring class to life.

Our facilitator told us that it isn't just gifted that is hard to put on paper, it is teaching. Teaching, she said, is an art. Our classes are our paintings. The map is perhaps the easel and the paint itself, but the students and the classes are the paintings. There is no way to translate that artwork into words. There is no way another person can walk into our classroom and recreate that same artwork. They can pick up the canvas and the paint and make their own artwork, but it will never be the same as what we create.

So here's to creating beautiful artwork, and to finding a way to put all the paint, canvases and easels in an organized place for the next artist to find :)

reinventing the wheel

2008-11-12T18:30:00.002-07:00

I am noticing a pattern, but I don't know how much of it is my own warped perspective and how much of it is reality.

It seems to me that the people who complain the loudest and the most frequently are not the same people who show up time and time again to actually make positive, productive changes.

When I show up for meetings that have a chance of effecting change, I look around the room. It's habit, I suppose. Week after week I notice that no matter the topic of the meeting, no matter the purpose of the committee or group, it is the same people with minor changes. And it's kind of exhausting to be constantly on the defensive, and yet to never see the people who are putting us on the defensive in any of these settings...

Connections - one of the 5 Cs

2008-11-12T06:23:00.003-07:00

Connections is one of the National Foreign Language standards. Students are supposed to be able to make connections between one language and another, one culture and another, etc.

This is often covered in very superficial lessons about holidays or in grammar lessons. In Spanish one can drop the subject pronoun when the verb is in first or second person, or when the third person subject has previously been established. In English, however, one must always use a subject or a subject pronoun...

Personally, I love it when students come up with these connections all on their own. A few weeks ago, we were reading a story in which a student addressed her teacher. The student used the formal register with the teacher, and I popped up the grammar. "Class, why did the student use habla instead of hablas?" My 8th graders were able to answer immediately, but then we digressed into a conversation about formality. Some of the kids thought it was so odd that a student would have to be respectful to her (or his) teacher like that. And then some of my asian students began talking about the culture in China and Korea and how it was the same. They informed the class that one would never address their teacher informally in their native language either.

Dictations - evidence of comprehension...

2008-11-12T06:11:00.002-07:00

I spent part of my holiday yesterday grading dictations, and I found a curious pattern that showed my students were understanding what I said, even if they were not following instructions.

A brief background. I do dictations a la Ben Slavic. First, there is not English spoken during a dictation. I read through the dictation two times. Rather than reading one word at a time, I read in natural clusters of words - words tend to be said in groups rather than individually, so that's the way I read my dictation. I offer a third repetition if anybody needs it. Then I project the answers on the screen. Students underline any mistakes they made and make the corrections immediately below the original error. Unlike many of our activities which are focused on comprehension, the dictation is focused on the details. The sentences are based on stories we have told or read recently, but students are not asked any questions about the material.

In Spanish there are two words that usually translate into English as "for." These are "por" and "para." They are used with completely different meanings in Spanish, and this is often a difficult concept for English speakers to master. I have no idea if this changes through TPRS or not (the distinction between the two past tenses seems to become more intuitive through TPRS instruction.) In my dictation I used the word "para" I had a small group of students write the word "por" instead. Now, the two words don't sound the same, other than the initial sound.

My assumption is that the sentences made so much sense to these students that their brains felt comfortable filling in the next most logical word rather than listening intently and trying to sound it out.

I am of two minds with this. On the one hand, I wish the students had been listening more carefully - I only ask for this attention to detail for ten minutes of the week. And I wish that they had been more careful with their editing as well. On the other hand, I am thrilled that they were understanding the material so well.

Now I guess I just have to write some stories with lots of por and para repetitions.

:)

classroom management

2008-11-07T17:34:00.003-07:00

I implemented one of the strategies from Power Teaching in my classes. That is, the class participation points - I forget what it's actually called, but that's what it really is. I keep a tally on the board for positive and negative points given based on behavior.

I've always used a similar system, but it was given individually. In the past I would assign two participation grades per student per week. The first was active participation - how many times any given child volunteeed to participate. That grade was based on the average number of times students were able to participate that week. Sometimes an A was 3 participation points while other weeks it would be 10 points. This grade never dropped below a C, because some people are naturally more shy and not willing to speak in front of their peers. The second grade was on-task participation. This grade always began at an A and dropped a letter grade every two times I had to remind a student to get back on task.

I kept track of both grades on a seating chart I had printed out each week. It was a great system, the two biggest drawbacks were that I had to be able to keep up with the printing and tallying of points, and I always seem to fall behind on that at this time of the year, and because they are individual grades I depended on getting buy in from each student as an individual - if a student is not grade motivated, this system does not work well for them.

This year I tried the págame system, developed by Blaine Ray. It reduced the number of things I was tracking. With the págame system I was only tracking off-task behavior and absences. With this system a student is able to "buy back" their lost points by doing certain tasks in Spanish. I had the same two problems with the págame system that I had previously. I cannot fall behind on the printing and tallying of points, and it depends on students being grade conscious and motivated.

This class point system is slightly different. The class is "competing" against itself for either fun time at the end of the week, or a more difficult quiz. But the actual consequence doesn't seem to matter as much as seeing the points go up. I am no longer depending on all my students being grade motivated. Now my class is my ally. When one student is off-task (head on table, speaking in English, etc.) his/her peers are actively campaigning to get them back on task.

This system has also finally gotten across the point that asking for clarification is a good thing. I give the class points any time a student stops me and asks for a definition or comes up with a really cool question or connection. Now rather than groaning when somebody stops the class, the students are cheering the slower processors on. I literally had an entire class break into spontaneous applause the other day when a typical class clown first asked me in an appropriate way for clarification on two points and then volunteered to translate a sentence. His smile at that moment was so precious. And on Friday when his class got to play pictionary, he was so proud that he had helped tip those points in their favor. I may just have gotten his buy in (at least for a little while...)

Native Speaker solutions

2008-10-31T21:58:00.002-06:00

This year I have one native speaker in my class. She is, as far as I can tell, on grade level in Spanish. I have tried several different strategies to get her involved in class and most importantly to not waste her time in my room. But it is a waste of her time. I cannot effectively differentiate for one student out of 118 to that degree. She needs high level grammar, detailed spelling, and reading comprehension - all skills that take a lot of time which is the one thing I don't have.

She has a Spanish for Native Speakers workbook that her mother has requested she work from, but she would rather play games with her classmates and act in the stories than fill in the blanks with verb forms. I don't blame her. But she is becoming a bit of a behavior problem, not that it's hard to understand as she sits in my room an hour each day learning nothing at all.

I have been brainstorming what I can do to make this a productive use of her time. Here are some of my ideas:

Purchase software which she can use to self-study another language. This would not be ideal, of course, but it would have to be better than sitting in my room doing nothing.
Have her self-study Spanish in the library. She can read novels and rewrite them/summarize them in basic Spanish to show me comprehension, and to work on her circumlocution, spelling, grammar and writing skills. The added benefit to this is it would make some of my higher level books more accessible to my other students.
I also thought of the idea of having her work with some of the other native speakers at my school who are in other grade levels.

workshop

2008-10-31T21:52:00.002-06:00

I went to Blaine Ray's workshop today. I'll have more thoughts about it later, but one thing that really struck me was a comment he made about our brightest students and our fastest processors. He said that we are doing a disservice if we underestimate what they can do and do not insist on their achieving that.

As far as my faster processors, he suggested I skip into the level 2 books. I can still shelter my vocabulary by translating whatever comes up for the slower processors, but those fast processors need that grammatical input.

I already have two higher level novels and the Look I Can Talk More readings, so I believe that I will begin experimenting with more Comprehensible Input (CI) next week.

Professional Development

2008-10-30T22:14:00.004-06:00

I am going to Blaine Ray's TPRS workshop tomorrow. I went to one in the Spring, and then a three day workshop this summer. I learned a lot. But now that I am using the method in class I can see a lot of places where I need some polishing and practice and filling in of the gaps - so I am excited to be going - even if it does mean missing out on the class party in the afternoon.

Saturday I begin my first class in my MEd program. My textbook is Education of the Gifted and Talented which I just got today. So far I have been too busy posting on here to read beyond page 3, but I'm excited to be in classes again. Speaking of which, I ought to log off and finish my homework assignment.

A ticket out of here

2008-10-30T22:06:00.003-06:00

I am combating the negative undercurrent in my classes in a number of ways these days. One of them is that I have ended class a few minutes early and had students line up at the door. A lot of teachers do a ticket out or a similar concept - turning in your assignment, etc. Well, my ticket out is a smile and a compliment in Spanish. I know it's corny, but I think it falls into that old psych experiment - if you smile long enough you begin to believe you are happy. If you smile often enough is Spanish you begin thinking Spanish is fun, even if the smile is coerced. If you tell me how wonderful my class is often enough, sooner or later you will begin to believe it. (I hope) In the meantime, it is nice to hear how nice my blouse, hair, my clothing are... and how smart and beautiful I am... and how interesting and fun my class is. I know they are just playing the game but it sure beats the, "this is boring" that we can hear from them. :)

Oh, and one student gave me her compliment in Chinese after asking permission in Spanish. I love it! She is practicing outside of Chinese class, and is using her Chinese because she wants to! And she loves my class too. I wonder if she tells her Chinese teacher anything in Spanish?

Preferred Activity Time (PAT)

2008-10-30T21:59:00.003-06:00

PAT is an activity students earn through active engagement and participation during the week. These activities are perceived as more fun, although they are often activities the teacher wanted to do anyway. :)

I need to create a file of activities the students can choose from. But today I "let" two of my classes do a TPR activity we did fairly often last year - I gave students one minute to write 5 commands on a sheet of scrap paper. Then I called on two students at a time, one to read and one to act. It's great. The students end up eating their shoes, sitting on the ceiling, and shouting, "I love purple toast!" They get up and move around, and they laugh at each other in a non-threatening way. Hey, it's hard not to laugh when somebody draws a banana on the board and then tries to eat it!

Another good one so far has been Hangman. Oh and Pictionary. But Simón Dice (Simon Says) just isn't working for me - I can't think of commands fast enough to stump them.

the worm on the hook

2008-10-30T21:27:00.002-06:00

Since my days as a student teacher I have had a policy that I do not call on students who do not volunteer. It can be too embarassing if they aren't comfortable yet with the material, or if they are by nature shy people.

On the other hand, I can't check in with my barometer students (those who are trying but slower than the class average) if I don't check in with them. So, I've been playing with strategies like teaching to the eyes, and making sure I move through the classroom more often.

Yesterday, as we were reading the class novel, I could see that some of my slower processors were struggling. So I would reread the sentence slowly and ask that student to translate what I had just read. I didn't do it in a mean way, and I was there to help them through it the whole time. I pointed at the words on the board, I repeated the words slowly. And I didn't let their peers call out the answers quickly. Every student responded.

Every student except one. This is a student who has struggled the whole year, not just in my class but in all of his classes. We, his teachers, have brainstormed strategies to help this student engage, to accomodate him, and to provide appropriate interventions for his needs. Yesterday I asked him what a sentence meant and he wuickly shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "I don't know," he said. Perhaps it was his tone of voice, which suggested he couldn't be bothered to care, or perhaps it was the speed of his shoulder shrug. But something inside me told me not to let him off the hook. I gave him the "teacher look" for what felt like five minutes. I refused to let his "I don't know" stand. I repeated the question, pointing at each word slowly. And I stared at him. At the end of that time he finally stammered through a translation. And I praised him for his efforts and went on.

It was painful to me to watch him squirm for so long. It was painful for the other students too, they desperately wanted to call out the answer and just go on already. And I know it was painful for him. He had 24 pairs of eyes on him for a lengthy bit of time.

But what that told me is that I have been letting him slip under the radar and simply choose not to engage. He is capable of engaging if he is required to, and now that he has tasted that, I plan to continue. I hope the next time I ask him a question he doesn't wait five minutes to answer. I hope that the next time I ask him a question he was already thinking that being called on was a possibility so he should be paying attention before hand.

Power Teaching

2008-10-30T21:09:00.002-06:00

As part of my reclaiming my classroom and myself, I finally followed up on a reference to Power Teaching. My first impression is that it is a little gimmicky for me. But by the end of the 7 minute video I was seeing possibilities.

I started using the class/yes technique the very next day (Wednesday). I adapted that to clase/profe. I thought about keeping it with the yes response of sí, but I liked the way clase and profe both have similar cadence. Since the idea is to have the class call the response back to you as you say it, the cadence of the words struck me as important.

I also started the scoreboard. Now, this is a lot like the participation systems I have tried in the past, except that it affects the entire class rather than just an individual. And what a difference that has made! Students who have never cared how many points I took from them or how many págames they owed me are suddenly uncomfortable when their peers are pressuring them to behave.

My husband teaches at a detention center that is based on getting the students to change their attitudes and behaviors through implementing a positive peer pressure system. And this is exactly the same thing.

In addition to addressing some of the more egregious behavior, I have also been able to truly encourage the behaviors I have wanted to see all along. Yesterday we were reading the novel Pobre Ana, and we read that Ana's family rarely eats carne (meat.) One of my students who rarely participates actively pointed out that this was just like the word carnivore. Instant extra credit point. I have another student who struggles with academics. He volunteered to translate the paragraph. I coaxed him through the paragraph, breaking it into easily digestible chunks and pointing out the definitions for him. When he finished, I had the class applaud him and I gave the class a point. Yet another student asked me what a word meant, and I was quick to give a point. Up until now students have been conflicted about asking for help. They know they need it, but they are embarassed to voice that in front of their peers. And now, they are helping the class by voicing it so the stigma is gone. Cool!

I'm back

2008-10-30T06:28:00.003-06:00

I have been too depressed about school to post lately. That and there has been a lot happening. But I feel as though a veil has been lifted and I have some valuable perspective again.

I can look past the events that are taking place and see my students for the wonderful, delightful people they are again. And in my classroom, that makes all the difference.

This week I have set about taking control back again - making it my classroom and not theirs. It's not that anything became wildly out of control, but the shift in my classroom definately went towards the kids for a little while. And now I'm back. I had a lot of fun so far this week.

a child shall lead them

2008-10-16T18:00:00.004-06:00

I have been trying to fall in love with Spanish all over again, or rather trying to let the students see how much I love it. And it is hard. I don't want to be that open to the students, or their families. I don't want to be that vulnerable. I've been reading Narnia en español during FVR time, and that has helped - it has given me time to be encompassed by Spanish even if it is only for five minutes at a time.

Today I fell head over heels in love again in front of my students. It wasn't about Spanish though. I fell in love with Chinese. And it was a 7th grade student who shared it with me. She has decided that she will teach me Chinese in exchange for the Spanish, and I have encouraged it. I have always wanted to speak Chinese, and I love that I can share not just Spanish but that huge C - Connections. I never became a Spanish teacher because I love Spanish so much. I became a Spanish teacher because I love languages so much, and I happen to be able to speak Spanish really well.

I had a conversation with two students today - in Chinese! Obviously I spoke with the student who is teaching me. But then I was muttering under my breath that I have a little brother as another student walked in to class. She said, "Oh you have a brother," and sat down. So, I told her that I also have a little sister. Then I asked how she was. "Hao." (Good.) Then she asked me how I was and I said very well. LOL

The simple pleasures. I felt like I was on cloud nine for the rest of the day! And it was easy to fall in love in front of the kids.

team building

2008-10-16T06:24:00.004-06:00

We took our students to the mountains for three days for a Team Building field trip. It's actually fantastic. The gains shown in the students' thinking, processing and just plain interacting with each other is amazing. Each year we see amazing friendships growing from the seends of this trip. One year there was this amazing bombshell of a girl who befriended this boy. He was this tiny little boy who was a bit of a social reject and a nerd. They became best friends for the next two years. Their common link? They both felt isolated by their peers - even though she was Ms Popularity and he was a typical geek. They both felt as though people judged them by looking at them and never saw beyond the surface they presented. It's heartening.

This year was difficult for me. I found it so difficult to put aside my fears and just interact with the kids the way this trip requires. But when I did, the magic was still there. It's amazing how much I still love having students.

falling in love

2008-10-15T06:20:00.002-06:00

I have retreated into myself as a teacher and as an individual over the last few weeks. There's a lot of stuff going on at my school that makes it very hard to want to be there really. In the past it's been pretty bad, but I was able to go into my classroom and shut my door and all was well with the world. When I am in my classroom the world is good and very little can disturb me.

But this time, the kids are involved in the ugly stuff. I don't want to be out in the school talking to my colleagues. I don't want to be out talking to parents. And I don't even want to be in the classroom with my students. I don't trust the system anymore, and I don't trust the people.

I asked for advice from friends and mentors. The best advice I was given was to "fall in love with Spanish all over again" in front of my students. I love the idea. I want to fall in love in front of them and make the world fade away for the hour that we are in the room together. But... it's just like falling in love for real. After a bad break-up, after you've been burned by love it's hard to let yourself have that freedom again. Which is sad. Because it isn't Spanish that's burned me. And really, it isn't the majority of the students, or the parents, or my colleagues. It's a small handful of people.

So here's to finding the courage to fall in love all over again.

accomodations

2008-10-03T20:51:00.002-06:00

We had a meeting today with a specialist for hearing disorders and the parents of a student who who has auditory processing, language processing and visual disorders. We spent an hour collaborating with this woman on ways to help this child succeed, not just in school but in life. We asked her to come in to help us. We, his teachers, with his parents are fighting to get him on an IEP or a 504.

As she was leaving she told each of us how wonderful we were, how receptive we were. She said that in most schools she is being pushed out before she even opens her mouth.

I don't get that.

I mean, yes, there is some more work involved here. Especially because he is adament that nothing is wrong. Can you think of a single teenager who wants to be singled out like that? But together we were able to come up with strategies that will help him maintain his dignity and function better. We hope that what was taking him three hours can be limited to half an hour at home. We hope a lot of things. Right now, we don't know because we haven't tried any of these strategies.

But I really don't get not wanting to know how to help a kid like this because there is more work involved for you. I mean, aren't we here to help each of our students?

an equal exchange

2008-09-29T09:18:00.001-06:00

I have a group of students who have decided that in exchange for my Spanish lessons they will teach me Chinese. I love it. The students get to be in a position as experts. But more than that, I am able to honor them for who they are, and for their culture. I am enforcing the idea that languages are important, not just Spanish.

One of these students was a very weak student, but now she is doing fantastic. And amazingly, although I know I am butchering the language every time I open my mouth, they adamently refuse to laugh at me. Instead they offer constant encouragement and model the words over and over again. In a sense we have become a team.

still thinking about teacher/parent/student interaction

2008-09-28T14:38:00.003-06:00

I have a friend who is struggling right now. Her son is 7 and has been in 2nd grade for all of a month. My friend has already been cornered by her son's teacher several times.

The first time the teacher told her that her son has ADHD because he is dreamy and stares out of the window a lot. Mind you, the teacher was not talking about a student who was disrupting the class, just one who was not paying attention the whole day. (At his school there is one recess for the kids. How insane is that? Ask kids to sit still ALL day long and then get surprised when they daydream out the window???)

Be that as it may, a week or so later my friend was cornered again. He son had failed the math test 6/10. The teacher told my friend there was no way her child would pass second grade. Mind you, school has only been in session one week! It turns out that five of the questions were complex logic questions: "The number is less than three doubled, more than five minus three and is an odd number. What number is it?" AND it was a timed test!

And then my friend was cornered AGAIN. This time the teacher called her in the middle of the day to say that her son's reading comprehension was awful and he needed remedial help. He had turned in a book report that was all gibberish. My friend asked if the teacher had taken the time to talk to her son about the book, because she had learned more about sharks (the topic) during the book report process that she cared to know. She acknowledged that his writing leads something to be desired, but that does not reflect his reading comprehension. The teacher said no, she had not spoken with the boy, because it was obvious from his report he understood nothing.

My friend is at her wits end. She is talking to the principal. She is doing flash cards at home. She is thinking of withdrawing him and homeschooling him. (Not that I think homeschooling is a bad idea.) But why?

Because her interactions with this teacher have all been negative. The teacher has apparently made up her mind that the child is stupid and uneducable and all this one month into the year. And she feels caught up in the system, and her child feels incredibly stupid.

Now maybe he is immature and is not ready for 2nd grade. But I can't help thinking how different would this whole situation have looked if perhaps the teacher had started with talking about how creative he is, or how well he interacts with other students - he has so many friends, etc. What if the teacher kept trying new strategies and always went in thinking that all of her students were capable of learning?

Thank God for the peacemakers

2008-09-28T14:30:00.002-06:00

I got myself in a jam in a story the other day. The story was going great, I had control of it. And then suddenly I did not. I let the kids wrest it away from me.

It all started when a student didn't want to go to school, so she played hooky and walked down to a nearby gas station where she bought and ate a magic taco. The taco gave her magic abilities and she returned to school. She walked into my class where I asked her where she had been. Rather than answering like a polite child, she picked me up and threw me to the floor where I died. The class decided to have a party. They were thinking Arby's and they went.

And all of that was controlled. Fun, a little unconventional at school, but I had the story.

Then the principal walked into Arby's because it was her lunch break. She saw my students and--

And that's where I lost all control. Because, as in many schools, the principal is not the students' favorite person. There were many suggestions - all of which were chaotic, unprincipaled (heh), etc. And then there was the peacemaker with the perfect solution.

The students invited the principal to join the party. She accepted and they all danced the Macarena in the middle of Arby's.

Story ended.

postcards

2008-09-28T14:24:00.002-06:00

One of my goals this year is to do a whole lot more noticing kids or catching them in the act of doing what they're supposed to be doing. I actually got this idea from FLYLady last year and I loved it. I am writing notes home to parents for every child. Actually, I brought it up to my team and as a team we will be sending home at least three for each child over the course of the year. I am keeping track to make sure that every child gets recognized at least three times.

I like the idea that this is a concrete way to recognize each student at different times and to include the parents. So many times the only communication we have with parents is when a child is having problems - even when we are recognizing the kids at school.

Elephants, donkeys and moose

2008-09-17T11:50:00.003-06:00

My students are very aware of the political process, and I have several students who wear shirts DAILY supporting their favorite presidential candidate. Without going into politics I wanted to honor these kids. I also wanted to get some more reps in with se llamaba (was named), fue (went) and había (there was)

I wrote a story about a student who wanted cats (blue walruses in one class). The student went to Washington DC to the white house. A man named George opened the door. The student asked George for cats. George said to him, " I don't have cats. I have elephants. I have lots of elephants." There were no cats in the white house. There were only elephants. There were no cats in Washington.

The student went to Illinois and talked to a man. The man was named Barack. The student asked Barack for cats. Barack said, " I don't have cats. I have donkeys. I have a lot of donkeys." There were no cats in Illinois. There were lots of donkeys in Illinois. Poor student. The student wanted to cry.

The student went to Alaska. The student talked to a woman. The woman's name was Sarah. The student asked Sarah for cats. Sarah said, "I don't have cats. I have moose. I have lots of moose." Poor student. There were lots of moose in Alaska, but there were no cats.

The student went to our school. There were cats on the roof of our school. The student was happy.

My kids loved it. They all wanted to be actors, and they laughed at the elephant and donkey joke.

perfecto

2008-09-11T22:48:00.002-06:00

I saw a few kids' faces just light up today. And the funny thing is, I didn't do anything. In three of my five classes today one of my barometer students, the kids who try hard but are processing the language slower than their peers, tried to translate a sentence from the reading. And I was able to give them an honest Perfecto! Hence the smile.

But, while I am happy they got their translations correct, I am happier that they volunteered to try - in front of their peers. And I think that made their victory all the sweeter.

Perfecto, indeed

remembering

2008-09-11T22:25:00.002-06:00

I started teaching seven years ago. Technically I started the last week in August. But this is the day that sticks out in my brain as when I really became a teacher. Of all the things from that day I suppose it's a really silly thought to have.

But, September 11 is the day I realized how much I really care. It is the day I realized how much more there is to teaching than ... well teaching. It's about love and caring and service. I know we all have our own horror stories from that day. None of us will likely forget where we were or what we were doing. But for me, it is the day I realized that I can never not be a teacher. I was so vulnerable that day. There were no scripts. No methods class had ever prepared me for what to do in case of national emergency. Nobody had ever told me what it would be like to have a hundred faces looking to me for comfort in a world that had been turned upside down.

I remember driving into work listening to the radio. Everything felt so surreal. We had just moved out west from DC, so everything felt simultaneously very close and very far. And I walked into the empty school building to see my four colleagues huddled around a radio, listening. Then minutes later we wiped our tears and greeted children. We tried to hide our own fear, to make the students and their parents feel safe.

The whole day was crazy. The school was in the middle of changing buildings. So, there were five of us and less than a hundred students in one building. The rest of the school, including all the administrators, were in the previous building still. We had no communication, and were under the assumption that we were in a complete lock down - we didn't let the students change rooms, walk by windows, anything. And I remember lying. Smiling and lying. And praying it would all be ok, that my lies wouldn't be lies.

I remember holding one student and letting her cry. Her father was a pilot. She was sure that he had been hurt. I told her that his plane had been grounded and he was safe. And I prayed.

Today I walked past the flags at half mast and I couldn't help feeling like it was that day all over again. I felt vulnerable and weak all over again. We're in a new building now, the whole school is together, I have support and administrators, and there were no catastrophes today. But I couldn't help remembering it.

differentiation... techniques (content and product)

2008-09-04T06:03:00.007-06:00

If students are going to learn different material or doing different products, there are several ways to make this fair, equitable and most of all manageable. The hardest part is always having so many *different* things to grade, that and making sure that students are doing equivalent work. :)

The products are the vehicles students use to show us their knowledge. The content is the material they have learned. I'm putting the two together because they can often go together in practical application.

Sometimes content can be differentiated while the product and skills remain the same, i.e. each student picks the topic of their research paper but all the students are responsible for the same type of research paper. In this case the student chooses the vehicle based on interest, but the skills being taught by the teacher and the product are the same for all students. This means that the teacher expectations and grading rubric remain the same for all students.

RAFT and tiered activities can also work well.

Other Menu activities also work well. In my class I used to require personal projects. Students could choose from a variety of assignments to show me learning and knowledge of the different Spanish speaking countries. Each assignment had its own mini-rubric and point values assigned. Students could choose which assignment to do, but their total points had to equal 40. A 5 point project was to make an accurate flag and provide the population statistics on the back. A 15 point assignment was to prepare a typical dish from that country and bring it in to share with classmates. A 40 point assignment was to write a mini-research paper with at least 3 references cited. Students were able to use their talents and interests and I was able to assess their learning. In addition, the other students were able to benefit from their learning when we shared our work. I always had a category for student choice which required talking to me, making a plan, writing a rubric, and assigning a point value for the project.

Independent study

Mentorships

Authentic problem, product and audience

Flexible grouping

Learning contracts

Varied homework

Curriculum compacting

Curriculum enrichment

Portfolio development

Reasons to differentiate

2008-09-03T21:26:00.004-06:00

More musings on my upcoming workshop:

When we use differentiation in the classroom we should have clear-cut objectives just as we should have objectives for everything we do in our classroom. Our objectives then guide us in our choice of how to best differentiate and which methods to use. When we keep our goals clearly in mind then we are able to reflect and analyze our own performance and the effectiveness of our strategies. Not only does this help us as individuals in our classroom, but it also provides a way to document the effectiveness of various intervention techniques for individual students.

What are some of the reasons we differentiate?

Medical - if a student has a medical reason to be unable to perform the same work or to learn in the same way as the other students.

Previous knowledge - Students come to us with different levels of knowledge. We can differentiate to accomodate students who have already mastered knowledge their peers are being introduced to, or for students who have not yet mastered material that is foundational to the work the class is preparing to do.

Processing speed - students are able to master material at different speeds. If a student is able to learn the material at a significantly faster or slower rate, then he or she ought to be accomodated in the classroom.

Strengths/weaknesses - (learning styles) we can use students' strongest academic skills to help scaffold and strengthen their weaker areas while also ensuring that they learn the material being presented in class.

Student interest - sometimes students can use a passion area to demonstrate skills or knowledge.

class website

2008-09-03T16:49:00.002-06:00

I just made a class website - woohoo! At the moment it is simply a blog where I am posting the stories from class (one class at a time only) and basic structures covered. Students will not be able to post comments - there's a liability issue there that I'm not willing to go into at the moment. Eventually I hope to add audio podcasts of the story and the structures.

My primary goal here is to provide students with a resource if they have missed class, or if they would like some extra practice outside of class.

Here is the url: http://profeburchill.wordpress.com/

differentiation workshop

2008-09-01T16:26:00.005-06:00

My school is hosting a conference on gifted education. I am scheduled to present on differentiation. Right now my main thoughts are that differentiation goes beyond Gardner's learning styles.

There are at least six ways to differentiate:
The pace
The content
The delivery
The product
The environment
The assessment

If you are differentiating the pace then each student can progress at the speed that he/she is able, but they are all learning the same material. I have seen elementary teachers do this very effectively with checklists.

If you are differentiating the content then each child is able to learn something different. This can go as far as independent study, but can also work in a more traditional setting where although groups learn different material they then report back to the class as a whole what they learned.

In delivery differentiation every student is responsible for learning the same material, but the teacher presents the material in different ways to maximize each students' learning potential.

In product differentiation every student is learning the same material, but they show the mastery of the material in different ways. Some students may choose to do posters while others do PowerPoint presentations.

In environment differentiation the physical environment and the conditions the students work in are differentiated. Students may have preferential seating in the classroom, or be allowed the use of certain tools and/or manipulatives.

By differentiating assessments students are still held accountable for the same information, but they are allowed to demonstrate their competence in a way that will best reflect that for them as individuals. Assessments can be modified to show students' individual growth rather than reflecting their mistakes. Assessments can be formative when the teacher uses them to inform future instructional plans.

absences and making up work

2008-09-01T09:31:00.003-06:00

Right now my policy is that students must hand write a 100 word essay in Spanish, which incorporates vocabulary from the class they missed, for each day a student was absent.

I am wondering if perhaps I cannot set up a student blog where I post the stories from class with the highlighted vocabulary so that students have access at least to the written version of class and can get some comprehensible input from their absences.

I don't know how much effort it would take to make audio podcasts of the stories so that students can also hear the stories online. It wouldn't work if they had no computer access, but for the majority of my students the majority of the time this would give them some access to the classroom.

I just don't want to create endless work for myself that will have little educational impact.

student responsibility for missing work

2008-09-01T09:23:00.002-06:00

This year I told the students that if they are absent they will need to write an essay in Spanish for each day's work they missed. Their essays will need to incorporate the vocabulary they missed why they were out. Because of that I have given them extra days over the stated policy (1 day + number of days absent = due date) in order to learn the new words.

Well, I received an email arguing that I am punishing a student because this student has an illness which requires day-time doctor's appointments and involves time spent out of school. The parents are asking if I am perhaps breaking the student's 504 by requiring "extra work" for absences.

The school nurse defended my position and told the parents that I am in compliance with the 504. I also responded to the parents by explaining that the essay is really the same as doing the problems she misses in math class or the work for lit, etc. Writing an essay is the closest that I can approximate making up all the work we do in class. For the most part we are talking for an hour, which perhaps does not seem as intensive as other classes, but it's also much more difficult to make up. The students cannot possibly recreate the environment of hearing and speaking Spanish for an hour.

Really, I am just flabbergasted by the whole thing. I cannot fathom that asking a student to make up work from an absence can be conceived of as punishing the student for being sick. Is there any such thing as personal accountability anymore?

the pagame that wasn't

2008-09-01T08:36:00.003-06:00

After school on Friday a student came up to me and thanked me for the best class ever. Well, this is a student who has had his fair share of problems in my class and in others. I assumed he owed me a pagame, but when I asked him (my clipboard was in my room) he said he didn't think so. And sure enough, he didn't. It was a genuine thank you!

more circling

2008-08-29T09:52:00.004-06:00

We were doing the circling with balls activity in class today. I decided to take the students outside because it was such a nice day out. The activity quickly evolved. We had three balls flying around in a large circle. We began with saying "me gusta/no me gusta ______" (I like/don't like____" with the sport that belonged to the ball. After ten minutes students had that down pretty well and were getting bored, so we changed. Before throwing/kicking/passing their ball they had to say "A _____ (student's name) le gusta _______" saying that (student) likes ____, using what we have learned about that student in class. So student x was throwing a basketball and saying that student y liked to ski. We did that with three balls simultaneously for about ten minutes as well. After that we changed to stating what students did *not* like to do.

It was great. The kids had fun. They liked the extra challenge of remembering the sport they had, what their classmates liked and what they did not like. And I think I actually saw them believing for two minutes that I care about them as individuals!

after the second day

2008-08-21T16:15:00.003-06:00

So, today I tried to learn from yesterday's mistakes. I tried to vary the sentences more and provide some unexpected responses along with the traditional "Susie likes to play soccer."

And, after school today I actually heard students speaking in Spanish! It was their first day of Spanish! Other students, who don't have my class until tomorrow were flabbergasted. "You learned Spanish already?" I think they are approaching my class tomorrow with a mixture of fear and excitement. Muahahaha....

first day

2008-08-21T15:35:00.002-06:00

Our students came back on Monday this week. But, my first real class was yesterday. And, I bombed. I was asking circling questions and nearly everybody was staring at me with that dazed look on their faces that says "we already *get* this, why aren't you going on?" But, when I did my comprehension checks, I wasn't getting very strong responses. I don't see that class again until Monday (testing schedule), but I think I will spend a little bit of the class time re-explaining my participation expectations and that I won't go on again until I hear that nearly all of the students understand a concept.

Today I had two new classes, and I made a more concerted effort to give unexpected responses every once in a while. We did some TPR for a while. Then I did the circling with props activity. We got through about three students in each class. In the circling with props activity, each student has drawn an activity they enjoy doing on a piece of cardstock. I selected one card and spoke at length about that student and that activity. That student is, of course, the best in the world at that activity.

I picked some of my barometer and my "may be trouble later on" students to focus on today. They were better soccer players than David Beckham, better guitar players than Jimi Hendrix, better actresses than Julia Roberts, etc. And then one of my students likes to sleep on the roof of his house all the time. Another student plays volley ball in the swimming pool. Another student skis down the mountains at 3 a.m. it was just enough to keep them guessing, and I had students participating, guessing what their peers do.

I have two classes where I can see that the students just are not as willing to play this game. Yesterday's class and the class I had this afternoon. Yes, I got cute answers and participation today. But it was like pulling teeth, and there was a lot of sighing, eye rolling and talking in English. I introduced the concept of págames and told them that begins on Monday when we next see each other. Hopefully the págames and the continued circling with props with unexpected answers will get them to participate more willingly.

technology workshop

2008-08-21T15:32:00.001-06:00

Well, my workshop went off without a hitch. Or, that's what I'd like to say :)

I didn't plan for how long it would take to get everybody logged on in the computer lab. And I compensated by randomly spewing out way too much information at everybody. And then... the internet went down. LOL

There we were telling everybody how wonderful technology is and how much work time you can save, and... nothing. Absolutely predictable. But all in all, it went fairly well and was not nearly as terrifying as I thought it might be.

Web 2.0

2008-08-13T22:14:00.004-06:00

As my colleague and I have prepared for our presentation tomorrow I have had the opportunity to reflect on my own thoughts about technology. In some ways I am no stranger to technology. My step-mother was programming computers before PCs even existed. She taught me BASIC when I was in elementary school. I used to chat on irc (does anybody even remember what that is/was?) and I regularly frequented bbs's (bulletin boards). I remember when the move was first made away from dos - I was upset because now people who didn't know anything about computers would still be able to use them.

But for all that I'm not technologically savvy. I have never cared to learn more than I absolutely needed to know at that exact moment. And, for the most part, I have not used technology in my classroom. Basically, it boils down to the learning curve. I find that I do not have much free time, and the time that I have I am loathe to spend figuring out something else that may or may not work. :)

My colleague and I were discussing Web 2.0 and all the collaborative tools it offers. And I just lit up. I have found new colleagues, some on the other side of the globe, and suddenly I am not an isolated teacher in my classroom anymore. A student asks me a question, and where before my answer would have been I don't know, now I can add but let me ask somebody. And within minutes I have an answer. As I was reading Harry Potter I came across two terms I was unfamiliar with (well that I thought may have been misused - there were many terms I was unfamiliar with!) and from around the world came responses: one was most certainly a mistranslation, while apparently the other was not. I have even met local friends and mentors.

Yes, there has been a small learning curve. No, I'm not the world's most savvy wiki user/blogger/moodler :) But, from my perspective here in a small corner of the universe, the benefits are amazing.

Now, here's hoping that the technology all works tomorrow and that I don't make a complete fool of myself. :)

an image for me this coming year

2008-08-13T22:05:00.003-06:00

Today was the official first day back at school for staff. We had staff development all day long. During the morning session my boss spoke briefly about overcoming some of the "stuff" from last year. Her words were that "nobody can take advantage of us if we don't let them," and that we should all really "be here." In my mind I saw an image of a phoenix rising from the ashes. I'm hoping to hold that image in my mind for a while, and to be that phoenix. (And just in case you were wondering, like we were, the plural of phoenix is still phoenix.)

speaking of reading

2008-08-13T22:01:00.002-06:00

I was surprised to find the word embarassed translated as embarasado while I was reading Harry Potter. Ron Weasley was pregnant? Wow, that adds a whole new layer of meaning to the story.

I was also surprised to see a word I had previously taught my students was gibberish: ello. Apparently, in some regional dialects, ello can be used as the object of a preposition. Who knew?

The pure joy of reading

2008-08-08T23:34:00.002-06:00

Well, it finally happened. I got so lost in a book that I stopped noticing what I was reading, I was caught up in all the finer points of the plot and was sad when the book finally ended.

I've been reading in Spanish for decades now, and I've read some of the most celebrated books there are: Don Quixote, Cien años de soledad, etc. But, I can't remember ever getting so caught up in a book (in Spanish that is) that I forgot I was reading and just lived in the book.

:)

The book, by the way, was Harry Potter y el cáliz del fuego.

When I began reading through my classroom library over the summer I thought perhaps I was being a tad bit nerdish. "Normal people," I told myself, don't spend their vacation reading in foreign languages. But, I have found a lot of enjoyment in these books. I also learned a lot of Spanish: roble means oak and sauce means willow. Who knew? And I have a new perspective on Free Voluntary Reading. I can't wait until my classes start reading so I can begin a new book.