Hello hello

It has been a while since I posted anything on here, mostly because I've been going at a breakneck pace since school started. Even though I've worked 12 hours in one day on more than one occasion, I must say...

I love teaching high school.

High schoolers are nuts. Think about it, they have exponentially more hormones and energy than they know what to do with, and we're asking them to sit in a classroom for 90 minutes with 25--28 of their peers (who are also nuts) and chill out while they learn. Ha! Right. I teach Spanish I, so in addition to having the normal craziness of high schoolers, I have a lot of students who are there only to fulfill their language requirement, not necessarily because they are dying to learn Spanish. And I have a lot of freshmen/sophomores. Essentially, calling the range of maturity and motivation in my classes broad is an understatement.

But finding a way to make it work is challenging, and I'm always up for a good challenge. My goal for this year is that the ~180 students I teach leave my class prepared for Spanish II--and that their education will not reflect that I am a first year teacher. So far, I have learned quickly and constantly, things like having "sponge" activities ready for when 2nd period inevitably finishes the lesson 15 minutes before all my other classes. Or how much note-taking the kids can take before they zone out. And how much they don't enjoy note-taking in general.

I would have to say the most important lesson I have learned in the classroom is to keep it fun. Especially with the variation of motivation among my students, this is vital. But not only for the sake of their learning, but for the sake of my sanity. When my students have fun, I have fun and giggle with them. When I have more fun, I love my job even more. Friday we played a game with vocabulary, and I actually overheard a student say, "This is the most fun game I have ever played in a class before." My day was made by that comment, and I left school Friday energized, despite my lack of rest. Note-taking and grammar are inevitable parts of learning a language, but there has to be something to keep the kids interested. And it will work for some of them more than others, but it will give them a positive view of your class for the effort. And it will let you have fun with them, which is a great way to build a relationship with students.

I'm a rookie, but learning. I love being a teacher. Just watch out when I have on my sombrero...

Wow

I had forgotten what real life was like. --And I don't just quite yet know it either, but I have lately started to feel the relief that it is about to start again. I have had a love/hate relationship with grad school for the past two years, mostly because I have tried to squeeze far too much into too little time. But today I received the email that my graduation application had been approved. And I'm writing the conclusion to the thesis I've been working on all summer. As of August 17, I will officially be a Master of the Arts, as awarded by one of the top-10 graduate programs in education in the country. Thank you, Texas, for a rigorous education.

On top of the relief of finishing a demanding chapter of my academic career, I was offered (and accepted) my first teaching job last week. I am a high school Spanish teacher, and I am flooded with all the excitement and terror that go along with that. I am thrilled by the opportunity to teach. And from what I hear, Cedar Park High School is a great place to work. Jeff bought me roses and we went to The Alamo Drafthouse (our favorite date spot) to watch a movie to celebrate the occasion. We met up with our good friends Christina and Geoff for additional merry-making.

Oh, and I finally legally changed my name today (added my new last name, moved my old one to the middle, effectively giving me four names and the longest name in history), and I will be getting my first out-of-home-state license made tomorrow.

Aaaaand Tanner graduated from puppy school last week.

Isn't he great?

So there. Life is grand.

Fascinating

From Mantle-Bromley (1992), Preparing Students for Meaningful Culture Learning:

Guioria [1972] and his colleagues have examined subjects' language egos, studying the relationship between subjects' sensitivity to cues in interpersonal situations (empathic capacity) and their ability to reproduce a foreign language. They found the degree of subjects' authentic pronunciation (which is psychologically the most difficult language behavior to manipulate) was significantly related to their empathy. Language ego, the personal egoistic nature of language learning, play such a part in each student's ability to take on new behaviors that it determines, in part, whether a student will succeed in the language class. (121)

Thoughts on Culture in Education in America

"When should culture be taught?

Culture should be taught when we have students to teach."

-Ned Seelye, Teaching Culture: Strategies for Intercultural Communication (1974)

In researching for my Master's Report, I'm currently reading the above-quoted book, and I found one of his points necessary to share.

Though Seelye specifically works as a Spanish language teacher and discusses the teaching of culture in a foreign language classroom, he advocates the incorporation of cultural knowledge into all our courses in education and as early as possible.  He acknowledges the teacher's concern with how this can be done (i.e., "How would I even teach that, assuming I had time?"), but emphasizes that teaching culture is about equipping students with skills to study, inquire, and relate with other cultures, rather than with information (trivia-type facts) about other cultures.  "While a convenient place to begin learning about the target culture is in our foreign language classes, culture must be taught systematically in addition to purely linguistic concerns. ...[J]ust as culture cannot be ignored in foreign language classes the role of language in human thought cannot be ignored in social studies classes that aspire to develop intercultural communication skills."

I think Seelye's point about including intercultural skills in all subjects would clearly be an effective change in our schools, but I think editing our views and practices in foreign languages could have drastic and positive effects, as well.

I've spoken with many people who wish their children had the opportunity to study languages in public school as early as kindergarten or elementary school.  It seems that generally people assume that learning languages that early is the "best" way to do it (there's research that indicates advantages to children and others to adults, so whatever your age, you have skills that will help you greatly), and I wonder if we might be able to begin with our children by teaching language with an emphasis on intercultural communication.  In this way, students would progress through their early years of school with this recurring theme of cultural curiosity and understanding that would not only be a healthy social change for us in the U.S., but would also be an amazing way of teaching our students to use critical and independent thinking skills.  Not to mention it would provide us with an opportunity to learn how to use the metric system, which to this day eludes me; I wish I had been taught to think in both Metric and U.S. customary systems.  --That's a personal motive, of course.

But if we seriously considered the benefits that exist for teaching our students foreign languages from primary school through college, we would be astounded.  One problem we have is that our timeline for learning a language is skewed; taking a language for two years does not guarantee that you will be an "intermediate" level learner.  We don't teach English (or any other subject) that way, so why would we teach other languages in such a rushed manner?  Teaching languages long-term throughout school would allow students to reach near-native proficiency by the time they leave public schools.  Multi-lingual, globally conscious, culturally sensitive graduating classes from our high schools would go on to college and the world to make strong, qualified, intelligent leaders.  Why would we not want to seize this opportunity?

I don't foresee these types of changes in the U.S., though they would certainly have positive and lasting effects on future generations.  Other countries recognize the benefits of multilingualism.  I only hope we can someday recognize them, too.

English-only Rule Doubles the Dropout Rate in Boston

Apparently, Boston voted for a change six years ago that enforced English-only curricula in their schools in hope of speeding non-native English-speaking students along their road to language acquisition.  --This doesn't work, and there is proof.  In six years, the dropout rate in Boston has doubled.  Imagine not having full proficiency in your second language and having all of your classes--not just language arts, but also math, history, and science--in that language with no extra help.  I might drop out, too.  This is especially unfortunate because 38% of the district's 56,000 students are non-native English speakers: 21,280 students.  The full story is here.

Luckily in Texas many educators realize how ineffective this approach is, possibly due to the large (and continuously growing) Spanish-speaking population in the state.  For example, I tutor at Metz Elementary School, which has adopted the mentoring program Help One Student To Succeed (HOSTS).  At Metz, the school has two HOSTS programs for language arts/reading, one in English and one in Spanish.  The purpose of the program is to pair students one-on-one with a mentor and have them read together; the mentor teaches the student reading processing skills and strategies, as well as pronunciation and vocabulary.  What is unique about Spanish HOSTS is that it is based on a type of language transfer theory.   Reading is a process not dependent merely on decoding the lexicon, but on processing the ideas, structure, transitions, etc.; if a student has under-developed processing skills in Spanish, then he/she will have the same struggle in English--with the added struggle of also grappling with foreign lexicon and syntax.  This could create a crippling cognitive load for the student.  In HOSTS, native Spanish-speaking students are tutored in Spanish so they can learn the processing skills in their first language so those skills will transfer to their reading in English.

Granted, Spanish is not the only first language students will have, which complicates the dilemma.  However, we already have teachers who are negotiating this difficult area.  ESL teachers daily search for ways to communicate with their students who are learning English because it is often at the same time the only common language among them.  

In my humble opinion, enforcing an English-only curriculum is a simplistic way out of a very complex problem, and Boston's growing dropout rate proves that.  It is an injustice to our students to choose this "solution" when they are the ones who suffer for our mistakes.  If bilingual or multilingual education is not an option, we have to--at the very least--acknowledge their needs and try to meet them through individualized efforts.  That is what we claim we believe in as a country.  That is what our public education stands for: equal opportunity.  Denying students' needs for specialized instruction is denying them of the equal opportunity we say we believe in; denying them of that opportunity essentially denies their validity as members of our society.  As teachers, we cannot stand for this.  It will be hard work, but we have to find an effective solution to this problem.