The End of the Year

This year has certainly had its ups and downs. The good thing is that a lot of things clicked for me this year. As a new teacher, there are so many experts around you throwing out all these buzz words, and you're just trying to stay afloat to understand it all.

At the end of the Proficiency Academy last summer, one of the speakers said to me "you know what the second year means, don't you? It means you throw out everything you did last year and start over." I thought he was a netball for saying that. It turns out he was right. I only used maybe one or two things that I developed last year. It wasn't because those things were bad, but rather because I had ways of making them better.  

This year, as you can tell if you have kept up with my blog, I have tried to dive head first into teaching for proficiency. I am so proud of all that I have learned and done this year, but it is amazing that I am still sitting here thinking of how I want to improve next year.  Despite all the research that I have done this year, I certainly had some failures, and I can't wait to fix those failures and fail some more. That is how we learn, right? 

One thing that has been stressed to me is that, if it is not open ended and not spontaneous, then we really cannot assess someone's language proficiency. On my course evaluations, that was one of the biggest complaints I received from my students. "Stop giving surprise tests." I think that I need to explain my reasoning behind this better next year. I want them to understand that, if it's not spontaneous, then it doesn't really show me or them what they can do in the language; or rather, it doesn't show them what is in their head and can come out naturally.

I did an open-ended final with all six of my Spanish classes, and boy did that stress me out. However, I would not change it for the world because it is so beautiful to see what my students could do at the end of the year. My only complaint is that, because I was assessing all six classes at a time, the feedback I gave the students was not as in-depth as I would have liked. 

Each assessment had a prompt that involved a lot of what each grade had learned that year. In other words, they were cumulative assessments. It was really good for me to see where the students were the strongest and where they were the weakest, but I take pride in the fact that each student was able to communicate in the language. I was so proud to see my students focusing more on meaning and less on grammar. This type of assessment is so much more meaningful than a non-communicative grammar quiz. 

I have learned that teaching for proficiency takes a lot of time and creativity, but it is not as scary as I had imagined. I was so worried about "doing it wrong" at the beginning of this year and last year that I held back a bit. Once I committed, I learned more and more, and I have really grown as an educator. All that they have taught us at the proficiency academy is true; the students really do learn a lot faster and can communicate a lot when they are taught using a communicative approach. This all has made me love my job even more, and I am so unbelievably proud of my students. I cannot wait to see what next year brings. 

Con cariño,

Timothy

Verbs Verbs Verbs

Hola a todos:

In my last post, I mentioned the issue of separating language such as AR verbs from IR and ER verbs. I ended up not doing that with my sixth graders this year to see how it went. If they wanted to use an "ir verb" when stating something they do, then I gave them the tools to do that. It feels nice to not restrict them by saying "oh, you'll learn how to conjugate ir and er verbs in 7th grade."

It has been really fun watching them progress in their language over this school year. We played "Two Truths and a Lie" last week, and it was so cool to see how well they were using their Spanish to guess each other's lies. They have really impressed me, and I am not so sure that my lessons would have been as communicative if I had only taught them how to use AR verbs. Also, I have noticed fewer "errors" in their grammar when they are communicating. Over the years, I have noticed that language learners always want to make everything into an AR verb. Perhaps the reason for that is because we often teach it all separately. They learn AR verbs first and so they think that that is the way all verbs work. At first, I was worried about not teaching that way this year, but then I thought about it and realized that Spanish-speaking parents do not raise their kids only using AR verbs until their child has mastered those and then moved on to ER verbs. So far, it seems to have been successful.

One thing that is driving me crazy is stem-change verbs. For those of you who do not know, these are verbs that change a letter to another letter(s). For example, the "e" in "pensar" becomes "ie," so it looks like this: "pienso" instead of "penso." Honestly, you don't really need to understand what I just said to understand why I am struggling teaching this. All of the stem-change verbs have one thing in common: the grammatical structure. It is SO HARD to teach these in a meaningful way because it is so clear to the students that they are learning them to learn that the E changes to IE. They don't view it as learning to communicate, which, once again, is the sole purpose for speaking a language. When we focus on meaning and communication, the language gets into their heads. When we don't, the language stays as explicit knowledge in their heads for a bit, but they do not use it naturally. I firmly believe that. If I ask my current eighth graders to use the stem changers that my 7th graders are using right now, I have a feeling most of them will not be able to do it, and the same goes for the stem changers that they learned this year. It has never really been meaningful to them, so it mostly ends up being memorization.

My sixth graders, however, have inspired me this week, and I think that I have come up with a solution thanks to them. Two of the verbs that my sixth graders know are stem changers. Now that they have begun to state what they and others do, they have tried to use those stem changers. In the past, I might have said, "oh that verb is confusing; try to write something else." This year, I simply told them quickly how to do it. Now, they know that "I play" is "juego" and I sleep is "duermo," and a lot of them have been using it correctly ever since. I think the huge difference here is that, with my sixth graders, we have always been focusing on meaning. They learned that it was "juego" instead of "jugo" because they wanted to use it for a purpose. I have tried to make a purpose for it with my seventh graders, but it has been a lot harder since we are trying to ONLY use stem-change verbs that have nothing to do with one another. So, this summer, I am going to look at the curriculum and try to find ways of incorporating these stem-changers in a meaningful way throughout the year instead of all at once. This way, they will still be learning the grammatical structure that our curriculum demands, but they will be doing it in a more meaningful way.

Thanks for reading,
Timothy