Spanish I

Hola caballeros y caballeras. Yesterday marked the sixth and final day of substitute teaching for a Spanish teacher at the local high school. As you may or may not know, I'm planning to return to school to get my masters degree in education so I can be a high school social studies teacher. All along I've thought teaching Spanish could be cool.

Not so fast. Talk about frustrating. These kids were asking me, How do you say "in" or "the" or "to" or "from"? Really?!?! Six weeks into the term and you don't know the most simple, useful words of all (other than, of course, "Sexo, you y me?").

Random tangent: One of the students brought me popcorn every day. I'm not sure what he was getting at, I wasn't giving any grades. Perhaps he didn't know. However, had I been, he was on track because it was delicious kettle corn. Yummmmm. But I digress... back to the teaching.

The final project, which we spent a little more than two days on, was creating dialogue for a news broadcast that we would tape and watch as a class. Some of them were very frustrated, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and I thought many had shut down and given up. Then when the lights went down (they didn't really) and the camera started rolling (that did happen) the kids, for the most part, performed admirably. I was proud. They were proud. Everyone was proud, happy, excited.

I think times like that are why you become a teacher.

Entering the Field

So teaching is fun. Today marked the beginning of a six day substitution for one of the high school Spanish teachers. She's gone on a trip... okay, well, it's conference that happens to be at Disneyland. Needless to say her kids are thrilled.

Today we played a name game (sorry, "activity", holler back ICLP!) and I am sad to report that in both classes of 25 students who have been together for eight weeks the vast majority do not know each other's names. We sought to rectify the deficit and it was a good time had by all, especially the kid who got hit in the family jewels with the ball we were using. C'est la vie. Whoops! Es la vida.

The three major objectives while I'm there:

• I have a Phrase-o-the-Day that is an important word or phrase that they'll use a lot. Today was vamos. ie Vamos a la fiesta? or Vamos chicas! or Vamos a ser chevere.
  
• We are learning -AR verbs and how to conjugate them. Grammar is fun.
• They identified six words or phrases they thought were very important in their lives. You may wonder what high school freshmen (it's Spanish I) would put on this list. For that I have answers: Cool/sweet, I don't care, and the ever popular: Shut up. Let's be honest, it's functional.

On to tomorrow where they'll be practicing conjugations through charts and crossword puzzles! Tell me your favorite Spanish word/phrase and I'll pass it on.