Express Yourself: A Letter of Invitation to Language Teachers Everywhere

Dear Esteemed Colleagues:

I can say "Language is not a" in my honors class and the students will respond "word to word translation." This is one of my catch phrases this year, along with "staring is not studying" and "how you feel and where you are, always use the verb estar." I use them so often that I'm thinking of having posters made to hang in my room of what I dub as Cleggisms.

Language is not a word to word translation.

I began saying this two years ago when I collected journals from my students and found the rampant use of translators. It was frustrating and that's putting it mildly. I always start the year talking to the students about what cheating is and how translators are not acceptable. I talk to them about online dictionaries and have embraced wordreference.com as a mainly reliable online dictionary.

However given how trusting my students are of anything online, be it translators or online dictionaries, I started looking into Google Translator and how it works. I put together a twenty minute lesson on translators wherein I wrote a paragraph in English, put it through Google translator and then translated that back to English. We talked about how translators can sometimes give you an idea but they largely work on the idea that languages do translate word to word but languages don't. Languages require context and meaning, not simply a word for a word.

PWC: My Second Family

PART ONE

Two years ago, in early fall, I was invited to attend a CDWP leadership retreat. I never really viewed myself as a leader as I’ve always seen myself as a follower or wallflower but I said yes since I knew a couple people who were also going. Unfortunately, that weekend I was terribly ill and was unable to attend. When the group met again in December, I popped the address into my GPS and finally found out how far Averill Park was from anything I knew. I entered a stranger’s house and broke bread with a dozen people, only three of whom I really knew. We began the meeting with writing, in true CDWP form. The prompt given was “What do you think is our future? What do you want to get out of this?” This then led to a rich discussion as we talked about the function of CDWP in our lives and what we needed.

In reviewing my writing from that evening, I see that I wrote “I would really like to be involved with some writing project group to push myself to write personally/professionally, to refine pieces and get feedback or even co-write something to be sent to a newspaper, journal or the NWP/CDWP sites.” I remember having a discussion with another participant during which he expressed his frustration that teachers are being given knowledge, being handed common core, being told the best ways to do something and that we are ineffective. I wrote down this following conclusion from this discussion: Be producers of knowledge and not just consumers.

The Art of Presenting

Over the last two days, my students have been presenting their ideas from the environment project they've been doing that was described in this blog entry. As I sat watching their presentations, I was struck by how lightly most took the presentation portion of their project. I started to think about why. I wondered if it was because I did not stress the importance of doing a good job or because they didn't think I was serious when I told them they had to memorize their Spanish sentences.

Granted, this was the first time I have done this project with my students so I wasn't really sure what I was looking for or expecting. I admit that my directions were not clear nor specific. I did inform the students that they should each say two sentences in Spanish and as much English as they wanted. I directed them that they should tell what their idea for helping the environment was, where that idea came from and how it will help people.

What Matters

When my mother passed away in April of 2010, it fell up on my sister, my niece and myself to clean out her house. The task of undoing someone's life and deciding if their knickknacks are meaningless to you or not is extremely daunting. She had a house full of belongings she thought treasured. It was so packed with things that our shock and disbelief at her death turned into anger and rage as we discovered thing after thing that she had saved.

The more we cleaned, the more we found and the angrier we became. I believe we ended up getting rid of a lot of things that perhaps, now, I'd want but it is too late for that. As we emptied out my mother's life and pulled apart her existence, we found many things that were expected and many that were not. The numerous school projects and photos were lovely to find. However, the drawer of every pen or pencil we've ever owned was extreme. We found a bag of bags and a suitcase with another suitcase inside with another bag inside of that and smaller bags inside that with yet smaller bags inside them.

Station Day!

Every year, each class gets one or two Station Days a year. I enjoy Station Day a lot because it puts the onus of the learning on the students. For me, Station Day is usually spent running around because they have a dozen questions and one teacher and are constantly seeking approval before writing down an answer. But it's worthwhile time because I get to really answer their questions and see what problems the students still have. Every year on Station Day, I usually go home exhausted and tired but feeling pretty good about my students and my teaching.

Preparation is the key for a successful Station Day. You need to decide on how the students will work, create a filler for students who finish dramatically early, and create the stations. Each station needs directions the students can read independently and figure out as well as whatever necessary to complete the task.

I have created Station Days for the topics that I know cause students a lot of trouble because they need to be in the thick of it and muddle around with the complexity of the language. I suppose you could make stations for vocab practice but I prefer different cards games and activities for that. Station Day, for me, is a day when they can struggle and triumph. Topics that have lent themselves well to me are the preterit vs imperfect or subjunctive when the vocab of the unit drives the grammar points.

The Most Loathed Question of my Classroom

Being that I teach a "foreign" language in an ego-centric country that does not stress the importance of taking part in other cultures but boasts of being "the melting pot"- one would think that the most loathed question I could hear would be "does it have to be in Spanish?" I understand this question because it is steeped in the acculturation of "american" students growing up in the post 9-11 era.

No, the question I most loathe is: Is this going to be graded? Every time I hear it, it grates on my nerves. I've heard it at least once a week since I began teaching and I believe back in the early days of my career I was annoyed by it for very different reasons. There were many times I would bite back a sarcastic "what do you think, dummy? It's school." But other times,  I would answer "obviously" with an annoyed tone and an internal eye roll.

one of the best!

So there are probably many times when I've had this thought, but every time it occurs to me, it's like it's the first time: MY JOB ROCKS. I love my job. Today was probably one of the best days I've had this year, I think.


 It was really an ordinary day by all accounts. No student who normally gets 50s suddenly had an epiphany and now is a genius. No student who usually misbehaves finally purchased a halo. But every so often, a class just goes well or you have an interaction with a student that just makes you proud to be an educator. Today, I had a million of those moments.

Special Paper Lessons

I was preparing for my paper lesson this weekend!

Before I even get here, the first day of school, I show the students THIS VIDEO. We talk about how it'd be nice if we all did nice things for people.

On the second day, I have them see the TED talk the maker of the video did. THAT'S HERE. The students journal about life lines of kindness that they have extended and that have been extended to them.

THEN a couple weeks later, I'm ready for the paper activity.

September 14, 2013

I had originally started keeping my Chrome journey in a doc file but I decided to switch to a blog, don't know why but then I could share it out with people I suppose. I thought perhaps my fellow Chrome compadres might like it. Who knows? Or just for my own crazy amusement.

So Thursday and Friday were the first days that I had the kids pick up their CBs (henceforth meaning Chromebooks) on the way in the door.

This really is making me plan like a first year teacher again because I have to rethink how I do things. Last year, and every year for the past few years, I've had unit packets. I photocopy it in the beginning of the unit and then have all the copying done for three or four weeks. I think it was around year three that I had that brilliant idea and it eased up my life so much. So this year, for the first two units, I naturally photocopied the units but now as I plan, I find that a lot of it is not needed, or needed differently since they can access things digitally.