It’s Thanksgiving! Happy Thanksgiving. :o) Hope you’re enjoying your days off of school or whatever you’re up to this holiday. As I think about what’s been going right in my class these days, what to be thankful for there, I thought I’d let you know that in my difficult period, I finally had to give […]
My 38 Spanish 1 darlings just turned in a stack of projects–they had to describe and illustrate five family members, at least one of them a plural set, at least one outside their immediate family. They had to tell me 1) what their name was, 2) ¿cómo es?, and 3) ¿cómo está? We worked on […]
I’ve been grading these Spanish 1 tests lately. This is the test (for some reason the clip art didn’t publish well on Google docs). They did extraordinarily well on it. The average was somewhere around 32-33 out of 38 points possible. And keep in mind, all my tests are given with no warning at all. […]
I’ve had jury duty for two weeks. Because of that and our wind storm (thank you Ike), I’ve taught three days in the last three weeks. And during the two weeks I was gone, I came back every day or every other day, in the afternoons, to find a note from the sub about all […]
Saturday was our school’s arts & crafts fair. It’s a major fundraiser for the various classes, so a lot of my students were there. I walked by one of my freshman, who was talking to some girls from another school. He said, “That’s my Spanish teacher,” and the girl said something about Spanish, to which […]
I’ve written about how I went to grad school and learned about second language acquisition (SLA) theory that revolutionized how I approached teaching. Then I attended an AP workshop where the facilitator used two Latin pop songs to illustrate how authentic Spanish media could be used in AP. I decided it was catchy and could […]