Who's reading?!

Evidently, people read my blog posts?

So if you're reading, please tell me "hi" and is my blog has been helpful or not below!

And for bonus points let me know what you would do in the classroom if you didn't have to worry about other teachers different pedagogical opinions, parents'/students'/others' misperceptions etc.


I'll start:

I find this blog a nice place to reflect on my teaching. It is nice to go back and see what I've said in the past about a unit.

For bonus points:
If I didn't have any constraints and could teach exactly how I would like:

I would do a lot of the things that I am doing, but make sure to emphasize stories, free voluntary reading more and be overall more relaxed in my classroom and less constantly having to "accomplish" so we could acquire the language more freely. ;-)

Ok, your turn! GO!

Responses to Comment - Complexity #2

I already posted a response to a question earlier here about complexity.

But in light of a conversation I have had with a few students I think this illustrates my point in questioning our understanding of complexity by traditional terms.

Example 1:
In my Spanish 1 classes, as recommended by Blaine Ray in his Look I can Talk books, we can teach the kids past and present in Spanish 1.  The more we expose them to both, the less they will rely on just the present tense.  So that's what I do. I tell oral stories in the past tense and do readings/movietalks/etc in the present tense.  When we talk about their lives, we might switch between tenses and I'll occasionally do a pop-up point about "Why did I say: querías (you wanted) instead of quieres (you want)?"

Responses to Comment - Complexity

The following is part one of a response to a comment.

Someone recently asked on a comment:

Hola Jeremy - this is really funny and I've very impressed. I teach Spanish I and I'm in awe at the complexity and level you're introducing to students. I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons (in 90 min classes and shorter periods). Just a suggestion for a future blog post. Gracias!

First and foremost, thank you for your comment!  I don't get too many. And I appreciate them because I post things to reflect but also in case it could be of any encouragement/help to other educators!

I would like to answer in different parts because your comment is loaded with different comments/questions! :-)

I hope my response helps you visualize my classes more! If you have further questions, please let me know. I enjoyed writing for the purpose of answering a comment!

TPRS year 4 - Story - la mafia de las vacas

So I have to share this, it went well with a few classes who appreciate my goofiness.  I wrote this story lastnight. Maybe I haven't slept as much this week.  I didn't realize there were meme's with the cow mafia until looking for one after the fact for this post!

(See possible pics for classes:
The Cow Mafia   &    Al Cowpone)

So I can use these pics next time!

Here's what I did in Spanish 1 this week.  I like the idea of starting out with past at the first few places and then transitioning into present in the last place.  Haven't quite gotten to it yet, but that's why my story was written that way.

TPRS year 4 - Spanish 2 story + Indirect Objects

So if you're teaching in a Department, you might find that you need to throw in those Indirect Object pronouns as soon as possible to get your kids hearing them as much as possible in context so by the time your department "covers" them, your kids are more comfortable with them and can use them without realizing them.

The following is a story idea I had after seeing a video.  I think it would work well in Spanish 1 or Spanish 2.

TPRS Year 3 - Sound effects

Ok, I always loved the show Whose Line is it Anyway.  It's improv.  I remember really liking it even when I was a kid and it was the British version.

So I've recently stumbled upon some episodes of the American version on Youtube and I have to say it's so similar to what we do at times.  We are living in the moment with our students and creating together with them.  We probably are like Whose Line is it Anyway? but on steroids.  We have to take more audience suggestions way more often and actually interact with the audience during the entire show (class).

But I was watching this episode and the game was where two audience members have to do sound effects for different characters.  It occurred to me that it would be kind of fun to have someone do the sound effects for the day for our story about the telephone (see story skeleton).

So I asked the the person to write the quiz, for the person to keep track of my structures, and for a person to do the sound effects!  The sound effects was the new part.

In every class, someone volunteered and I told them that they would be in charge of all of the sound in class that day, including speech and anything else we needed.  They were ultimately in charge of how something sounded, although we described it enough in Spanish so they understood what was going on.

Since the story was about a telephone ringing and various people/animals calling this random telephone and someone not understanding, it worked out perfectly because the sound engineer had complete control over accents and they would sync their mouth up with the actors.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time.  So if you find yourself needing something to liven up your TPRS classroom, try out getting a sound engineer for the class that day. :-)

TPRS Year 3 - Story - telephone

So I was trying to find something to help go over some structures involving, "couldn't" or "can't" in Spanish and I came across this story script from Jim Tripp that I bought from Ben Slavic's site.  I really think there are some gems in this book.

The basic idea in Jim's version was that a person called someone and that person hung up the phone.  I adapted the story from Jim Tripp's book.  But the structures I used were the following:

• Contestó el teléfono    s/he answered the phone
• No podía entender / hablar              
      s/he couldn’t understand / speak
• colgó el teléfono     s/he hung up the phone 

* I was also trying to get more repetitions of llamó (s/he called) since that was in our weekend chat yesterday.

I tried it out in both Spanish 1 & 2.  Of course in Spanish two I could focus on some different things than with Spanish 1.  And of course the language was more complex at times and we could review more words.  But the general idea was the same.

I recently had acquired a telephone as well and I thought it would be the perfect prop.

So I asked if there was a boy or a girl.  We went over all of that.  I then asked where he/she was.  Then what was he/she doing (had to translate that... since we hadn't used it too much).  Then we had each person doing something in the place and suddenly, they heard a phone.  The phone rang, they looked for it, found it, and answered it.  Someone called them.  They couldn't understand.  They hung up.  On a different day, someone else called, they couldn't understand because they couldn't speak whatever language was being spoken and they hung up.  Most classes got to two days for sure.  A few classes got to three days.

In one of my classes, a student told me, "Thanks for making class so fun today."  To which I replied, "No.  Thanks to your class.  You guys are the ones who made it interesting."

All in all a blast of a day!  My students and I sure needed it.

*Note to self* Props can really help a story.