Zapatistas and the preterite tense

This week I challenged my Spanish class to write a personal travel blog containing specified features and structures.  It was my goal to make the connection between the grammar and vocabulary and the real-life functions of using the language.  The blog was my way of trying to marry them together.  I provided what I thought was a lot of structure on the first day of explaining the project, which will be there unit assessment.  It will work as a sort of online portfolio of their work, and will be assessed through rubricking throughout and at the end.

Though I had thought that I had included plenty of scaffolds for the cognitively demanding work of writing descriptively in the preterite tense in Spanish, several students showed despair, not knowing where to start or how to develop the ideas for what they might describe.  I concluded that I hadn't included enough framing and supports around the language needed to accomplish the task, so I developed some guiding questions that, when answered in their writing, would be sufficient to produce the type of narrative required.  This seemed to help, as certain students indicated that they had "just gone through and answered the questions."  I was happy with this, but wondered at the same time what that structuring might have done to the open-endedness of the assignment.   I learned my lesson for the prompts for each day's writing tasks, and developed more and more banks of questions and graphic organizers to build a safety net around student writing.  The feedback so far has been that this is a helpful scaffold, but their writing samples will tell the true story.

Other students required none of these extra supports, and one student even went so far as to create a fictional travel account during a Zapatista movement in Mexico.  This was not at all what I had been expecting, and I was fascinated and delighted by the out of the box thinking of that particular student.  In some way she had felt free enough to develop an original idea and run with it beyond the scope of the project.  I am glad that the project guidelines were flexible enough to accomodate and allow such creativity.

I am finding that the open-ended assignments and questions need to always be buttressed by the structures and forms that hold them up, though knowing how much to offer and how much to allow students to discover freely requires intuition and an appreciation of the nuance of learning a language by doing.

You don't receive, you build

I write today to reflect on the first week of the semester.  By all the current standards of public education, I was given an incredibly manageable group to facilitate.  Here are the vitals for my class:

• Spanish 3
• 26 students
• First period (8:00-9:30)
• 7 contact hours / week
• 3 native speakers
• 12 girls, 14 boys
• 2 Freshman, 9 Sophomores, 16 Juniors

This week was a fairly unorthodox start to a language class.  Students were asked to draw from their well of past knowledge to generate, putting them in the role of Subject rather than Object of learning.  They freely associated, created lists, explored geographical phenomena, and narrated past events in their beautiful sputtering way.  I gave neither grammar lesson nor vocabulary list, allowing students to muck about in Spanish after so much time away.  The purpose is not to take away the structure, which we know to be a deep need for children, but rather to try to view language in a new way.  It is going to be a groaning process of breaking the habit of passivity in students accustomed to being treated like receptacles for information.  

Students have a composition book that they use to complete class activities, take notes and write me a short letter in Spanish at the end of the week telling me what they learned and any questions or concerns they might have.  The comments were positive, and at times telling.  There were many questions that were indicative of the assumption that the system has built into them: 

knowing grammar = productive/receptive language ability

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water here, and I will indeed be signaling some of the finer points of grammar and syntax for those linguistically inclined, but I maintain that these things are only important if they are connected to their real world functions, and how they are fleshed out in communicative tasks.

Seeing the students as co-creators

Reading through the names, letting them roll off my tongue, there is a language to it, I memorize these words because I need them, is it for communication or love or power or control or is it just rote?  Something teachers have been told to do from time immemorial? I look at the faces, let the consonants and vowels and the way they feel in my mouth establish themselves as I see the young people blush and giggle and embarrass and distract and spew.  These are my co-creators.  Even as I write this I sense the difficulty in my task of ceding power, giving away the illusion of my control and letting them have it to manipulate meaning as they will.  I want them to name the world, know themselves, know their neighbor.  There is something whole and true about naming things as they are, an opening up of possibility in pointing out the window at the rise in the land and saying hill or mountain or butte or plateau or colina or loma or montaña or cerro or mesa.  And knowing that others know the meaning of such things when you say them, there is the power.

Day one was uneventful in the way of first days.  Introductions and syllabi and the normal blah blah blah.  Unfortunate but necessary as administrative tasks tend to be.  Having 90 minute periods does allow me to unfold a bit more each day, though, and I took the opportunity to see what the sophomores and juniors think an ideal Spanish student looks like.  They formed groups quickly and efficiently, which impressed me more than a little, and then sat together working out the kinks of a first morning of work together, trying to visually represent the ideal student, labeling things in a broken third semester Spanish that indicated a wide range of language levels and a whole spectrum of interpersonal and intrapersonal strengths.  It was telling that several groups drew the textbook, subtly indicating in their scritch and scratch on poster paper who their true teacher has been these past few years.

Walking through a sea of adolescent timidity--they were dipping a toe into the water--I had a glimpse of the mountainous task before me.  A generation of children bred for following and filling in blanks and bubbles on tests and sitting waiting to react to the teacher instead of acting purposefully on their own will.  Hoping for a list to memorize and some worksheets to fill out quietly while the teacher nods and smiles and says you get an A.

Today is day two, and a chance to begin the process of handing back the learning to the students, who wait for the crumbs of learning to be brushed from their teachers' tables.  They must create purposefully today, or I will succumb to the current of what is, instead of rowing against it to give students the opportunity to transform their world.