Autumn's the Season (for Reading Instruction)

I think one of the most interesting things I have experienced in my practicum actually (interestingly) did not involve Spanish at all. One day in class not soon after the Parkland shooting, a few 8th graders began a discussion that ended up taking the whole class period--and to my surprise it ended up being really good. The students were actually quite respectful of one another and their opinions, and listened when Mrs. Vieceli reminded them to think about the story from all sides. I was surprised and impressed by the civility with which the students were able to discuss a controversial topic like gun violence--certainly more civil than the majority that were going on at the time. A large reason why this discussion was able to happen, from my perspective, is the facilitation of the teacher. Mrs. Vieceli helped them along with questions and guided them away from trigger words that would cause arguments or unreasonable comments from the participants. I'm not sure I've heard t...

When you look at the title of this blog, I would guess that immediately you recognized a word or two if you've had any instruction in Spanish--maybe the articles, maybe "inglés", but not too much else. Then going back and reading it again (like you probably just did), you could potentially decode the meaning--"bendición" is pretty similar to "benediction" or "blessing", oh wait, I learned "aprender" at some point, "segundo idioma"--that's got to be second language because this is the ESL blog post. So you've got the general idea now, but it wasn't immediate--you needed a moment to sort through it all. And that's assuming that you have some background in Spanish, which may or may not be the case.  For English language learners, this is a daily and near constant experience in school. Depending on the level of their abilities in the various language skills (listening, reading, writing, and speaking), ...

As a voracious reader, I have always had a fairly extensive vocabulary, able to use complex words in a variety of contexts. I remember being complimented throughout high school for my use of technical language in the essays that I wrote. For a while, it surprised me that not everyone was the way that I was, or the ways my high school best friends were. Why would you not want to learn new words that make you sound smarter? Why are there people out there that don't enjoy reading all the time? I still wonder about that at times, but now I have a different perspective, as a future teacher. My questions are more based on how I, as a Spanish teacher, can encourage the use and acquisition of vocabulary in my students--and why they would be unmotivated to do so. Traditional vocabulary instruction in Spanish often involves the use of word-to-word translation, vocabulary lists, and forced memorization. That's how I learned Spanish, from the beginning. And sometimes, it seems that w...

I'm not even a real teacher yet and I still ask the same question, the one that all teachers ask themselves at some point (or various points, if we're being honest) in their career: Why don't my students care? Why aren't they applying themselves? Why aren't they motivated? Especially if the content of a class is one that you have a lot of passion for (e.g., myself, Spanish, linguistics, culture, grammar... I'm a total nerd about them), it can be difficult to understand how students cannot see how interesting or important the content is for them to know. They should just... realize that, right? And yet, while there will always be those few bright and "self-motived" kids that are in it for the grades, motivation seems to be the constant struggle of education. Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas (2014) suggest that part of the issue is due to our misunderstanding of the nature of motivation. Motivation is not easily defined, nor is it easily created but rat...

So we have arrived, then, at a consensus that students need to have access to texts that challenge them to be better readers. However, we also examined the multi-faceted problem that teachers face in getting their students to a) want to read and engage with the text, and b) understand the text (and, even further, develop and apply various reading techniques and skills to these complex texts). This reading delved into multiple strategies to help students learn how to engage with and seek to comprehend what they read. The example used in the text was of a high school social studies class that was doing a unit on immigration laws in the 20th century. They spent quite some time examining various laws, poetry, data, and other relevant texts from this time period, and synthesizing them to ascertain the intent and bias behind these laws. I loved the efforts made by these teachers to ensure that the students dealt with all levels of learning to arrive at their conclusions and points of view...

There's this internal struggle that goes on in my head whenever Common Core is brought up. Many of my relatives are heavily right-leaning individuals that believe that CCSS is (a) a curriculum and (b) ineffective and making our students less intelligent and more confused. I feel like a parrot sometimes, telling them over and over again, "It's not a curriculum, it's a set of standards to make sure our students are all at the same level." "It's not a curriculum, it's a guideline that tells where approximately students should be at a certain grade level." "It's not a curriculum..." I understand that Common Core was designed to help improve education across the board and even the playing field that has been for so long wildly unequal based largely on socioeconomic status and racial considerations. The "greatest nation in the world" should not have such a disparity among its schools, and the creation of this set of standards...