{"id":930,"date":"2011-03-13T09:33:40","date_gmt":"2011-03-13T13:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dacha.com\/?p=930"},"modified":"2011-03-13T09:33:40","modified_gmt":"2011-03-13T13:33:40","slug":"higher-level-thinking-in-high-school-spanish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacha.com\/?p=930","title":{"rendered":"Higher level thinking in high school Spanish"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I got a great long note from my former student Maija Langeland Scarpaci, who taught high school Spanish for several years. Let me just move aside and let her do the talking:<\/p>\n

During my last teaching job, I taught the highest and lowest levels of Spanish offered at my high school – AP Spanish Literature and Basic Spanish, which had lots of kids with IEPs – and loved teaching both classes equally. But because I’m someone who likes to talk about concepts and ideas, I found the curriculum as it was designed for the lower level to be unsatisfying. So I changed it.<\/p>\n

After doing some research, we found that many kids in Basic Spanish weren’t going beyond a year or two of Spanish study, and as there was no language requirement for students in the school’s special education program, the kids weren’t encouraged to continue. But I wondered if traditional basic language classes weren’t particularly advantageous to these kids. Maybe the material was (1) boring for them, (2) frustrating for them, and (3) not relevant to their lives. My department head and I sat down and asked, How important is it that these kids are able to perfectly conjugate “-ar” verbs in Spanish? Not very, we decided. Would we rather that they know more about issues that are relevant to the Spanish-speaking world and therefore to them, since there are so many Spanish speakers in the US? Yes, we decided.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We redesigned the curriculum so that it would address more issues and less grammar, and ultimately I had them reading lots of the same stuff that my AP kids were reading, or at least by the same authors, but in English. These kids were exposed to Dar\u00edo, Cervantes, and Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez – not easy stuff, even in English. \u00a0We devoured newspapers, reading endlessly about current events; the students were amazed by the number of articles we found about issues that were relevant to Spanish class and<\/em> to the US, even in our part of the country. We watched some great documentaries; a class favorite was one about the coffee trade in South America, as my students discovered parallels between their coffee habits and the coffee farmers and their families thousands of miles away. We also watched a fascinating episode of 30 Days<\/em><\/a>. Its focus was a Texas Minuteman who lived for a month with a family of illegal Mexican immigrants in LA.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Now, instead of talking about the weather and colors, my students were dealing with more advanced (and interesting!) ideas than they would have otherwise, which enabled us to talk at a different level (there’s only so much you can say about the weather in Spanish). In the class as it was originally designed, much of the questioning and material for tests would be from Bloom’s<\/a> most basic level, but we were able to do so much more in the new class:<\/p>\n