“I’ll be honest, I don’t see much point in him learning Spanish,” Incredulous Parent said to me about halfway through our conversation. We had established that Incredulous Jr. was overall doing well, of course with the usual teenage ups and downs along the way, and Incredulous Sr. seemed to be Read more…
The assignment for my Advanced Expression class (2nd to last before my Master’s is done!) is to plan a lesson in which your students learn or practice/develop their ability to write a description or narrate a story. We’re to tie it to a couple of the new Common Core Essential Read more…
I can’t help it: I love controversy. What’s more, I think it’s essential to have a safe forum to discuss important social issues with young people. The trick is to be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brain falls out* OR so open-minded that you allow one group of students to Read more…
El tradicional teatro de papel japonés es narrado en Perú al estilo andino Fusion is the name of the game. Peruvian artist José Cabana combines the puppet theatre of Japan known as Kamishibai with the imagery of artisan arts of northern Peru. But why stop there? Students in an advanced Read more…
When I started teaching Spanish, most of my classes were in the neighborhood of 25 students apiece. The last 3 years of my career, to have a class of 20 was to be bursting at the seams. Imagine my dismay at having a class of 25, predominantly freshman, the last Read more…
I had to present a 10-minute mini-mini-mini grammar lesson to a small group in my grad class on Thursday. And now, I have to “beef it up” by adding 2 of the following things we’ve been reading about: positive input enhancement–where you use underlines, caps, bold, and (I think) vocal Read more…
You know Cortazar, Borges, Paz, Lorca, and, of course, Garcia Marquez. But do you know Pardo Bazan, Unamuno, Valle Inclan, Matute, Rivas, Gomez de la Serna, Huidobro, and Quiroga? I’m halfway through a course on Hispanic short stories organized by region, and week 1 was Spain (which, if you do Read more…
Advanced Topics in Diversity sounds kind of like what I’d like my Spanish classes to be about, but it is, in fact, the name of my first graduate class of the summer. I was wary of the class’s ability to do anything for me that 8 years in the classroom, Read more…
What if “Language Lab” was a place where students learned any language they wanted? They could go to this Language Lab take online language classes, but could get practical advice–applicable in a variety of languages–from an experienced language instructor. Said language instructor might not even speak all of the languages Read more…