I’ve been a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) since I started teaching, and it has been a good organization to be a part of – they helped get me a scholarship through the Spanish Embassy to do a summer course at Salamanca in 2009, and they publish Hispania, a worthy publication on the methodology, linguistics, and literature we teach. This year’s annual conference was in DC, and I presented a session on flamenco in the classroom, which was the main reason I spent so much money to go, just three weeks after going all the way to the West Coast. I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.
To be honest, I was painfully nervous and my voice always shakes and chokes when I’m nervous – it’s not hard for the audience to tell I’m trying to hold it together. So I always figure it’s best to admit it, make light of it and move on. The presentation went well, with over 30 in attendance, and it made me realize how hungry teachers are for accurate cultural information – we can’t even trust our own textbooks some of the time, and if we go looking on the Internet we don’t know necessarily what’s good or bad information. Most of the teachers stayed past my 30 minute session allotment since it came at the end of the day, and I was able to teach them some palmas and answer all their questions.
I didn’t get to the end of my powerpoint, which is a disappointment, since of course I had such crucial information on every single slide! By the way, if you teach or if you are a flamencologist of any kind, contact me and I’ll be more than happy to email you my presentation and handouts. Overall, I am really glad for the experience and I will admit with no amount of modesty that the applause was much stronger at the end of my session than for most others I went to, except the special speakers they had contracted.
For example, I was particularly inspired by Myriam, (and I have to look up her last name, I'm sorry!) because she spoke so adamantly about early elementary foreign language learning and about bilingual education. Her statistics and other information made it almost seem hopeless to start after that point, but I know that she was just trying to emphasize her own hope for what language education can be. Part of the difficulty of having students achieve the same success when they start at grade 9 or 10, I think, is the quality of language teachers in many high schools, frankly. (I myself started learning Spanish at age 15, but I am lucky and a natural, and despite having some poor high school teachers, I was hooked anyway.)
I heard many teachers speak and converse over the course of the conference - I was there for three days - and I’ve seen many candidates come through my school to be my potential colleague and then replacement, and while some are bilingual and flawless as L2 learners themselves, some are really shoddy, and Myriam spoke a bit on that. College programs do not have rigorous enough expectations of their candidates in teaching programs (which I have heard about education departments in general, that they actually tend to attract some of the weakest students).
It all may be a vicious cycle of having mediocre teachers that don’t inspire students to be great, who therefore go through college without great ambition in the language, and come out thinking they have enough experience and passion to teach when in fact they are sorely underestimating the need. The actual tested level for many college grads ready to enter the teacher force is not dissimilar to that of a high school graduate who has in fact gone through a rigorous program with many contact hours, according to Myriam’s presentation. A student needs a minimum of 240 contact hours to approach an intermediate level of using sentences and stringing together ideas – beyond parroting. Think of the average language class time in your school or your child’s school – how long will it take them to reach 240 hours?
She showed us clips (too many of them, but they were cute) of kids in various immersion programs and the kind of language they can produce, and it was indeed impressive. She recommended that I go to the Center forApplied Linguistics and look up their lists of immersion programs around the country to find what’s available in my area. I did a quick search and came upon the John Stanford International School in Wallingford, for example. It offers immersion education in Spanish and Japanese. Awesome! I will be sending Hudson there, in oh, five years. It's exciting to see, and I'll have to do some more poking around the CAL website - they have an extensive resources section.
Myriam's presentation style was dynamic, and she was clearly impassioned about her topic. I wish more of the other teachers had been like that, and I wish more of them had addressed the audience more as colleagues than as dimwitted students. There were a lot of attempts at getting us to participate that fell flat, there was a lot of repetition of key points without analysis, and there was a lot of shallow methodology. As teachers, I would expect the whole conference to be a boundless energy ball, hurtling our best material at one another, sharing our passions and discoveries. Where is that? That’s what we have to work on, but I did learn some important things in DC.
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