Sunday, March 20, 2016

Spring Rush!

 My goal to write once a week has fallen desperately by the wayside.  Progress reports, parent-teacher conferences, 7th grade 3-day snowshoe/yurt camping trip, and winter sports days...all claiming a lot of my personal bandwidth.  Sorry.

So I will instead share some gems that have been shared with me over the past month:

"Señora, I just wanted to tell you thank you.  I scored 5th out of all the incoming freshmen for Spanish.  I know it is because you are such a great teacher."  -8th grader

"Señora, I wanted to say thank you.  Our son was placed in honors Spanish and we are so thankful for everything you have done for him." -Parent of 8th grader

"A group of us were singing your praises; all our kids got into honors Spanish."  -Parent of 8th grader.

"I didn't even realize we were speaking Spanish!" -7th grader after a particularly great PQA day, when I asked them to estimate how many minutes we spent speaking Spanish.  (The estimate was 52 minutes.)

I think that I should note that these happy 8th graders (and families) were never taught to a test, and have had minimal exposure to grammar over the past 2 years, primarily through quick notes and readings from Martina Bex's grammar notes.  So, TPRS does work.  Duh.

What else?  Oh, I wrote up a 6 page document to educate and advocate for TPRS/CI  as the pedagogical approach for teaching Spanish at my school.  It included a comparison table, an examination of why it is a great fit for our school,  and a breakdown of costs for training and materials.  It was very well received.

I planned a 5 week trip to Costa Rica to continue to grow as a language learner for the summer.  I will be traveling with my 70 year old father who will also be taking classes.  My mom and my husband will be joining us at different points during our time there.  I'm sad not to get to go back to Guatemala this summer, and also to not get to go to India (for my 40th birthday, as I've been planning for a decade), but this is going to be amazing.

Lastly, in my personal life, I was elected the chair of the city's Bicycle Advisory Committee.  It's a very exciting time for me!

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