Tag: spanish

Just shoot me, ctd.

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I did something today that I’ve never done in twenty years of teaching– I would estimate, without a shred of exaggeration, that 2/3 of the teaching I did during my fourth hour was in Spanish. It was time to sit down with my newcomers and see where they were at, and the only way to do that was to communicate with them in their own language. To wit, I generated this for them:

And then I banished about half of the class from the room, sending them with my co-teacher to her classroom, mostly to cut down on the number of other kids who might want to talk to me and also to prevent a certain student from getting Valentine’s Day-related harassment, and sat down with the kids and went through a bunch of problems with them. I’m hoping that document is translated well from what I typed; based on my meager Spanish it looked okay, and the kids didn’t have questions. The boy read through it, smiled at me, and proceeded to get nearly a perfect score on his assignment with only a small number of questions, all of which, I’m proud to say, I understood; the girls are a little bit behind for 8th grade but not enough that I’m terribly concerned about it. I have English-speaking kids who, based on this one assignment, have bigger problems than they do. One of them does seem to rely kind of heavily on the other, who did most of the talking and also appeared to do the lion’s share of the work, but we’ll see how that shakes out in a couple of weeks.

You may notice, even if you don’t read Spanish, that the actual Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t appear anywhere in that document. That’s entirely intentional; I generally deemphasize the formula itself in favor of the process of figuring out a missing leg or a missing hypotenuse. They know the formula, but I treat this as mostly calculator work, and I drill the phrases “square-square-add-square root” and “square-square-subtract-square root” into their heads until they’re repeating them in their sleep. Since I didn’t have any real idea where these kids might have been in terms of their math skills I decided I’d leave it out entirely for now.

We are taking it easy tomorrow, across the board. I kinda feel like I’ve worked the kids (all of them, not just the new ones) like dogs this week, and between talking a lot more than usual and the added stress of teaching in a foreign language today, I’m ready for a day where I can wave them vaguely in the direction of a Quizizz or something else that has a chance of being fun rather than being at the board or hunched over someone’s shoulders all day. They’re picking this up pretty well so far so I think if I have a calm Thursday before a four-day weekend God will forgive me.

In which my throat is sore and my brain is melted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I saw a post earlier about how Taylor Swift’s boyfriend won a trophy at the Usher concert, and I gotta admit: I LOLed. Quite a bit.

Today at work I talked for roughly seven straight hours, and in accordance with prophecy I am tired as hell. Tomorrow’s highlights will include three new students, all in the same class, all directly from Mexico, and two of them are twins. I already can’t remember anybody’s Goddamn name; it is, in fact, the clearest evidence that having Covid two or three times really has taken a toll on my mental faculties. I do not know for sure if they are twins, but even as fraternals they’re gonna look close enough, and when you combine that with the fact that they don’t speak any English … I’m in trouble. The third kid is a boy and (I assume) unrelated to the other two, and I’ve already started Duolingoing in Spanish in addition to the Arabic, so you can add that to the Streaks post from the other day. I have got to improve my Spanish. It’s barely functional, which isn’t nothing, but I need a lot better than “barely functional.” 

The other problem is that with the addition of these three I now have five Level One Spanish kids in there; Level One meaning they speak little to no English. We are reaching a point, and I’m at that point in at least one other class, where there are enough Spanish speakers in the room that they start interacting solely with each other and stop interacting with me, which isn’t good for any of us. Fully half of my third hour is fluent in Spanish, although most of them speak perfectly serviceable English. That’s not a problem in and of itself except for the part where the kids who only speak Spanish don’t have any reason to stretch their English, and they’ll ask the other kids for help on stuff and they don’t always get good explanations. Plus my “quit talking and do your work” filter isn’t as good in Spanish as it is in English, for obvious reasons, and so it’s a lot harder to monitor wildly off-topic conversations. 

Anyway, point is, I gotta come up with a first day project of some sort for these kids; I don’t have any idea what their educational background is like and they probably won’t have devices yet to do their assignments, so I gotta write a quick introductory letter for them. Then maybe I’ll go hang out with my son for ten minutes, before we both go to bed.

Because I love you

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music2 Comments

My son encountered this horror at school, and he exposed me to it, and now it’s yours. This is not all of it, as the full video is paywalled on this guy’s site and I suspect this formatted-for-Tiktok version is probably going to get yanked off of YouTube eventually. But you need this song and this nightmare in your lives.

(For those of you who know no Spanish: “How much does that shirt cost?” “This shirt costs five dollars” and “It’s a bargain. What a bargain!”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjDWz7ww2AM

On actual helpful ed tech

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I am tired– okay, that’s always true, but it’s basically bedtime and I just wanted to take a moment for this– and so this will be a brief piece, but: my lesson for my 8th graders today involved something that I don’t do a lot in my classes: note-taking. I defined and provided a bunch of examples of rational numbers and irrational numbers, mostly me talking and writing on the board and the kids being surprisingly dutiful about writing it all down.

I have a student in one of my classes who speaks basically no English at all. She is– there is some debate about this, and every time I remember to just cut to the chase and ask her about it, she’s not in the room– either from Mexico or Guatemala, or possibly Guatemala via Mexico, I’m not sure, and she only speaks Spanish.

She uses Google Translate to get by in my classroom. I’ve got her paired with another kid who speaks a moderate amount of Spanish and they have their Chromebooks out at all times and the one kid will translate anything important I say into Spanish for her. Unfortunately, this wasn’t working very well today, since I was writing quite a bit and the other girl had to take her own notes as we were going.

She came up to me and told me (in English, which I was impressed by) that she didn’t understand what I’d said after the lecture, and the amazing thing is that between my own limited-but-not-nonexistent Spanish abilities and the translation software I was able to translate all of the notes for her in maybe an extra five or six minutes. At which point she happily– and, I noted, accurately– did her assignment.

I am very old-school in my teaching despite having spent last year literally working as an ed tech advocate. It’s nice when something works like it’s supposed to and actually makes my job easier.