stalling

I should be doing so many other things right now, but here I am blogging!

It's incredible to me how much we have all (I certainly have) learned--I remember feeling like it would be impossible that I'd ever feel ready to step into a classroom after only a year of training, and it's amazing to say that, yes, I *do* feel ready! (Or, at least, I'm confident that I will!)

Which is not to say that I don't realize that there is still a long (endless!--I hope) road of learning ahead. Already, I think back on the unit plan that I did last semester for my methods class--a 125 page document that I thought so clearly articulated my values as an educator. A mere two months later, and I think about how much more I could have done to address community-building in my classroom, something that I'm growing increasingly passionate about.

I've been trying to do ice-breakers with my students every couple of days, even just little things--like asking a couple different students every day to do Two Truths and a Lie. S. talked to us about how very underrated she thinks the importance of caring and relationship building is in teaching. As M. always says, we don't teach Spanish (or whatever), we teach kids.

And I am just crazy about my students. I think back to a time when I was considering changing my placement and I appreciate so very much how much my students and I have done to build relationships together, because it would be heartbreaking now to be anywhere else.

The importance of this relationship building has really been confirmed for me these past few incredible days. One: there was a student who I just thought was lovely from day one, a funny, earnest girl who was asking my mentor teacher about how she might get into studying linguistics. I tried chatting with her every day but she was strangely kind of dismissive of me. But now, she talks to me every day: we talk about the music she likes (she listens to all kinds of Brazilian and French music, and asks me to translate things for her!), and she asked me to help her translate a Shakira song that she wants to sing for some upcoming auditions at the school. Yesterday after class she asked me if she could sing to me, and she sang her song and the voice that came out was surprisingly sturdy and beautiful. I teared up as she stood in front of me, shyly looking away and clutching her close to her. I praised her and told her how honored I was that she would share that song with me, and I meant it.

I was talking with another student yesterday, M, a Mexican American girl with whom I connected right away, back in September (her desk was by my desk in the back, where I spent a lot of time observing, initially). She was telling me about her trip over Christmas break (a trip that went a month longer than planned because, as she and her mother explained, Mexican officials wouldn't let her younger sister return alone to the U.S. with only M. as her guardian unless they paid a lot of money). Anyway, she started telling me about how her dad had always beat her mom (they were divorced) and now he beats his new wife, and how he has a temper and M. would get scared alone in the house with her sister, dad and his new wife while her dad was beating the new wife. I asked her, "M, are you safe alone with your dad?" she assured me that he's never laid a finger on her, her brother or sister but that he has always been violent with women. I didn't know what to do, she said she didn't understand how a woman could be with a man who treated her like that, and I said to her that she should know there are people one can talk to or places to go for help if one ever was in a situation like that. I didn't quite know what to say. But this moment really underscored for me S's point that, as teachers, we are going to her all sorts of things from our students--especially if we start asking questions and listening. It really hit home for me the fact that teaching our content area is one part of what we do--but that there is this whole other important part that can't be ignored.

I have another student, a shy, very girly African American girl who is quite disengaged in class. Recently I've been trying to get my students to do more free writing--they have so little experience being creative with the language and producing original work, and I want them to see how Spanish can apply to their lives. She wrote something on her paper about loving her girlfriend. I thought that she might have written the wrong ending (the words for boyfriend and girlfriend, after all, are only different by one vowel), because I just wouldn't have thought she was gay (which is just stereotyping on my part, and I should know better!). Since she had made some grammatical errors, I approached her about it. I said, "D, you wrote something on your paper that you turned into me, but I wanted to help you a little with your grammar! So tell me first what you were trying to say. She said, "I love my girlfriend and she loves me, too!" So I helped her fix her errors (she'd written "I love YOU my girlfriend"and hadn't finished the rest). She was grinning at me as we wrote the new sentence out, and since then, she has been really open with me, and more engaged in class!

Perhaps the best thing to happen this week (which is saying a lot, because this week was amazing) was yesterday. D.J. is a boy who rarely turned in any work last semester. He's not loud, per se, but he is totally unengaged in class and just talks to his friends. He resisted so many of my efforts to push him or connect with him. He was failing and was on the list of students who receive those modified tests. Last semester I started really trying to get him to engage in class. I called on him, I'd bug him about his homework when he didn't turn it in. When he doesn't turn in a class assignment, I would hound him about it. I didn't want him to think that it was okay with me if he didn't do his work. I wanted him to know that I believed he was capable (and he totally is! I have worked one-on-one with him on a number of occasions and have been dazzled by his intelligence, especially considering how little he works in or out of class on Spanish). Now that he's officially in my class, I've really begun to do this more with him. I am also trying to get to know him. I know that he is good with computers, so we talk about that. I try to joke around with, or ask him about his family.

So Friday, I had to give the students the literacy test which I knew would be a drag for them, so I brought them in cookies. I stood at the door greeting them as they walked in, joking around with them, and telling them to grab a plate of cookies. At one point I had my back to the students entering at the door as I was talking to a student about something. All of a sudden, I feel someone reach behind me and wrap his arms around me. It's DJ, giving me a friendly hug! I turned around and said, "Hey you, bienvenido!" and he said, "Hey, teach." and went and got his stuff and sat down. It was a simple little moment, but it almost made me cry.

This week I had students interview each other about their families and I collected a small self-assessment at the end. As I walked around the room, I heard students talking to each other, if haltingly, in Spanish! Later, I saw that they had learned a lot of new things about each other. I can't tell you how heartening it was for me to see so many of my kids interested and engaged in this activity. When we give them a fill-in-the-blank worksheet, I get half the kids using the time just to talk or goof around and later they either turn in nothing, or they turn in a half-completed paper. But this task convinced me of the power of making learning meaningful for the students, because they all could tell me things about their friends when I asked--even the next day. "D.A., ¿cuántos hermanos tiene tu amigo DJ?" And he could tell me! ¿Quién tiene los ojos que cambian depende de su humor? They could tell me! ¿Quién tiene la mama que está embarazada? And then we had a talk about that. This activity also served to community build, because I asked kids to tell me about something they learned about their friend that they didn't know before, and then we shared those things with the class.

Monday begins a new week, and I am looking forward to it. Tomorrow I'm going to be doing a project with the kids using cell phones--I'm having them take photographs of them acting out certain verbs, which we are going to use in a review for their upcoming quiz. I told them on Friday to bring their cellphones (like I needed to remind them!) and they all started cheering! So they are excited about it; I just hope that the activity proves worthwhile in terms of the learning objectives that I'm trying to meet.