A Tallahassee teacher dealing with a middle school experience

A new school year has begun here in Tallahassee, Florida. I found a teaching position at a middle school in the area. I teach Spanish to six, seventh and eight graders. Many of my students come from less than appropriate living environments, with broken households, guardians, instead of parents, issues of poverty, gangs, street living, and an unsupportive learning environment at home. Many of my students have not been taught courtesy, respect for others, how to study, and how to behave properly. I have my hands full, that is for sure. So do all the other dedicated, good, teachers that I am surrounded with. I always admire teachers. They do earn their salary, as they spend so much of their time, at home, and on weekends working for their students.

My job is to teach Spanish. I have done this well on many occasion, to both children and adults, as a private Spanish teacher, and in schools. I have six years of experience teaching Spanish at high schools, and several years of experience teaching English at language institutes in Mexico and Paraguay. I have been providing private Spanish lessons in Tallahassee, Florida, to all age groups since 1994. You can say that is my secret under the table job. I have turned non-Spanish speakers into fluent Spanish speakers, and have a sense of pride and joy in knowing that.

Now, my task is much harder, since I am in a classroom with children who probably would rather be out on the streets like their buddies, or with their buddies. I really don’t know. Only a few of my students truly care or appear to care about learning Spanish. I know middle school has its challenges in general as the children are going through the hormonal period of their physical lives, however, at this particular school, the kids are in general troubles, retarded, gangsters, nervous, or carry other mental, physical issues with them. These are not what I or others would call a normal group of children to teach to. I have seen much better behaved young people. I do understand that they come into the classroom with issues from a sorry, inferior home environment. I cannot blame them for the defects of their parents/caregivers. The adults pass their issues on to the children, and the children pay the ultimate price by not taking their education seriously.

Now, does all of this background mean that I do not go into the classroom with high expectations that at least some of the students will learn, and get something out of a foreign language education? No, not at all. I have much hope. There are good students. I praise them, and help to lead them on, although they are surrounded by wolves. What goes on in the limited thought processes of the wolves? Certainly, not the way of righteousness. It is not a story of wolves united with lambs. The lambs are conscientious learners, the wolves just don’t care.

I go into the Spanish classroom speaking Spanish, and giving new vocabulary to the class. The lambs will acquire the vocabulary, and participate, while the wolves play away their illogical behaviors and sink in their own crap. My lesson will continue, and those who can swim will make the A grades, and those who do not get it, because they purposely stay off task, will make the low end grades, and will not even walk ashamed of their sin: not wanting understanding; not getting knowledge; not reaching for wisdom. The book of Proverbs would be a good manual for the wolves to read.

Of course, the good students do not want to study, nor are able to adequately learn in a room with those who don’t want to learn. They don’t understand why we as teacher, cannot remove those disruptive ones from the class, either temporarily or permanently. I have had children ask me that question. I really don’t have an answer, but I can say, that in most societies around the world, there is separation between those who want to learn, and those who want to be rude, disruptive, and don’t care about learning.
We make children get an academic education, but of course, we know that not all children will grow up and use their academic educational experience. Hence, we have all those people working in vocations, the blue collar workers. In other societies, not everyone gets to have an standard education. Some do, some don’t. Some are just not academically inclined. Children are sent into a vocational tract, or an academic tract. American education is quite different from the rest of the world. We want, and expect all our children to be great readers, writer and intellectuals. This is not reality, of course. Just look around at society.

Having lived and taught in other countries, I know that respect, courtesy and honor go much further. Children behave much better in other parts of the world, in general. They have an environment in which honor is super important. If they misbehave, or show disrespect to their teachers, they are acting dishonorably, and that hurts the family reputation, or family name in the community. They have strong supportive families, but oh yes, I have to remember, that in the United States of America, many kids come from broken homes, and do not have family support. There is no sense of obligatioin of honor. Teachers are not given the high standing that they are in most other lands around the world. In the Spanish speaking world, in which I have personal experience, teachers are respected, honored members of the community, and are respectfully treated by the children. No nonsense, classroom disruptions, or disrespect, such as you find in American public schools. Children in many cultures go to school in nice looking uniforms. Here in Tallahassee, they go to school looking like you know what. They play “cool.” For some reason, it is hard to get Americans to accept uniforms for all their children.

The solution as I see it for American education:
1. Require business like uniforms with boys wearing ties.
2. Remove troubled, disruptive kids from class instead of integrating them in the classroom with the good, hardworking students.
3. Have tougher punishments for children who disrupt. Bring back biblical principles into the educattional system.
4. Give teachers more staff support, and less bureacratic paperwork to complete, so that teachers can focus on teaching. Get rid of these ESE forms, and other paperwork that in the big picture serve for nothing except to please certain demographic groups.
5. Keep class sizes small, so each student gets better attention. Students crave my attention, but I can’t help them adequately since I have to help other students too. I feel so bad for them. Each teacher should have another adult helper in the room, especially in a system that requires integration of children in the same room. I am reminded that classroom integration is a recent phenomenon in history. How many hard working students have come forward and said that they do most of their learning outside class on the computer, or through other means? I hear this all the time. They do not learn in such a diverse classroom. I could not when I was a student! I was mostly self-taught.
6. We need government programs, like a public works program that will shuffle the kids that ought not be in a traditional school environment, into a trade route, a vocational tract.

As a Tallahassee Spanish teacher, I will do all I can to get the children interested in another language. I believe and always will believe in the importance of foreign languages started at the elementary school level and continuing ever year to the last year of the formal educational program. Foreign language education serves to strengthen our first language use, makes us appreciate other people, and their way of communicating, and makes us able to communicate with a wider global demographic. I know that I can go to over 30 countries and communicate in Spanish very well with the people. I would like my students to have that confidence some day.

Seeing the earth from different angles

There is more than one way of looking at the earth. There is more than one way to look at a classroom. There is more than one way to deliver a quality foreign language program in a school.

A number of years ago, I flew to Paraguay, and as the plane went lower I was able to observe the earth simbolized as Paraguay. What I noticed was the brilliance of the color red on the earth. The land was red out in the country, and in yards within the capital city of Asuncion. The red earth made a mark in my memory, and I acquired that characteristic of the Paraguayan land from on high.

The plane landed, I took a ride through the city of Asuncion to the residence where I would be staying. I observed not the red earth that I saw from the sky, but instead, a piece of Paraguayan land filled with green everywhere. There were so many trees, bushes, and shades of green. I felt so happy to be in this new land, and to see the beautiful display of colors and nature all around me. No red land from this perspective.

When entering the neighborhood and then the yard of the home I would be residing in, I could not help but notice the abundance of orange, grapefruit and banana trees everywhere. Now, I was not looking at just green trees, but specific kinds of green trees. I had an even different perspective. Still no red earth at this level of vision.

During the first several weeks in Paraguay, I visited the Paraguay River, and some big lakes. I saw some of the rural landscape around Asuncion, but did not see the red earth, that I saw from the sky. I saw rolling hills, covered in green vegetation, a big lake and white houses around it. I saw so many flowers of all kinds of shapes, sizes and colores. I never saw so many flowers so richly endowed in their plant kingdom. I saw women walking down streets with baskets of bread balancing on their heads. Still another perspective of the land.

As we teachers go into a classroom of students, ready to begin the tasks of acquiring knowledge and skills, we are able to experience the class, its talents, strengths, landscapes, from different perspectives. There is not such thing as a class filled with students. Rather, it is a class filled with learning styles, different motivations, strengths, weaknesses, and different skill sets. We are teaching to ideas, and talents, and bringing forth strengths and challenges in those ideas and talents. We are delivering reinforcements in old perspectives, and delivering content in new perspectives. Students are adaptable, but withing a balance of old and new abilities, and strategies. It is an art, and a science to see what works with what student. What perspective to take and how to see it from one angle or another.

In a foreign language classroom, there are so many opportunities to present to students using many different language acquisition strategies, or simple learning techniques. It make a foreign language classroom an adventurous place to be both for teacher, and for student.

Spanish teacher and classroom desk arrangements

The way desks are arranged in a Spanish classroom, or any foreign language classroom has an effect among the students in getting them motivated and interested in learning, or acquiring language. I think that most Spanish teachers, certainly I can speak for my years of teaching, want students to have the best learning atmosphere. We start by arranging the room in a certain way.

In my six years of teaching Spanish (hopefully there will be many more), I was always unhappy with desk arrangements. Can anyone relate to that? I moved desks in this order and that order, trying to find the perfect fit for the room. Sometimes, I even rearranged desk positions and order more than once during a day. This became a nightmare, a ridiculous chore, that I know I had to eliminate from my list of tasks to do. Once I found TPR, I found the perfect arrangement for desks.

TPR is Total Physical Response. I strongly endorse TPR for teaching language, any language, because the results are visible quickly, and it works on the right hemisphere of acquiring language, in which students internalize and not memorize language. I did not start out using TPR strategies until I went to workshops, read books, and saw research and demonstrations online about the TPR ways of acquiring language, the natural way we all acquire our first language. TPR works because it gets the students out of their seats responding to and acting out language. It is not a worksheet, and memorization way of learning language. It is about making language inherent in you, making it be one with you. In essence internalizing words, phrases, syntax, and semantics. The ways the classroom desks are arranged in a TPR classroom, allows the students to interact easily with language commands, and stories in the target language.

I followed the way TPR classrooms are supposed to be set up. I divided the desks into two halves, each half facing the others, allowing a space between the two sections so that students and teacher can be seen by everyone, and so that staging, acting, role play, and language responses can be more easily performed. At the end of the space area between the two sections, and against the wall, maybe the chalk board, or white board, are three chairs. The middle one is for the teacher and on each side sits a student. The teacher can now get up followed by the student on each side of him, and say the language, and act it out with each student acting out language with the teacher. For example, the teacher gets ups and says, “Anda a la caja.” “Walk to the box.” the students on beside him go with teacher to the box, and wait for the next command, or language, to respond to.

At the other end of the space (or stage area) between the two divisions of desks in the room, is a table. In a TPR room, box, basket, and other props become very important. They need to have a fixed place in the room. A storage closet is useful.

After having arranged my classroom in this manner, I had better student performance overall in my Spanish classes, and had better discipline in the room. The desk arrangement is important. Students should be able to be seated in a way so they can be engaged in the subject, and be able to engage each other. In my classes I always allow ample interaction among students, since students like to practice, and demonstrate what they know. The old way of long rows and columns just do not fit in a foreign language classroom.

My goal for the classroom, and for children and adults that I provide private Spanish tutoring to, is to provide opportunities for language acquisition. I am not following the old school ways of language learning, because I want students to retain what they learn. To acquire language is the higher level of learning language. To acquire is to make inherent, and to possess it, says the dictionary.

Get out to your classroom, and rearrange those desks. My students seemed to have liked my arrangement, after so much time trying to find that ideal placement for desks.