Jennifer wrote this:
I had some truly amazing students last year. Amazing intellect, amazing creativity, amazing personality. Truly, I was blessed as a teacher to have some of these kids. One boy borrowed a grammar workbook to study at home. He came back to me a few weeks later to report that “I’m not quite sure I understand the subjunctive.” This was in the 8th grade. As far as our stories went… out of this world.
I have moved on to another school, and so have they. And, I am seeing what they are saying about Spanish. Oddly, they post about Spanish frequently on Facebook. Sometimes, they quote random lyrics or story lines from our classes last year. More often I see complaints about how boring and endless the verb conjugations are, powerpoint vocabulary lists that never end, worksheet after worksheet on topics they already understand, and homework.
These brilliant kids who could write novelettes in Spanish with minimal errors last year, who voraciously read through three Blaine Ray novels and Mira’s Piratas, are now defeated by the monstrous verb conjugation task at hand. They report that they are only now beginning to understand the preterit (although they were successfully using the preterit and imperfect in class last year) and they are feeling dumb that it is taking them so long. Two of them discussed their recent mid-term exams and how they spent so much effort trying to remember the rules for i->y and “basement verbs” that they were unable to answer a simple question “How do you say ‘they are singers?'”
And, oddly given all the complaints I got last year about how “boring” the Ana books were… they are begging to read “Real Books” like Pobre Ana again.
At first, reading through this recent discussion of theirs I too felt crushed. I didn’t prepare them properly for high school. I should have taken the time to explain the grammar… Then I felt angry. Who are these teachers who crush these absolutely brilliant kids? Why must we take these confident children who can speak and communicate in Spanish and force them to pay attention to such minutiae as whether or not they spelled a word correctly with an i or a y and thus convince them that they have not learned what they thought they had, and that they are not good at it. And then I felt pride too. Here they are, a year later (some more than a year later) posting to each other from multiple high schools, IN SPANISH, talking about Spanish, remembering our stories, reading Ana…