From Eric Herman. This serious indictment concerns ESL teachers as well:
From the 5 elementary schools which feed to 1 high school, only 5 graduating 8th graders skipped level 1 HS Spanish. 4 from the same town. 1 from my school (Edg). Placement was decided by a 100-question discrete vocabulary test and 100-question discrete grammar test.
The complaint was voiced by an elementary teacher that last year’s placement exam included trick questions (on many questions, a 1 letter difference got you a wrong answer). The high school said that was purposeful. I guess, students have to be prepared to be “tricked” for 4 more years of high school instruction.
There are 5 ninth graders from my school in Honors Spanish 1. The rest of last year’s Edg 8th graders are either not taking a language, switched to French or Portuguese, or are in a lower level. I don’t have those numbers.
A (grammar) “boot camp” was offered for 1 week this summer to anyone wanting to move up a sublevel. 6 students attended. 4 from Martha’s Vineyard. 2 from an off-island private school. Only 1 from Edg.
The 6 boot camp students all qualified to move up a sub-level after 1 week of instruction. Get this: 1 private school student had been studying French (not Spanish) and was deemed intelligent enough (good at learning grammar) to skip level 1 Spanish at the high school. Although she decided not to skip into level 2, how come the HS cannot see the problem with this? It’s staring them in the face! A girl with 1 week of grammar instruction and no prior Spanish instruction is given permission to skip a level.
All Honors students were given a test on day 2 of the new school year. The teachers said pretty much no one studied. Almost no one did any of the “recommended” summer homework. Surprise, right? And this test counted. This test “tanked” (their words) some of the grades for many of the students. Nothing like starting your freshmen year with an F on a test and an F as your class grade. Makes kids take Spanish seriously – so goes the argument.
Which leads me to my conclusion: I teach a different subject. My class should be renamed so that I don’t get confused to be teaching the same subject as the high school, so no one thinks I’m trying to prepare kids for the high school. I don’t want any association with that. I teach “Spanish for Acquisition,” a.k.a “Spanish to Communicate Messages.” The high school teaches “Spanish for Learning,” a.k.a “Spanish to Communicate Grammatical Forms.” The tasks in the high school class, the homework, the tests. . . they all are designed such that communicating grammar is the name of the game. The progress of my students will go completely unrecognized. Afterall, they are taking a different subject.
And I see it now: none of this will change. Not without personnel changes. There is too strong a belief in what they are doing and too many years doing it that way. And no one’s close to retirement. So, none of this will change.
Eric