How do you teach a Spanish class? (Con mucho cuidado---y amor.)
How do you teach a Spanish class? (Con mucho cuidado!—y amor.)
I actually have a few questions in this article along with some anecdotal experiences from my life in teaching a college level Spanish class which I do hope you will enjoy. First a little “gem” which I picked up along the way in my college days (as a student)
Para apreciar y conversar sobre la literature y la política, no hay como el inglés. (English is the best) Para la música—el italiano.
Para las ciencias y la técnica: el alemán, francés, or quizá el japonés.
Para los asuntos del amor, la moda, perfume, “haute cuisine” No hay como el francés. Pero Para hablar con Dios—Español---¡Orale!
Ahora, lo del profesor/a.
Para tener éxito en una clase de español, es imprescindible (muy necesario) tener unas palabras a su disposicón para cuando encuentres situaciones que pueden serte un poco difíiciles.
At this point I will switch to English to make things easier on the beginners as well as on myself. I hate typing in all those codes to get the accent marks and the tildes.
There are certain words and expressions that I use which I call “danielismos” o palabras y expresiones “danielescas” You think that these words are not a part of the Spanish language?? Well, they are now! (¡Que te guste o no!)
Anectoda #1.
Hace tres or cuatro noches—I forgot -- English, sorry—Three or four nights ago we were studying and practicing going from present tense to preterite. There was an exercise in the workbook whereby the student was supposed to answer a question ,given in the present, with an answer in the preterite. And the student was supposed to say that whatever action it was was already accomplished.
Example: Question.¿Te vas a comprar una computadora”
Answer. Ya me compré una computadora.
We did a few more of these,when I began to notice that some of the questions lacked capital letters on the initial word.
Les pregunté ¡Oye! ¿Qué cosa hace falta en la frase? Nada—Big Silence! I asked again, ¿OK, Qué cosa le debemos poner en la primera palabra de una frase? Again—great silence Finally one boy, who is about as jugetón as I am shouted out “Capitolio” I didn’t correct him. I said “Capitolio it is then! And every time we came across this problem and I asked them what to do about it, they shouted “Capitolio” Later on I introduced the words mayúscula and minúscula –capital letter and small letter.
Now when my students leave my class they might never remember the proper Spanish words for capital letter but never never will they start off a sentence without starting with a “capitolio.” I later explained to them the proper meaning of “capitolio”. I explained that the “capital” of the state or California is Sacramento and that the “gobernador trabaja en el capitolio.
Anectote#2
One evening when I trying to explain a rather “dicey” difficult point of grammar, I noticed one girl who was playing with her smartphone and not paying attention. Le dije “Oye, no se debe “tweetear”mientras les explico la gramática!! She said, "I am not tweeteando, I am doing my online homework!" (I give out a lot of that) We had a few more exchanges, I told her that her homework should be done “en casa” She put her phone away. Another student raised her hand.” Miss,Dani, is there really such a word as “tweeteando”, I replied, “There is now!’
There are numerous other examples of how to deal with students. I once caught another one cheating I scolded him for “cheateando” (sounds like chitiando) Again, there are countless others, Yo, siendo muy juguetona, I like like to play with words one -language puns , bilingual puns and more.
What am I saying here? It's that I don’t teach Spanish. I teach students! I teach them how to communicate in a different language and in a different culture, and have fun doing it.
Foreign language is not a cold hard subject like math (which I hate) or biological science (which I love). It is a means of people interacting with each other in a (hopefully) loving, caring, and respectful way.
Do I have discipline problems? Most of the time , no. If somebody wants to get a little froggy, I’ll wear a sleeveless blouse or dress and let my somewhat” larger-than-usual” biceps show. No I don’t have discipline problems.
Could this be why I have waiting lines of students trying to get into my classes that are larger than the entire class loads of other teachers? I’m not writing this to brag---well, maybe a little.
I could prattle on for hours, about teaching, but ,what say ye all?” I hope my little effort might just encourage some of you to become teachers. From the high quality of Spanish that I see demonstrated on this site, I think that there are a lot of potentially great teachers here.
Give me your thoughts, please.
Amor y besos!
Dani
5 Answers
My experience of teaching English to Spanish speakers in Bolivia caused me to realise that helping the students to relax helped a lot.
My Spanish is far from fluent even now but then it was worse and I often made mistakes in front of the students.
With experience I learned which ones amused them and made them laugh. They learned to laugh at their own mistakes in English.
At times we almost had competition in the classroom about which student could make the funniest deliberate mistake. Some even resulted in a round of applause.
Teach how to laugh - people love laughing and learning.
Another "trick" is to use the students to teach.
Student "How do I say this teacher"
Me " Don't me Claudia, ask Jose this time" (you look around the classroom and see which student wants to answer)
It IS all about communication.
PS I banned mobile phones in my classes.
PPS Teaching is hard work but I could go into a classroom feeling down with maybe a headache and feel great after about 20 minutes. 
Estoy de acuerdo, Danielle.
I think communication is most important. Most people are afraid to try to speak Spanish for fear of making mistakes. Well, guess what, you have to make mistakes to learn, and if you wait until your Spanish is "perfect" you will never get anywhere.
I wish I could take your class. It sounds terrific. Right now I am in a translation group with Spanish natives and I make all sorts of mistakes, but I am not afraid to try. I wish I had Spanish people nearby to speak with, but I do the best I can on Skype when I have some time.
I love teaching online and have done a lot of English teaching here and on other sites. As for teaching Spanish, I can do some fundamentals. In my college class a few years ago my professor had me teach a few classes.
Thanks for this terrific post.
Un saludo,
Sandy
It took me awhile to get around to finally reading this. Great post by the way. I like your attitude. I am always telling people not to be afraid to make mistakes and to not be overly concerned about grammar. Language is used to communicate and if you can accomplish that then made up words, bad grammar, spanglish; none of that matters. Once a person gains confidence in speaking and communicating, in whatever form, they can then start to improve and correct the errors. After seven years living immersed in Spanish I still make dozens of mistakes every day. But you know what? I also get several compliments daily on my Spanish from native speakers. And man does that feel good.
Thanks for a great post. Maybe it will help others relax a little and worry less about being "perfect" in word choice and grammar.
Since you like puns, here is one for you.
How do you say: En ninguna manera hombre. in Spanglish--------- No way güey.
I find your post very interesting. I've been thinking about becoming a teacher of our favourite language (once I've learned it, haha) and the culture of the areas in which it is spoken, but, being autistic (though luckily not severely), and enthousiastic (even about boring ol' grammar!), I worry sometimes that my teaching might end up being dry and boring to everyone but me.. although of course I'll try my best to avoid that! (I've thought of all sorts of creative ways to make them practise the language, funny examples to use etc. etc...) However, I don't think I'd soon have thought to purposely introduce 'incorrect' words. Could you explain to me how exactly this helps to improve the atmosphere in class? I'd think it'd be either confusing or go unnoticed and thus have no effect, depending on if they have a clue what the 'real' word would be..
p.s. this is not criticism, I'm just trying to understand your methods better.
You break things down so the person you are teaching can understand
