I am passionate about human connection and the experiences students have in the middle grades that lead them to who they will become in the future. I am passionate about making every student I encounter feel valued, intelligent, and capable. I love creating situations for students to experience success and build confidence. I love giving students an outlet for what they are feeling. I want to teach children tolerance and compassion for others. I am also passionate about modeling intellectual curiosity and encouraging students to find what it is they love and go for it. My after school theatre program has given me the personal experiences which make me wake up everyday excited to go to work. I can take a group of kids who know nothing about theatre and turn them into performers. I can take a shy kid and turn them into the lead actor shining on stage. I can a take a 8th grade tough guy and teach him to love musical theatre. I have patience with the ones who misbehave. I can redirect their energy into something positive. This is what I am passionate about and what I would like to contribute to education. Giving children a way to express themselves is a powerful tool; it can ignite a child's life and larger world as well.
I need to explore whether Spanish is the right subject for me to teach. I have built a wealth of knowledge in my 4+ years teaching Spanish, but I am not content. When I think of technology integration my mind spins with hopes to use blogs to track my students' experience learning self confidence in performance. I would like to incorporate video in performance as well, allowing students to actually see their progress and evolution, in addition to providing another outlet for creative development of self and voice. My next step to reach beyond the surface is to find out how to make this switch of subject matter a reality. Staying in Spanish is safe, in a way. It still challenges me constantly, but I know the drill. I need to be fearless about pursuing the unknown and not let the negative chatter in my head control what I think I am capable of.
I am passionate about human connection and the experiences students have in the middle grades that lead them to who they will become in the future. I am passionate about making every student I encounter feel valued, intelligent, and capable. I love creating situations for students to experience success and build confidence. I love giving students an outlet for what they are feeling. I want to teach children tolerance and compassion for others. I am also passionate about modeling intellectual curiosity and encouraging students to find what it is they love and go for it. My after school theatre program has given me the personal experiences which make me wake up everyday excited to go to work. I can take a group of kids who know nothing about theatre and turn them into performers. I can take a shy kid and turn them into the lead actor shining on stage. I can a take a 8th grade tough guy and teach him to love musical theatre. I have patience with the ones who misbehave. I can redirect their energy into something positive. This is what I am passionate about and what I would like to contribute to education. Giving children a way to express themselves is a powerful tool; it can ignite a child's life and larger world as well.
ReplyDeleteAs I read through the things you are passionate about, I noticed two things: 1) You are very aware of the affective dimensions of learning 2) You have a lot of confidence in your skills as an educator. Only you can answer whether or not teaching Spanish is the best fit for you. However, I think you are positioned beautifully to have a powerful impact on your students by virtue of the things you know outside of the field of Spanish (i.e., your sensitivity to their developmental needs as learners, your theatre background, your technology skills, etc.). The great thing about a Spanish class is that as long as you are developing students’ communication skills, you can use just about anything as the content/context for that communication. For me, this was a powerful realization because it meant that I could integrate all of my passions (and those of students) into our daily work together. So much of developing linguistic and cultural competence is about assuming a new role and functioning within an alternate reality. Like theatre, language learning can be a powerful tool for helping students to develop their own personal identities, for assisting them in exploring other cultural perspectives, and for imagining an alternate reality for themselves and for the world in which things are better. The insights you have about theatre can function as technologies—empowering students to accomplish these things through the language learning process. New technologies open up a whole host of additional possibilities, allowing students to represent their new understandings and to express themselves about topics that matter to them for real audiences. When you layer these 3 domains (language learning, theatre, and technology), you can create truly compelling learning environments and experiences for students in ways that might not otherwise be possible.
So, my question for you is what would you tell a shy student who is afraid to get on stage? How might that answer cross-apply to your own statement that “Staying in Spanish is safe, in a way?” Perhaps one possible path to consider is that it isn’t necessary to abandon the field of world language education in order to get away from the drill. Maybe instead, the real task is to find a way to re-imagine what is possible within the confines of a Spanish classroom, to rethink how you might use your charge to teach Spanish as an opportunity for empowering students to change the world. Every step forward is an act of trust and faith to some degree that something positive will result. You’ll never know what you are capable of until you try!