Blog:3 Teacher Interview
For my interview, I spoke with Ms. Hurtado. She is a sixth grade teacher at Hambrick Middle School. She teaches reading and writing, and has been doing so for the past 4 years since she began her teaching career. I never really talked to her before this interview. I only remembered her from a walk through we did in the ELA department. A walk through is when you go into about 4 or 5 different classes all in a time frame of about 20 minutes, and you takes notes of the culture in each class. Her class seemed to be oriented around students’ speech, language, and meanings. While I was in her class, I could tell she did some extra things such as give very thorough explanations, repeated a lot of instructions, and sometimes spoke in Spanish. I could tell that the students in her class were ELL. This made me remember, her because she seemed really passionate about her teaching. I felt I would get the most in depth feedback from her concerning the topic of second language learning. She gave me ...
I also struggles with Spanish in High School. My school required us to take 3 semesters of the language and I did not learn much in the class. I was not able to speak Spanish and I had a difficult time creating sentences. Now that I am teaching students who predominantly speak Spanish I wish I had taken those classes more seriously, but I also found them to be repetitive and boring. I have learned a lot more from my time communicating with the students in my classroom and having them teach me sentences and phrases than I did sitting in a chair repeating myself. With the amount of students in the area that speak Spanish it makes it very difficult to communicate and I regret not taking Spanish class more seriously.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with your point about taking those high school classes seriously. I jokingly played through most of my Spanish classes in high school for the entire year and walked away with practically no Spanish acquisition at all. Anyway, I believe that instructed second language learning never works well with someone who is not intrinsically motivated to do so. The best way to learn a new language is to jump into it and learn it from the environment around you. This naturalistic learning is always better because it comes from a place of authenticity and passion. You will always learn more when you are put in an environment where learning that something benefits you.
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