Enlightenment
The ‘Aha moment’ that inspired my driving question
So, the thing about enlightenment is, it makes me question everything I’m doing. Like, everything. All the time. Always. Although, I’ve actually known throughout my entire career that assessments need to be meaningful and authentic. I always strive to create real-world contexts in order to assess my students’ proficiency in a relevant way. But the problem I’m having lately is that my definitions of meaningful and authentic are changing.
Take the health unit I designed my third year of teaching for Spanish level 2. We did a project where students need to describe an ailment to a doctor, and another student, the “doctor”, will give that person medical advice. To my 25-year-old self, this was perfect. It was a relevant context, it had meaning, sickness is something we all experience, and therefore, should be able to articulate in our second language.
Okay, but wait a second. When will my students need to give advanced medical care to speakers of Spanish?
“Our kids are never going to be doctors in Peru!” I recently exclaimed to my colleague.
Arriving at this conclusion took me an embarrassing amount of time. But it’s true, isn’t it? And it begs the question, what other absurd tasks have I been asking of my students?
I’m also forced to ask myself, what do they really need? Do they really need to be giving medical advice to someone who describes (using different forms of ser and estar and a variety of vocabulary from page 15) their medical ailments? Obviously not. The beauty of teaching a non-core class is that I have the autonomy to decide exactly what I get to teach. Awesome, right? The truth is, it’s a blessing and a curse. Like I said, it causes me to second-guess myself every step of the way. I’m constantly asking myself why am I making my students do this? What do they really need to be able to do in the target language?
But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I mean, I’m driving myself crazy, sure. But aren’t reflection and questioning the mark of a good teacher? Don’t effective teachers always wonder what it is they could be doing better? And finally, after an entire semester of reflection, I arrive at my driving question that will inspire the remainder of my work in the Teacher Inquiry and Writing Institute. What can I be doing to better prepare my students for interactions with speakers of Spanish? It seems like such a simple question, but one that took me months to finally ask myself. And one that will be transformative in enlightening both me and my students.
