7 de septiembre 2015

Beinvenidos!
Welcome to the new school year of 2015-2016 at Colegio Point Loma.

This year I will be teaching three sections of Spanish 1-2 and one section each of Spanish 3-4 and Spanish 5-6.

We begin this year with a week of speaking, hearing, writing, thinking, singing, chanting, dancing, moving and understanding only using the Castellano language.  Do not be alarmed that I use the term Castellano, because I grew up speaking the Spanish of the Mexican nature in school and I know all the coolest slang Mexicanismos.  Most of the Spanish speaking world uses the term Castellano and differ by the use of the informal. plural, vosotros verb forms as well as other variations in word choice.  In many countries the midday meal is el almuerzo while in the formerly Mexican state of California it is commonly called el lonche.  Students will be immersed in the Spanish language and will quickly be comfortable using their limited Spanish.  Second and third year students will also be blabbing like telenovela stars in Spanish.

I will use English occasionally in the first and second year classes in order to explain concepts and ideas quickly.  Most of our class time, students will be immersed in the language and will be asked for that hour of the day to speak only in Spanish.

I will be pushing students this year to make the choice to use the language as much as possible both in and out of the classroom.  Our large freshman class, as well as sophomores and juniors, should strive to take four years of the language with the goal of taking the AP Language and/or Literature course in order to receive college credits while still in High School.  For many reasons which we will review in class next week, Spanish is a super handy language to know and use.  It provides students the opportunity to communicate with a larger portion of our world, it gives them an advantage in the workplace over the monolingual population, and study have shown that acquiring and using more than one language improves ones ability to think and learn more.

The syllabus for all three classes will be posted online at the end of this week for students and guardians to review.  I look forward to meeting our freshperson class.  I also anticipate reacquainting with returning second and third year students.

BILINGUISMO!  The language of our world.