What about...

This afternoon, while students readied themselves for a cooking show segment they would narrate for classmates beginning on Monday, I realized what progress they have made thus far in Spanish 3. Tenth graders who could create formal commands, juggle cooking and culinary vocabulary worthy of that of any chef, and dub a Paula Dean or Rachel Ray recipe from start to finish--the year certainly didn't start that way, and their hard work in collaboration with classmates and me has increased their confidence and intuition. Complete with a list of ingredients, measurements and deft manipulation of commands and subjunctive, I am confident that their narrated recipes would yield edible, if not delicious, dishes.

What I have learned in the process of transitioning from higher education to secondary students is that the latter abound with optimism and love of discovery. In higher education, cynicism and 'fulfillment of requirements' begins to set in, and a pursuit of money--or at least other disciplines better-disposed to "utility"--rears its ugly head. High school students think it's fun to create, play and work together in creative, playful ways. Isn't it best to work together to have a good time? to exchange ideas? to make inroads in your understanding of the world in all fields of human inquiry? Sometimes all of this means giving over some amount of charge to the students themselves. After all, if you don't ask them what they need or want, how can you expect to mete out goals of the course?

Fostering student choice cannot happen at the expense of indispensable methodologies or banks of knowledge. For the specter of these anarchic possibilities, choice can be controversial, of course. What teacher, after all, doesn't consider at least to some degree him or herself the proverbial master of the house once the door closes and the period/block/class begins? We're all interested in ensuring that students acquire the necessary tools to express their ideas in a meaningful, respected and respectful way according to the standards of each teacher's discipline. The happy medium is for students to inform our choice of activity by which we ask them to show us proficient language skills. Memorizing scripted exchanges hasn't been accepted methodology for over thirty years. Likewise, pure expression over precision is so very 1995. It seems the pendulum has swung away from purely communicative and back toward a balance: teach grammar--not in isolation, clearly--with a grounding in real-world (or as close to real world as possible) experience.

At my school, we use a video-based curriculum which is very good at grounding vocabulary and prefiguring grammar. Nevertheless, a soap opera-style curriculum has its limits, and students even at this age, sense its lack of authenticity. They cook, eat, download, upload, record and delete with abandon. A language curriculum without these hallmark vocabulary words is "dead to them." Texting is central to their existence--for real (said in a distinctly Ke$ha accent). I am proud to report that some of my colleagues have created an entire tech-centered unit around an out-of-date unit whose most advanced tech-centered vocabulary fails to even mention the 'fax machine'.

If you're a language teacher, you love your students (or "kids," as so many of us call them), you're reading this because you want innovative ways to teach a living language within the confines of the classroom walls. It's not like teaching the disciplines of science or math or even history or English. We are more like art educators than any other colleague--ours has real-world implications: As foreign language educators, we address the question: "can you really (really?) talk and connect with those around you in a way that is culturally relevant, appropriate and meaningful to your interlocutors? Sculptors, painters, ceramists and illustrators do much the same. Believe me, I learned much from educators in other fields, but rare are those those teachers outside of foreign language or the arts, teachers who understand the many-faceted moments that construct our existence across human experience. We are the new Liberals and anarchists of education. We language teachers disobey the borders between disciplines: we teach Mayan math in Spanish; metaphysics and philosophy in French; war- and love-making in Latin; art and religion in Chinese.

Is there anything we cannot do or will not try? I challenge us all to reach outside of our comfort zone: talk to your history colleagues, art, religion, philosophy, literature, politics, psychology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, calculus, biology--we all believe these are areas worthy of human discovery and pursuit. Why can we not complement each other's teaching and become more holistic and inclusive in our fostering of knowledge? Linguists of the world..."UNITE," por favor, s'il vous plaît, qingwen, gratias tibi ago.