Hi Whizzes!
No, it's not S*X😳, nor S*X🤯, nor S*X⚾️, nor S*X😖, nor S*X🎷.
It's...
DRUM ROLL
🥁
🥁
🥁
SUBJECT MATTER!!!🤢 🤮 🤧
Ok...JUST WAIT. GIVE ME A MINUTE HERE, BEFORE YOU GIVE UP ON THIS MEMO. GIVE A WITCH A CHANCE, WON'T YOU?
People visit my old school a lot. We are the best kept secret in Manhattan—a school for gifted and talented middle schoolers who are also economically underprivileged. We are small, and thus able to create authentic community. And so people visit to see how they could recreate our “magic” in their schools.💫💫💫 It’s not magic…it’s intentional effort and practices, but yeah when that works out it sure does look like “magic”, don’t it?
Our fabulous students tour them. They just open the doors to our classrooms and VOILA, they see our classes, or, like what happened one day, unfortunately for them they caught me during a prep period. 👽 👾 🤖 🎃 ¡Ay qué pena! ¡Quel dommage! ¡Poopy!
So, the tour-guides explained how the World Language Department at our school is an input-based program, not an output-based program (my eyes teared up listening to them🫶), and how we use stories🎭 as the main medium for acquiring the language, and have Warm-Up Circles, ETC. Usually this is the point where they move on, BUT these particular visitors stayed longer, and asked me:
“How was teaching through Covid for you?”
❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗❗
The above line of exclamation marks was how I felt, and this is what I said:
“Somehow, don’t ask me how, I was able to have really good language classes on Zoom. We did everything—even interactive Reader’s Theater, and it worked.🤡 What was hard, perhaps the hardest year of my teaching career, was last year, having the students rigidly podded, and all of us having to wear masks, and all the distancing protocols.😷😷😷 And I knew what I was doing. I can’t even imagine what this must have been like for new teachers.”😬
Torture. 😵 😵 Try teaching a language with a mask on…what with at least 90% of human communication being non-verbal. It killed my soul. Not even remotely joking.🥺
Then they spoke of all the gaps in learning that Covid caused. The man-visitor told the tour-guides how lucky they were that Covid hit them when it did, saying that students attending college now…essentially didn’t go to high school. I said:
“Yeah the moment I start thinking about the consequences of Covid hitting anybody whenever it did…my mind blows up.”🌬 💨🧠🔥
I think of what it would have meant for your last few years of life to have happened during the pandemic, or what it means if it happened to someone in infancy, childhood, right after graduating college, ETC.
The picture is not pretty no matter which way anyone looks at it, but I do have to say that I feel like people like me were the luckiest—able-bodied adults 💪 with careers well on their way and somehow lucky enough to have jobs that didn’t go bust. Who KNEW being a Spanish teacher would = job security? Not me.🤷
Lady-visitor:
“Do you notice gaps in their knowledge or abilities?”
Me:
“Well, we have a lot of professional development where we discuss the fact that students are “not what they used to be”. We as educators are going to have to face the realities of what Covid meant for their intellectual-social-emotional-spiritual development for a long time to come.”
They agreed. And then I said:
“BUT we in our department are lucky. We are not subject matter, you see, so while they might have missed some key components of their Math learning, or History learning, for us, if the person has a functioning brain and already speaks one language, then we’re good.”👍✊ 👊
They looked at me cross-eyed. 🪬 I went on:
“We gave them linguistic input before Covid, we gave them linguistic input on Zoom, we gave them linguistic input last year, all masked, and we are still giving them input this year, so we’re lucky.”🧌
They only slightly uncrossed their eyes. And then our students continued their tour, and I went back to whatever I was doing. Probably creating glossaries for chapters 5-8 of Book Two in the Novice Mid “BRUJAS”--“SORCIÈRES” trilogy.
Bill VanPatten🫅🏻🫅🏻🫅🏻 (the Diva of Second Language Acquisition—I recommend While We're On The Topic: BVP on Language, Acquisition, and Classroom Practice along with the podcast Tea With BVP), says it, not me. I just happen to agree. I’ll say it again:
🈳LANGUAGES ARE NOT SUBJECT MATTER.
And again:
🈂Languages are not subject matter.
And again:
🈯️Subject matter, languages, they are not.
I speak like the above sentence sometimes…it just happens. In boarding school a friend of mine used to call me Yoda.
Unless they are…in which case…what class are you in? That’s right: A LINGUISTICS course, not a language acquisition course where communicative ability and proficiency are the goals.
If your Spanish language learning curriculum looks something like this (you can extrapolate for your language of choice):
Then you're in for a wild ride🏟 🎡 🎢 🛝, which will leave you with near zero communicative ability, because indeed the language will be treated like subject matter🙀 😿 😾 , and educators will assume that just because they explained how the Imperfect Tense works in Spanish, that you should now, magically, somehow, be able to communicate while utilizing it.
Tough times are here and will only be happening more and more, what with the climate crisis, ETC🌲 🌳 🌴. The internet could cease to exist, and if there is (there will be) another pandemic, and there is no internet, education will have an even rougher time perpetuating itself.
BUT, barring the cessation of all possible communication between World Language Facilitators and their students, WE CAN GIVE THEM COMPREHENSIBLE, COMPELLING AND COMMUNICATION-ENHANCING LINGUISTIC INPUT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE WHATSOEVER 🧘 🏋🏽♂️ 🚴🏽and thus continue giving them this most precious gift of developing communicative ability in another language. We can continue enacting a healing pedagogy, on Zoom, Doom, Boom or any other life-saving, soul-crushing software that comes along. 🧚
And oh, we will.
Period.
Slay.
Constanza Ontaneda
your own personal Language Acquisition Witch
My question is:
❤️🔥 Have you encountered something implicitly advertised as a language acquisition course that ended up being a linguistics course? What were the results?
