This isn’t the post I promised about my next book project. However, it is otherwise related to my “hanging up my sombrero” as a classroom Spanish teacher (same link).

I am now gleefully clearing out Spanish textbooks, and books about teaching Spanish, from my bookshelf. Before discarding Imágenes, a 2007 textbook from Houghton Mifflin by Debbie Rusch, Marcela Domínguez, and Lucía Caycedo Garner, I scanned one of my favorite activities, a retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk” that helps students acquire the distinction between the preterite and imperfect. Like most English speakers I struggled with this concept, and it wasn’t until I used this specific activity in my own classroom that I finally “got it” myself. Perhaps some of my readers will find it useful as well, for themselves and/or their students.

Many Spanish teachers use familiar stories to teach and practice preterite and imperfect, such as Barbara Kuczun Nelson‘s Superhombre and Ricitos de Oro stories. What I like about this “Jack and the Beanstalk” exercise is that its columnar organization graphically divides the plot elements into those that naturally take the preterite and those that take the imperfect.

By the way, two other Ah-ha!!! preterite/imperfect moments for me were:

• When the professor in a summer class I took at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid told us to use the preterite to express an overall evaluation, e.g. thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I later generalized this to an open vs. closed box metaphor.
• When an exercise in the same Imágenes textbook showed me that bounded time trumps repetition, so that (for instance) you use the preterite to say that you played golf every day during your vacation. This is an example I’ve mentally returned to over and over again.