The title of this post translates as ‘Farewell to the classroom’: I’ve decided not to continue teaching in the fall. This decision has been a long time coming. It is mostly due to a gut feeling that twenty years as a classroom Spanish teacher — five in a high school, and fifteen as a college adjunct — is enough. In addition, I’ve taken on new responsibilities in my personal life, so that I’ve felt increasingly squeezed and stressed. Finally, I want to stop teaching while I’m young enough to be able to fully enjoy my freedom.

Another factor is that Fordham University, where I’ve done most of my adjuncting, is on the verge of revising its undergraduate language requirement. By “revising” I really mean “eviscerating”: reducing the current two years of required language study (of course many students place out of part of this) to a single semester. This is likely to drastically reduce my department’s need for adjuncts, so I’ve been expecting to retire when the change is implemented. I’m just doing it a little sooner.

This does not mean, of course, that I will abandon Spanish, or teaching. I’m open to doing some tutoring. For those of you who teach Spanish linguistics classes, please contact me about giving a guest lecture on any of the topics covered in this blog and my books. I expect to return to writing in this blog more frequently, and also have in mind a third book project that I will share with you in my next post. Finally, I teach Hebrew “on the side” and would love to do more of that, and also improve my own skills in that fascinating language.

As my classroom teaching career has drawn to a close I’ve been reflecting on what it means to be an effective college language instructor. In recent semesters I’ve grown increasingly disaffected by the traditional curriculum followed in every college where I’ve taught. These courses cover an enormous amount of material during two or three class meetings per week over the course of a short semester. A typical first-semester Spanish class, for example, covers:

• several hundred words in basic categories like education, family, housing, hobbies, personal characteristics, the calendar, and numbers;
• subject pronouns, including multiple forms of address (tú, usted, and ustedes);
• noun gender and number;
• definite and indefinite articles;
• agreement of adjectives and articles with nouns;
• possessive adjectives and possession with de(l);
• telling time;
• the present indicative, with its many irregularities;
• using gustar;
• the basics of ser vs. estar;
• forming questions and negative sentences;
• when to conjugate a verb and when to use the infinitive;
• the present progressive;
• expressing the near future with ir a and obligation with tener que;
• reflexive verbs.

I’m an experienced teacher, and I think I’m pretty good. I do my best to present vocabulary and grammar in an engaging fashion, embedded in culture, and to provide time to practice in class. But in my opinion it’s impossible to get through this much material this quickly without (i) essentially telling students to go home and memorize the vocabulary, and (ii) spending class time on activities that boil down to grammar drills, albeit in a variety of fun and creative formats.

This is fine for students who have a flair for language. I don’t worry about them. But most students will succeed only to the extent that they (i) are willing to work, and also (ii) possess as many as possible of following abilities and skills:

• grasping new concepts, and being curious about them;
• memorization (a skill otherwise mostly lacking in education today);
• “thinking on their feet”, i.e. recalling and integrating different aspects of the language that they have learned;
• a “good ear”;
• willingness to make mistakes.

Depending on where one teaches, and who happens to enroll in one’s classes, there may be depressingly few students each semester who possess enough of these traits to have a decent chance of actually learning the target language.

Were I to continue as a classroom instructor I would look into alternative teaching methodologies as a way to reach more students. I understand the principle of Comprehensible Input, and I love the Dreaming Spanish videos, but am not sure how one designs a classroom curriculum around the CI approach. Coming from a vastly different direction, I’ve always been a fan of the Michel Thomas method, including its recent adaptation in Language Transfer, and have wondered how it could be implemented in a classroom, not just a tutorial.

Of course, even if I wanted to try an alternative methodology, as an adjunct I would be limited in my ability to do so. I’d have to try to fit these ideas within the scope and sequence of an already jam-packed existing traditional course.

While I’m not retiring as a classroom language instructor specifically because of these concerns, they do add a tinge of sadness to my departure. I’m curious to see how college-level foreign language pedagogy will evolve — but I’ll be watching from the sidelines.

¡Hasta la próxima!