Tonight, I am sad for my country.
The events that transpired this past weekend in Charlottesville are not unique. As language teachers, we are about communication. We are about comprehension. We are about connection. We are about community.
Let's also be about change.
I've been reading a lot of posts about what teachers are doing in their first week of classes--keep those posts coming!. (I have shared before how I always started off my year.) I am not in the classroom anymore, but I have spent much of the day today thinking about how I might begin my classes with a message of peace. I had several different, elaborate ideas (news summaries, starting a hashtag/selfie thing for Spanish students on Twitter, etc.), but since the first week is already SUPER full, I decided to keep it simple....and in the target language, of course ;-)
Here is a short presentation that you can use in the first week of your Spanish class--on the first day, if you want--to draw a hard line for what Spanish class is about. Language teachers have historically tackled the alphabet in the first weeks of school--so I brought that into this presentation. You can work with the alphabet in the context of messages that are full of meaning--all in the target language.
The presentation is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0, which means that you can use it, adapt it, and re-share it provided it is shared freely, with the same license, and with attribution to The Comprehensible Classroom.
I am sure that I am not the only language teacher considering if or how to address Charlottesville with their classes as we head back to school, and I would love to know what you are thinking!
