As Mr. Willard, my fearless leader, says, "There are some kids even God couldn't get to pass."  These are the only ones I am to permit to earn an F in Spanish I or Spanish II.

And so, I have cobbled together a few maneuvers to see if I can play God.

Maneuver uno: allow those who pretty much never pass a test but in tutoring can often put 2 and 2 (or subject and verb) together at least to tag-team the test.  They put their brains together and collectively eliminate wrong answers with what they know between them.  This maneuver has been in effect for certain parties in Spanish II since mid-term, and is now being applied to some of the more resistant cases in Spanish I for finals purposes.

Maneuver dos: it is not enough to tag-team the test for the aforementioned Spanish II parties, but some of them have decided that they do better with written tests than multiple choice/matching tests, and so have opted to take a 20-question, form-your-own-answer-to-totally-random-questions-that-use-a-potpourri-of-vocab-and-grammar-from-the-whole-year.  I give them 25 questions ahead of time, they carefully translate them, formulate answers, then translate the answers (still working together.)  I call this maneuver malice aforethought: they know what they're getting into, but they also know it's a lot of work.

Maneuver tres: for those who can pass tests now and then and really need a crutch, I return to the cheat sheet, wherein they can put whatever they want on one side of an 8 1/2" x 11" page--in their own handwriting.  The catch is they have to know how to use it, and they're inadvertently studying as they make it.  Oh, and they also sacrifice a letter grade for the chance to use it, which is not so bad, unless you get a D...which one did today.

All in all, end-of-course testing has been fruitful for the state-mandated tests.  Only my juniors have taken a test so far, and all but 3 passed the test, and of those did Mr. Willard and I agree God could not get to pass.

Mid-project: Bilingual picture book
My Spanish 2 kiddos are in the midst of creating a bilingual cultural picture book with partners.  I'm a little off-schedule as far as getting them to turn stuff in as well as the concepts they'll need to know in order to write the story in Spanish.  They've researched their designated cities and are writing the English versions of their stories.

If I could start over, I'd tighten up the celebrities requirements, for one, so there would be fewer "super models" and telenovela actresses being worked into children's stories.  I might switch it to historical figures or add historical figures in the future.  Also, the kiddos are not being very geographically specific with their landmarks, which was the whole purposes of having them not just pick a Spanish-speaking country, but a city.  And there's got to be a way to get them to zone in on REAL landmarks without allowing ski resorts.

Maybe I'll have a whole research paper before they write the book in the future...

I do think this is going to be an excellent way to put everything we've learned this year to work in a meaningful way in the end, even if the culture is a bit lacking in other ways.

Post-project: Cultural wikis
I updated an old assignment by putting it online, thereby averting having to hear about Shakira, Sammy Sosa, and tacos eight zillion times, since once a topic's claimed on the site, no one else can use it.

The single biggest problem with this project is grading it.  That or getting them to finish it.  Back when kiddos could overlap, there was a lot less whining about how hard it was to find 10 topics.  You'd think they'd get the message and choose different categories, but no, everyone had to do food and wildlife, it seemed.  In the meantime, I have approximately 400 pages left to grade with progress reports due next Thursday.  I thought it'd be so much easier to grade online, but if I'm going to hold them accountable for linking, that's a lot of extra clicking around that powerpoints and "scrapbooks" did not require.

Next time around, I do believe I'll require fewer topics, BUT, I'll require students to conduct research on what's already there--maybe make a map for the different categories?  Instead of or as part of the play dough map early in the year.

Post-project: Differentiated lyrics response
In keeping with the school's goal of differentiating for creative, practical, and analytical learners, I came up with still another way to respond to the lyrics that we had spent 2 weeks translating beforehand.  I think this went better than the video option simply because the responses were less time consuming, and I divided the labor, so each stanza of "Llore, llore" was translated.  More kiddos understood more of the song that way, and so COULD do something with it.

The vast majority went with the response poem option or compare and contrast essay option.  The poems got sticky for guys who had to pretend they were girls, and some people got hung up on how much the guy was crying in the song, neglecting that it was past tense and the whole song was about how he wasn't going to be so torn up anymore.  People got caught up in the essay with being able to parallel specific lines; it was almost harder to analyze the English than the Spanish!  I'm very pleased with the quality of thinking that came out of that one, though.

For this next song, I'm going to be hard-pressed to come up with new ways to respond, but I'm thinking I might like to do something with using lines from different songs to create a whole new poem or dialogue, or maybe a dialogue between two of the singers.