Review sites: Another marketing ploy

A few weeks ago, I received an unsolicited email from Elizabeth Reynolds (elizabeth@reviews.com; not her real name, I'm sure) complimenting me on a blog post and asking me to add a link to their site. Note that once again, the topic has nothing to do with my blog's focus (language teaching and learning, though my most popular posts are the ones dealing with marketing ploys like this one). 

This site is at least more up-front about its source of revenue:

In fairness, a lot of websites make money this way (using affiliate links), so it's not as deceptive as other sites that pass themselves off as third-party sites with no profit motive dedicated to helping people. (Please note that I do not use affiliate links, and I do not have any ads on my blog. All opinions are my own, and I receive no payment from anyone for my opinions on different educational resources. Mostly because I am happy to give my opinions for free, whether asked for or unasked for. 😁)

Here are a few things that make me skeptical about this site:

1. As with all of the other sites that have contacted me, there is no information about who runs the site.  In fact, the site mentions that there are no bylines. From the site's About page:

"Our reviews sit squarely on the shoulders of our entire editorial team. The picks we make for the best are collectively ours, not the individual opinion of a single writer."

2.   There is conflicting information about when the site started and where it's located.  The site itself says it was founded in 2013 and is located in Fort Mill, SC. However, the email I received and the site's Twitter page indicate that it is located in Seattle, WA (and that its Twitter account started in 2007).

3. As with other sites, whoever designed the site has tried to make it look like a "real" business site, so there's a sidebar ad indicating that they are hiring. However, when you click the link, it pulls a page with values, but no job listings. Now, this does happen when there are no job listings, but usually there are two other things that also happen. First, the company does not have a sidebar ad announcing that they are hiring, and second, when you try to browse list of jobs, you'll usually receive a message saying that there are no positions available at the moment.

While having affiliate links doesn't automatically mean that a site's content isn't trustworthy, it's worth investigating who is running the site and why. Many bloggers use affiliate links because it allows them to make money doing what they love (writing about whatever topic they care about, such as education, food, or lifestyle).

So how can you tell if you can trust a recommendation from a site that uses affiliate links? Here are my recommendations: 

1. There should be a name attached to the site. You should be able to verify from an independent source that the person actually exists. Ideally, it's someone who has been around for a while who is a trusted and respected voice in the blogging community.

2. It should always be crystal clear which product recommendations are affiliate links. If the site doesn't disclose which recommendations are affiliate links, it's not a credible source of information. If it does disclose which recommendations are affiliate links, and those make up the majority of the site content, it's a dubious source of information. 

The bottom line is: Always remember that 

anyone can publish anything on the internet.

 

Some of it looks extremely credible, so even major news organizations have been fooled into publishing content from for-profit entities masquerading as disinterested third-party reviewers (see the following stories about Drew Cloud, a supposed student loan expert, but actually a made-up person used as a tool of the student loan industry: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Drew-Cloud-Is-a-Well-Known/243217, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/drew-cloud-fake-student-loan-expert/559019/). 

Reflection on my first year of teaching high school & attracting WL teachers to the profession

Technically we still have 12 more days of school (not that anyone is counting or anything), but since I've finished my own schoolwork for the semester, I feel like I have more free time, since now I only need to plan lessons and grade on the weekends instead of doing homework, planning lessons, and grading. Anyway.

Teaching high school or college?
A number of students have asked me if I like teaching high school or college better, and my student teacher supervisor asked me if I wanted to get back into higher ed. My answers: high school, and a very emphatic 'no.' If you'd have told me 10 years ago that I would feel this way, I would have asked you if I had suffered some kind of brain injury. But it's true; I'm finding that I actually enjoy it more, despite the fact that it is much harder, for the following reasons:

1. Time with the kids. I thought this might go the other way because I'm so introverted, so I was a little nervous about a job that required me to be around people so much. It is very exhausting, and I've had to work to carve out quiet time to myself so that I can function like a semi-normal human, but that extra time has meant that I can build relationships and get to know my students. This happened occasionally at the higher ed level with upper-level undergrads and grad students who took more than one class with me, but that was the exception rather than the rule. The additional time means that I know my students better and have more patience and empathy, but it also means that they know me better and know that I care about them. As a socially awkward introvert, it really takes time for me to feel comfortable with people, and at this level, I have the time I need to make connections. This makes my job feel meaningful to me, which is one of my top priorities (after salary, insurance, and retirement benefits, because I'm a pragmatist).
2. Curricular control. I know this wouldn't happen at every school, but I'm the only Spanish teacher at my school, which means I run the program like I want. I used to think I wanted to be a language program director, because I love working on curriculum and activities. But a language program director needs to be able to manage people, and while I think I could do OK for a while, it would make me miserable and I would hate it. (And I would REALLY hate it for language program director pay, which is typically less than assistant professor pay because many LPDs aren't on the tenure track...so you're running a program, supervising people, and using lots of administrative skills that are supposed to be well-compensated, but you're making less money than, say, a public school teacher.) All that is to say that my current job is an excellent match for my personality, because I get to run a language program without having to manage people. 
3. Regular schedule. I always enjoyed having schedule flexibility in higher ed, and I especially enjoyed not having to be awake before 8 AM. So I was not crazy about having a rigid schedule and needing to wake up at 6:30 every morning. I am still not a morning person, so it's been an adjustment. But having a more regular schedule has been really good for my mental health. I am actually awake for most of the daylight hours, so I get more sunlight, and I'm not awake until 2 or 3 in the morning. I actually wake up at 5 AM every morning because I learned that my brain did not want to do anything else after I'd spent all day with 100 people, and it was taking me 3-4 hours every night to make my materials for the next day because my brain was mostly done for the day. So I started waking up at 5 and getting to school at 6:15-6:30, and I've discovered that I really enjoy the quiet work time in the morning while my brain is still fresh.
4. Admin support. I used to think I had administrative support at the higher ed level, but I've been thinking about this during the past year, and I'm realizing that what I had was academic freedom, which is different than administrative support. I don't mean this as a criticism of any specific person, as the people that I worked with were generally nice people, but rather on the state of higher education in general. In my experience, there was never anyone saying, "What do you need to be successful and how can we help you get what you need?" It was "Sink or swim, and if you sink, there are hundreds of hungry PhDs that will be equally qualified who can replace you." Many, many people have written on this toxic culture in academia, and it does not have to be this way. But it can be this way because there are so many PhDs and so few jobs.
5. NO PUBLICATION REQUIREMENTS!!! In hindsight, academia was never a good fit for someone who doesn't have any ambition to publish. And it's not even that I don't like actually doing the research. Nerd that I am, I have been collecting data on student vocabulary retention this year to help establish benchmarks for vocabulary learning as I develop my program. My amazon cart has four books on acquisition of L2 vocabulary in it, just waiting for me to finish the school year so that I have time for some light "leisure" reading. :D When I'm not a new high school teacher, I would like to turn this blog into accessible summaries of current research in second language acquisition. But it was very frustrating to spend so much time running studies, getting weird results, and having things get rejected because the results were different than what previous studies had shown. 

Full disclosure: I do miss a few things.  I miss my prep time. Or maybe it's better to say that I miss the research time that I used to prep my classes. I taught 15 hours/week tops, which left a respectable amount of time for prep and grading (though still not enough once you add research into the mix). First, let me say that my school admin is great at protecting our time, so this is not a complaint about my school, but rather about what our society feels is a reasonable workload for educators. I always get my plan period and my district is great about not killing us with superfluous meetings. My plan period each day is 55 minutes, which is supposed to be enough time to plan for three different classes and do any grading that needs done. Well, I have 100 students, so 55 minutes/day doesn't even come close to the amount of time I need to do everything. A lot of this will be better once I have my materials developed and I'm not making everything from scratch, but it's still not enough time. Some of this is just part of life; we'll never have enough time for everything we want to do, which means we need to prioritize. But 100 students and 55 minutes/day means that I can't do very many assessments because I don't have time to evaluate them. I'm getting creative and using technology to help me, but there are some things that can't be automated well (or affordably), like writing and speaking. And again, let me say that my workload is much better than that of many teachers. Other teachers in my cohort have 140-160 students and a lot more meetings. In my last post, I mentioned a Cult of Pedagogy post that talks about teacher plan time in other countries, and the US does not come out favorably in the comparison. 

But isn’t that just the nature of the job? Not everywhere. According to a 2010 research brief from Stanford University, U.S. teachers spend 80 percent of their work hours delivering instruction to students. The average in other high-achieving nations? 60 percent. And brace yourself: In South Korea, Japan and Singapore, that average plummets to a staggering 35 percent. Yes, you read that right. In these countries, just 35 percent of teachers’ time is spent teaching students. The rest of their work hours are spent collaborating, studying, and planning, making their instructional time as good as it can be.

There has been a lot of news about teacher strikes and teacher shortages lately, and while we definitely need to work on improving teacher pay, there are other things that we could do to retain talented teachers, and giving them enough time to do a decent job during a regular work week is one of them. I've spent every weekend this year developing materials and grading. I come in by 6:30 every day. I frequently still work in the evenings (on menial tasks that require no brain power, like making vocabulary cards). I know that this will improve as I have my classes developed, but it shouldn't happen in the first place. I should be able to have the time that I need to provide a quality education AND spend time with my family. (And again, I reiterate that many, if not most, teachers have more demands on their time than I do.) Why do we just expect that teachers will need to work on evenings and weekends?

The other thing I miss is teaching teachers. I really did enjoy teaching world language teachers, but as I told my student teacher supervisor, I'm not interested in returning to higher education. I already know it's not a good fit for me, and I've finally found a job that I love. So hopefully I will be able to mentor world language teachers in an unofficial capacity at some point when things have settled down a little.

Final thoughts on teacher recruitment and retention: While I didn't choose my career path with the intention of teaching high school, it's actually one that I would recommend, for a few reasons.  First, I love knowing my content area so well. When I first started teaching, I was reasonably proficient in Spanish, but still made a lot of mistakes that me cringe when I see them now. Going through a master's program in literature and a PhD program in linguistics has given me enough time in the language that I have a deep understanding of its structures and a broad knowledge of its literature. Second (and I think a big selling point), while I was doing all of this study, I was working as a TA, so I was getting teaching experience in a fairly structured environment. I was also getting paid a small stipend, and most importantly, getting all of my tuition paid for. If I had started teaching high school after graduating with my PhD, I would currently be making more than I would have if I'd gotten tenure at my university. And I have no student debt. So I would advise future teachers to go to graduate school FIRST, with a teaching assistantship or some other form of financial support (not on your own dime), and get as much education as you can while someone else is paying for it (and before you know the feeling of having a regular paycheck). You will have some years of lost wages, sure, but you won't be saddled with a huge student loan burden wondering if you'll ever be able to pay it all back. Since I didn't have a "real" job with a real paycheck until I turned 30, I didn't mind making $10,000-$12,000/year for 8 years while I was in graduate school. And I love not owing $50,000-$100,000 for the fantastic education that I received.

Benefits of being a “new” teacher

“New” is a relative term, obviously, since I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years. (How did that happen? 😂) But this is my first year teaching high school, and while there are a number of differences between teaching at the college level and teaching at the high school level, one of the bigger differences is the amount of prep time I have. Because I’m teaching all day, any prep (and grading) needs to be done during my 55-minute plan period, or outside of school hours*. By contrast, I usually spent 9-15 hours per week actually teaching at the college level.  This may sound ridiculous, but I easily filled the remaining 25-30 hours/week with prep, grading, meetings, etc., without taking into account all of the research I was supposed to be doing to publish enough articles to get tenure.  The great thing about my schedule is that I have students in class 55 minutes/day 5 days/week. Both the amount of time spent in class as well as the fact that we meet every day have huge advantages for language learning, and I have been amazed at the difference it makes in terms of students being able to use the language!  But the comparative lack of prep time has meant that I’ve had to scale back a lot in terms of how elaborate my lessons are, because I physically don’t have enough hours in the day to plan everything I’d like to do.

So I’ve been doing a lot of recycling and repeating, and guess what? My students actually remember things, because we’ve gone over them more than twice! For example, at the college level, I spent two days max going over the alphabet in Spanish 1. The most that can be said is that students were familiar with it, but they didn’t really know it, because we had to move on to other topics. It might seem silly, but it’s really crucial that learners know the alphabet to be able to function in another language; without it, they can’t exchange contact information, because they can’t spell out usernames or email addresses. So we’ve been going over the alphabet, numbers, days/months, and other basic language elements that are essential to be able to function in another language, and my students are rocking listening comprehension!  I use bingo a lot because the students love to play, and it means that they hear the words over and over so that they can actually understand the words when they hear them, as opposed to reading them but then not recognizing them when they hear them. (As I add more bingo games, I'll post them here.  Other resources: memory/Go Fish cards, flash cards, and crossword puzzles.)

That’s not to say that I won’t be glad to have a little more experience under my belt so that I can come up with more interesting ways to recycle content. But I'll need to remember that me having more experience doesn't mean that I should move faster through the content.

*It's worth noting that I'm more fortunate than many teachers in that I actually get 55 minutes of uninterrupted planning time every day, as well as an hour or two of uninterrupted work time almost every Friday afternoon. (I love my job!) This Cult of Pedagogy post indicates that many teachers end up with little or no planning time, and have to do all of their planning and grading outside of school hours. Food for thought from the same Cult of Pedagogy post:

"But isn’t that just the nature of the job? Not everywhere. According to a 2010 research brief from Stanford University, U.S. teachers spend 80 percent of their work hours delivering instruction to students. The average in other high-achieving nations? 60 percent. And brace yourself: In South Korea, Japan and Singapore, that average plummets to a staggering 35 percent. Yes, you read that right. In these countries, just 35 percent of teachers’ time is spent teaching students. The rest of their work hours are spent collaborating, studying, and planning, making their instructional time as good as it can be."

Note to self: Remember to try things you're bad at

I've been teaching high school Spanish for about three months now, and as part of my responsibilities, I'm the Spanish club sponsor.  In October, we went to see the Hispanic Flamenco Ballet perform, and learned about Flamenco Omaha, a dance studio that offers flamenco lessons.  Students were interested in learning to dance the flamenco, so we've been having lessons for the past three weeks.

(Not very big) secret:  I am terrible at the flamenco (or anything that involves any kind of physical coordination, really).  I can manage OK as long as we're repeating the same step, but if any kind of transitions are involved (or I'm supposed to be moving my hands and feet at the same time), I need to practice over.and over.and over.  I still don't look graceful or elegant after practicing so many times, but I'm at least following the basic steps (but missing lots of details like hand movements).

It has been fun and good exercise, but it's also been a good reminder for me as a teacher.  Picking up language features has always been very easy for me.  But for some of my students, learning Spanish is like learning the flamenco is to me: we need to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces to be able to do something remotely resembling the model.  And then repeat 8 million more times and then we'll have it down.  :D

Having some success with hand movements because I didn't have to move my feet at the same time.
Assisted by my 3-year-old.

A syllabus for teaching online

I'm teaching two totally online classes for the first time this summer, and while the majority of the course is pre-packaged and ready to go, I wanted to make a few customizations to make the course easier for students to navigate, and to make it a little more personable.  So I created a video introducing myself (and providing a little bit of cultural information about how not to address teachers in Spanish) and a screencast walking through where everything is located in Blackboard and MySpanishLab.

The syllabus is given to me by the course coordinator, so all I really need to do is fill in my contact information and post it to Blackboard.  But I went to a faculty development workshop a few weeks ago on creating a good syllabus, and learned that there is a syllabus website at the school where I'm adjuncting that generates a web-based syllabus.  The information in the syllabus is the same one way or the other, but in a 10-page document, it's nice to have tabs that you can click that will direct you to the section you're interested in, rather than scrolling through a pdf for days.  So I went in to the site and used it to create my syllabi, and then posted the links in Blackboard, and thought I was all set. But my courses started today, and several students emailed to tell me that the site would not let them in to see the syllabus (it requires a login).  I checked with tech support, and my students are apparently using the appropriate login credentials, but still can't get in.

I would prefer to have my syllabus in a place that doesn't require a login, and obviously I have a little experience setting up websites, but I wasn't sure I had quite enough know-how to create the syllabus site I wanted to make.  In particular, I didn't know how to link navigation tabs to different spots on the site. It turns out that it's pretty easy...you just have to do a little basic HTML editing.  I had no idea what the feature was, but I now know that it's called an anchor tag, and if you google it, you can find the code and modify it, which is how I customize all of my sites.  So armed with this new bit of code, I created a new website for my syllabi this summer:

http://syllabus.anitasaalfeld.com

(I also created a copy of the site and made it a template, available here:

https://sites.google.com/a/anitasaalfeld.com/metrosyllabustemplate/ )

Kahoot!

I realize that almost everyone has heard of Kahoot by now, but I just realized that I never did a blog post on one of my new favorite technologies.  A few years ago I posted about Poll Everywhere, a polling site that lets you create polls for students to answer.  Kahoot is similar, but in a more game-like format (it includes game show-type music and keeps score).

It's a great tool to do comprehension checks, especially for more complicated topics.  I created a Kahoot for preterit and imperfect in Spanish, focusing on interpreting whether an action had been completed or not (based on a grammaticality judgment task I took as a grad student way back in the day).  For example:

Anoche leía una novela.

Then students decide:

A. I finished the novel.

B. We don't know if I finished the novel or not.

(You could also add "C. I didn't finish the novel." to make it more interesting. For the curious, the answer is B;  the use of the imperfect indicates that the action was in the past, but leaves the finality open-ended.  In other words, when the imperfect is used, we don't know if the action/event was completed or not.)

Kahoots also are great for doing exam reviews, but I wanted my students to be able to use them on their own if they wanted, and not just during class.  It's designed for use in a classroom, with the questions & answers projected on a screen and students responding from their devices, but they can use it individually with a few modifications.  They have to create an account in Kahoot, and then they can access your activity in preview mode.  One thing to note about preview mode is that it will not show up as an option if your browser window is too small, so if you're looking for it and it's not there, make your browser window bigger.  I give students my Kahoot user name so they can look for my materials, and make sure to title them something obvious like "SPAN 1110 Exam 1 review."

In case it's helpful, I made a video for my students showing them how they can use Kahoots in preview mode for individual review.

EdPuzzle: Saludos

I'm teaching 100% online for the first time this summer, so I'm starting to create materials for my courses.  I decided I want to do short video lessons, but I also wanted to integrate an interactive element since just watching/listening to a video isn't very engaging and won't help learners process the language.

After a little looking around, I decided to use EdPuzzle, which allows me to take existing videos from a number of sources and add my own interactive components.  Students can sign up for an EdPuzzle account, or you can choose to make it available to anyone with the link. EdPuzzle provides an embed code so that you can embed it into a course platform such as Blackboard. If you want to assign the videos as homework, you can create a class and require students to enroll, and the best part is that it's free for you and your students.

I'll be posting all of my materials in Blackboard for my courses, but I'll also post them here for more general accessibility.

Saludos