Do students really need to be able to produce commands with double object pronouns?

TL;DR: No. 😁

One of the things that I've really been enjoying about my job is the flexibility to teach what and how I want to teach. I opted not to use the existing textbook, since it's basically a grammar manual and didn't have a coherent design in terms of developing language proficiency. (This is true of every textbook I've ever seen, by the way. Some are better than others because they have better activities that do foster language proficiency, such as input-based activities and information gap activities, but all textbooks present grammar that students don't really need to know in order to meet the ostensible goals of the unit.)  Anyway, I've enjoyed throwing out stuff I don't think my students really need to know in favor of activities that help them communicate in the target language. It's worth noting that I'm not on the CI (comprehensible input) train. I appreciate various aspects of the CI approach, but research on language acquisition in adolescents and adults indicates that teaching structures can facilitate acquisition as long as it's meaning-based instruction (in other words, as long as you're teaching structures that help students understand and communicate in the target language). So I still teach grammar and will always teach grammar, because there's a lot of meaning that learners will never get if they don't receive explicit grammar instruction. That said, direct grammar instruction comprises less than 5% of my instructional time, because the research evidence also shows that learning the grammar rules of a language doesn't mean that we can use the target language. We need exposure to the language and lots of practice, so that's what we do.

I was looking over my spring units, and seeing that I have commands coming up in Spanish 2. Last year, I think I had a section on a test that required students to give commands, but as I was considering this unit, I had an epiphany. When will my students really need to give commands? And furthermore, when will they need to give commands with (double) object pronouns?  The answer for most of them is probably never. Unless they become Spanish teachers or are proficient enough in Spanish that they can use it in a work environment, they really don't need to be able to produce commands.  They do, however, need to be able to recognize when someone is giving them a command, and they need to be able to interpret pronouns that might be attached to a command. So this year, I will still be teaching commands, but I will be asking students to interpret them rather than produce them. (I'll also be asking them to interpret object pronouns, with and without commands.) So for all of my fellow grammar nerds, keep teaching that grammar. But it's worth thinking about if students really need to be able to produce a given grammatical feature, or if they only need to be able to interpret it.

On a related note, I've also started doing a soft introduction to the subjunctive in Spanish 1. When we're talking about verb endings, I point out that the endings are really important because a lot of times the verb ending is all the information you get about who's doing an action. After we'd been working on present tense endings for a few weeks, I told students that the appropriate vowel is also important because if you flip the verb endings (hable instead of habla, for example), you're now producing a different verb form that's used for hypothetical situations. I'm not formally teaching the subjunctive until Spanish 3, but by the time they get to Spanish 3, they should have a (very) basic understanding of what the subjunctive is and what it looks like. For that matter, I also focused on interpretation when I taught the subjunctive last year in Spanish 3/4, because (surprise!) the research indicates that while students are capable of learning to manipulate structures, a lot of times they do this without really understanding what they're doing. But if you first work on teaching them what they structure means, they'll be able to use it appropriately (given sufficient input and experience, of course).  If you're interested in this topic, I recommend reading VanPatten's many papers on this topic, starting with the classic VanPatten & Cadierno (1993).

Working on habit formation in the new year

I have a few things I want to work on in 2019. I don't like calling them resolutions, because resolutions are easily made and easily broken. I've been working on habit formation, because habit formation is what leads to real change, and I only do things that I can maintain long-term. For example, after my son was born in 2014, I started walking. I walked very slowly and for short distances, but I committed to walk regularly. The next year I had free access to a gym, so I started working out on an elliptical. Since the gym was at my job, an hour from my house, I also bought a trampoline jogger and started jogging on a trampoline when I couldn't get to the gym. When my job ended, I decided to bite the bullet and join the Y near my house in order to have access exercise equipment and childcare and started going to the gym almost every day. I don't go to the gym much anymore because I don't want to be around people after I've been at school all day. But I realized that if I wanted to keep improving my fitness, I needed to step up my exercise to get my heart rate up, so I started jogging. I started with a mile, and gradually added distance and am now at 3.25 miles. So what's my point? If I had resolved to start running in 2014, I would have given up pretty quickly, because I wasn't ready to start running. Instead, I made a small change and turned it into a habit, and then as my fitness level has improved, I've pushed myself more, both in terms of quality and quantity. I feel good because I'm making changes that I can live with, instead of trying to push myself to do something that I really don't want to do. I've done the same thing with my diet; rather than make a drastic change that I won't want to stick to, I've made small changes that have added up. The main thing is that I've cut way back on sugary drinks, but I've also added a few more fruits and vegetables to my diet. My diet is still far, far away from being considered a healthy diet, but between diet and exercise, I've lost 60 pounds over 4 years, with plans to drop another 15 in the next year or two. It's been a slow process, but I feel confident that I won't regain the weight because I haven't made temporary changes; I've slowly changed my habits so that I can maintain my progress. I still have my sugary drinks because I still love them, but I only have them on the weekends (and in much smaller quantities than I used to). I still eat wings, nachos, doughnuts, cookies, ice cream, etc., but I eat smaller portions and adjust my total daily calorie intake accordingly.

So one of the habits that I want to form this year is going to bed at the same time every night. I think this will benefit me in many ways...if I can go to bed on time, I'll get a decent night's sleep. I think more clearly and more quickly when I've slept well, and I also eat less...when I'm tired, I just want sugar so that I can stay awake. So my new habit formation goal is to go to bed at 9:30 every night. This will give me a little time to read in bed and still hit my goal of sleeping for 6.5 hours (ideally it would be more, but I'm finding that as I age, I just don't sleep as long as I used to even when I'm not setting an alarm). To assist me in my habit formation, I've set a 9:30 reminder on my Fitbit. However, I've had the 9:30 reminder on my Fitbit for the last year and a half, so the thing I need to change is to stop laughing at the Fitbit when it gives me the bedtime reminder and actually go upstairs and go to bed. 😂

I also joined the 40-hour teacher workweek club this semester. I appreciate the approach of picking one thing from a list to change to make work easier and lighten your load, as I think it keeps it from being more work/too overwhelming to think about. I'm apparently already doing a lot of things that are recommended (batching, simple wardrobe, simple meals), but I'm hopeful that there will be suggestions for my prep time that will help me cut down on the number of hours I prep each week.

Anyway, Happy 2019! This year, I will continue doing all of the things I've been doing, and will be introducing a few small new habits into the mix. There won't be a "new me" this year, but check back in a year or two. I certainly never would have dreamed that I'd be running 3 miles regularly even 2 years ago, and yet, here we are. Pick something that you can do and stick to, and start doing it.

Simplifying and streamlining homework processes

One of the things that I really struggled with last year was keeping up with student homework, and more particularly, with grading homework that was turned in late. This is the first time I've had to wrestle with this, because at the college level I did not accept late homework since I had all assignments listed in the course syllabus on the first day of the semester. (I dropped the lowest few assignments from each category to allow for people being sick or forgetful.) Last year I tried to stagger due dates, but it felt like all I did was keep up with who was missing what, and I spent hours each week filling out slips telling students that they were missing assignments, and then going back and checking to see if they completed the assignments later (most of my assignments are online, and I don't get notifications for completed assignments).

This year I realized I couldn't continue to maintain that workload, so I tweaked a few things to make my life a little easier. The first thing I did was make all homework due on Fridays. That's easier for me, because I can go through once a week and put in grades, and it's easier for my students, because there's never confusion about when things are due. Everything is always due on Friday. Another thing I did was to stop giving out missing homework slips. I teach 9-12 Spanish, and at this age, they are capable of going into PowerSchool and seeing that they're missing homework, especially since I'm putting grades in right away every week. If they dip down into the D-F range, I have them stay after school to do missing homework (part of my school's policy). Other than that, I remind them to check PowerSchool and submit missing assignments, but I'm not taking on the responsibility of telling them multiple times that they're missing things. Probably the best thing I did was to start having students email me when they complete assignments that are late. Most of our assignments are online, and I don't get notifications when things are submitted. Last year I spent hours going through late assignments checking to see if people had submitted, but this year, I put the burden on students. If they submit assignments on time, I will put their grades in and they don't need to notify me about submitting things, but if they submit late, they need to email me so that I know that they've submitted something that needs grading. I tell them that I will not go back through assignments to check for stragglers, so it's the students' responsibility to tell me when they've submitted something. I also make it a requirement that they email me rather than just telling me in class, because otherwise I'll have 20 students tell me that they've submitted 10 different assignments, and then I still have to go through all of the assignments to find who's turned in what because I won't remember who completed what when I have a chance to sit down and go over late homework. The last thing I started doing this year is putting in 0s immediately when I enter homework grades. Last year and at the beginning of this year, I marked things as missing and/or late, but I wasn't putting in 0s. The result was that students didn't turn in missing assignments, because most of them only respond to a drop in their grade. It has saved me a lot of time to put in 0s immediately, and it lets students know immediately that they're missing something in a way that they actually notice. It has resulted in much faster completion of missing assignments, and shows students immediately what happens to their grade when they don't turn things in.

Using Google Drawings to make virtual altars for Día de Muertos

I've been pondering how to have my students make a virtual altar for a loved one or famous person as a part of my mini-unit on Day of the Dead this week, but I wasn't coming up with any satisfactory solutions. There are a few websites that let you build virtual altars, but you can't customize the objects, so they're pretty generic and not really a reflection of any specific person (but they look pretty cool).

I thought about using a virtual bulletin board like Padlet, but I'd either have to create a bulletin board for each student (105 bulletin boards, which would be tedious and require me to upgrade to the paid plan) or I'd have to have students create individual accounts with Padlet. I'm trying to be judicious in the number of accounts I ask students to create, because if every teacher is asking them to create 5 accounts with various websites or apps, that's a lot of usernames and passwords to remember. So I didn't want to do that.

I thought about just letting them choose their own medium because I was having trouble coming up with something, and then I remembered Google Drawings. If your school uses Google Classroom, this is a particularly great option because you can create a blank document or a template and assign it to your students. Google Classroom allows you the option to make a copy for each student, and then voilà! Each student has their own copy that they can use to create a virtual altar. In our case, it's going to look more like a virtual bulletin board unless my students want to make it look more like an altar, but the basic idea is the same. Here's the model I made for my grandma, who passed away in 2015:

When stomach pain makes you thankful

I started having stomach pain in the fall of 2008, at the beginning of my second year on the tenure track. I remember clearly when it started, because I was attending a linguistics conference in Austin, TX. My stomach hurt the entire time I was there and I thought I was getting the stomach flu, but I never vomited. At first it wasn't too bad, but over the course of a few years it slowly got worse until at some point my stomach hurt pretty much all the time every day. At some point I went to the doctor and she put me on an acid reducer, but it didn't help, and my stomach pain kept getting worse. It finally got to a point where it was unbearable and I asked to have tests done to figure out what was wrong. In the end, it wasn't anything serious; a stomach scope showed that I had a hiatal hernia, which was causing acid reflux, and once they upped the dosage to 40 mg of omeprazole, I could function again. On my doctor's advice, I repeatedly tried to reduce my dosage, but every time I dropped down to 20 mg my stomach pain came back. I switched to a safer med category in 2013-2014 when I was pregnant and breastfeeding, but I still needed to be on it. I finally started tapering down successfully in 2015, and eventually was able to stop taking it altogether without having stomach pain. In retrospect it's clear that stress from being on the tenure track was responsible for the stomach acid, and as I started to recover from being in a job I hated, my stomach started recovering. Surprisingly, a year of being unemployed was apparently less stressful to my stomach than being on the tenure track, and I did not have to go back on the acid reducer in 2016. 

So this past week I was having the same kind of stomach pain intermittently during the day on Tuesday, and it kept getting worse through the evening. I had just been celebrating that although my job is demanding, I enjoy it and feel like it's a better match for my interests, so I haven't been experiencing all of the adverse health problems resulting from stress that I experienced while I was on the tenure track. When my stomach pain hit on Tuesday, I didn't think anything of it at first, but as it kept getting worse, I remembered when my stomach pain started 10 years ago, and I started thinking about what I would do next. I love my job, but one thing I've learned over the last decade is that if my body is telling me that my job is too stressful, I need to listen and make some changes. I took Tums before I went to bed and hoped that my stomach would feel better the next day, but I woke up at 2 and my stomach still hurt, so I took more Tums and went back to bed. At 3, I woke up again and finally realized that the stomach pain was the stomach flu, which is why the Tums before bedtime didn't help. (It also explains why I was tired enough to go bed at 9:00, which should have been my first clue that I was getting sick, not having indigestion.) I hate having the stomach flu because I hate vomiting, and now that I'm middle aged, I hate it more because my abs are sore the next day from vomiting and my back hurts from lying in bed all day. But this week I was relieved and grateful that it was only the stomach flu and not the beginning of another bout with stomach acid, and was happy to realize that I would be back to normal in about 48 hours. 

Moral of the story: Listen to your body. I kept trying to make adjustments, always thinking that at some point I'd somehow figure out the secret and be happy with my job. I thought this even though I was having debilitating stomach pain and had to go on 40 mg of omeprazole in my early 30s, and even though I kept having recurring bouts of depression that got progressively worse each time they hit. It's been hard to transition out of academia because I spent so much time pursuing that goal that I just kept trying to make it fit because I didn't want to feel that I'd wasted so many years in grad school and on the tenure track, and as my mom says, my mama didn't raise no quitter. So I'm not where I imagined I would be in my 40s, but that's turning out to be the best thing for me.

(Silver lining to the stomach flu: I ate whatever I wanted today and I'm still several pounds below my regular current weight. :D) 

Time hack for Google forms

I use Google forms every day, and frequently use more than one Google form per day. They're great for doing quick vocab checks, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, dictation, and lots more stuff. I like them because they provide immediate feedback to students, and it gives me a way to monitor their progress without spending hours grading. I only use them for formative assessments, so I'm not recording grades from them, but I do use the forms to assess participation, as a way to make sure that students are doing what they're supposed to be doing during class time.

This will super obvious to many people, but it took me a year to realize that my current method of checking Google forms wasn't sustainable for me in terms of time. I had the forms set to collect email addresses, but then when I went back to check for completion/comprehension, the forms were
listed in order of submission, and there's no way to change that. So it took me a ton of time every week to go through my Google forms because submissions weren't in any coherent order. But there is a very quick work-around.  I started adding two questions to my Google forms this year:

1.  What class are you in? (with a dropdown list of all of my classes)
2.  What is your last name?

Then I can go to the response tab in the Google form, click on the spreadsheet link to make it into a spreadsheet, and then go to "Data" and select "Sort range."  I select the "header row" option, and then tell it to sort by what class students are in, and then I add students' last names as a second criterion for sorting. Et voila! All of my Google forms are now sorted alphabetically by students' last names and class periods, so it just takes a few minutes to go through and check for completion.  (Also this year I have an amazing TA who's checking my Google forms for me, which I am ridiculously excited about!)

Infographics for reading comprehension

One of the struggles with working on reading comprehension with authentic resources for low-proficiency language learners is that a lot of stuff is just too text-heavy to be a really good reading comprehension activity...if you have to gloss most of the words for students to understand it, it's not really helping them learn to read in the target language.

One of my particular challenges this past year has been creating my own curriculum and materials for Spanish 1, Spanish 2, and Spanish 3/4 with 55 minutes of plan time every day. (Hint: This is not possible. I get to school before 6:30 every morning and usually leave after 5, and worked both Saturdays and Sundays most weekends last year.) This meant I had to work very quickly, and couldn't spend a lot of time scaffolding more complex reading assignments, but I still wanted to get students reading at least a little bit in Spanish. Enter the marvelous infographic.

I'm a big fan of pictoline (@pictoline) because I appreciate the artist's sense of humor, but the infographics are also great to use for teaching. They're created for native speakers of the target language, and since they're designed to be interesting, they tend to engage students more than other types of reading assignments. The use of visuals helps students figure out meaning from context, and the limited use of text keeps the reading from being overwhelming. During a food unit last year in Spanish 1, for example, I had students read this infographic about food coma. They were able to deduce that "mal del puerco" (translated literally: "evil of the pig" or "curse of the pig") meant "food coma" without looking it up.

To keep it simple, I put questions in a Google form, and I always have at least one question asking students to guess at the meaning of a word or phrase from context. Students get immediate feedback and can see how much they understood as soon as they submit the form, and I can see pretty quickly how much people understood (though the ability to do a question-by-question view would be really helpful, Google).  I don't take grades for them since we're working on building our reading comprehension skills, but I do check the Google forms to see how much they understood (and to make sure that they were staying on task...I use the form completion as part of my participation grading criteria).