Combining Jobs

School Site: CHS
Subject: Spanish

My 3 hours of sleep was abruptly interrupted by the Imperial March, my ringtone, at 5:30am today. The nice automated lady came on asking for my password, she's so rude, she never does formalities. I listen to the assignment, and instead of pressing '2' to hear the assignment again, I press '1', sealing my fate for the day. Every ounce of my grumpy sleep deprived body tells me to go online and cancel the assignment, except for the ounce that needs money, and ultimately that wins out.


Mi Espanol es bien en los areas que lo usan mucho, en mi trabajo por ejemplo.  But to teach spanish the whole day, to spanish speakers? This task seemed much more daughting. I arrived on time, unfortunately the other teacher who was supposed to give me the assignment arrives 10 minutes before the start of school. By the time his computer has loaded up and he has translated the email from the teacher I'm subbing for, I'm left with the following instructions.

"Ask the students where they are in the book, and have them do the next assignment."

Yeah, ok, unfortunately students can't remember what they had for lunch, let alone what they did before their vacation. Never fear though because I am a war veteran by now, and I know how to dance.

Period 1: 

This was English 1, I did not feel they would be advanced enough for a writing assignment, so I did assigned them something out of the book, I survived without consequence.

Periods 3-6: Spanish for Spanish Speaker

 I had a blast improving a lesson today. During my prep period, which was second period, I decided to do a writing assignment based on video games. I am, afterall," The GameStop Guy," might as well embrace it.

I explained to the students that I work at GameStop in Colton and that I get a lot of Spanish speaking customers, my vocabulary is unfortunately limited so I had them help me out. I had them help me translate words pertaining to the games I was trying to sell, and then I tried to sell the game to the class in Spanish.  

The resulting assignment looked a little like this.

Halo 4	1 Space   2 Aliens 3 FPS 4 Online 5 Coma 6 Extra Online Content	1 Espacio 2 Extra Tereste 3 Primer Persona 4 Enlina 5 Coma 6. Extra cosas avancadas
Call Of Duty Black Ops II	1 War 2 Futuristic 3 Robots 4 Zombies 5 Co- Op	1 Guerra 2 En El Futuro 3 Robo 4 Zombies 5 Equipo De Dos or Mas
Assassins Creed III	1 Civil War 2 Native Americans 3 Graphics 4 Assassin 5 Hack and Slash 6 Open World	1 Guerra Civil 2 Nativo Americano 3 Buena Graficos 4 Assesino 5 Contrar y Trajar 6 Mundo Abierto

After each set of words I would try to sell the one game, then move on to the next game, translate some more words, and try to make my explanation better. At the end I had them try to sell me something, anything, on their own paper, in Spanish, and within a minimum of 5 sentences.

The result was a lot of fun, even if a lot of the girls were not wholey interested in the subject matter, they were very engaged with translating the words. I felt pretty accomplished with this assignment. The kids were engaged, I snuck in some learning, and it killed 1/2 hour of an otherwise loud and long babysitting gig. I cannot say that it had wholey renewed my vigor to teach, but I certainly found that feeling that first drew me to teaching, I thought it was long gone, turns out it's a drug for me, unfortunately I need stronger doses to keep the buzz going.