Irish dancing in the Bronx, and other tales

I saw this story at the bottom of the New York Times Page and I thought of the other day when I was explaining the cultural background of a new song to my sixth grade class. The words of the song say "El patio de mi casa es muy particular/cuando llueve no se moja como los demas." (The patio/porch of my house is very unique, when it rains it doesn't get wet like all the others.) So I was trying to explain to them how houses in Spain often have a courtyard in the center, a paved private patio where the family can hang out, and when you walk down the street on a summer day you can often see through the gates of the houses into the beautiful courtyards. The conversation at that point sounded like this:

"Can we go to Spain?"

"Yeah, let's go."

"Oh, guys I would love to take you to Spain, but we can't go, it would cost thousands of dollars."

"We could have a bake sale."

"Or a car wash."

"Please, Ms. Werezak."

"I promise I'll try to take you on a field trip here in New York before the end of the year."

I have to say I was reminded of the scene in the move Freedom Writers when the inner city students who are reading The Diary of Anne Frank decide that they want to meet Miep Gies. Their teacher is a little overwhelmed, but they are determined, so they do have fund raisers and they pay for her to come and visit their class. It would be easier if it were just a person to fly in so that my students can meet them. But this... What Spanish teacher wouldn't love to take their class on a trip to Spain. It's one of those moments when my students' hearts just blow me away. I've only had a couple moments like this in my three years of teaching, but I wouldn't trade them for anything. :)

Any ideas what kind of special thing I could do for my class to "take them to Spain"?

On Learning

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the process of learning, which is quite a luxurious thing for a frazzled urban middle school teacher to do. What got me started was my friend Nigel's post on praise choruses and worship music in the church. He is putting together a songbook for the youth group at his church and was searching for songs (old and new) that had meaningful theology in their lyrics. He mentioned how easy it is to remember the songs we sing regularly in church, so we ought to take them seriously.

It is an interesting point, because around the same time I attended a professional development for work about using songs in the Foreign Language classroom. I learned Spanish with songs, but as I attended a Christian school, we sang popular praise choruses translated into Spanish. This was especially useful because we had a general idea what they meant in English. But I didn't know where to find "secular" Spanish songs when I started teaching here in the public school. After the PD, I very randomly ran into a young lady who had been in the same session and was headed to the Instituto Cervantes, a Spanish cultural foundation in the city. She told me about the library that they had there, and I asked if I could come along. I found this great book that came with a tape of traditional Spanish language children's songs (I happen to have a good old fashioned tape player at school, thanks to the teacher before me who left it when she retired).

Singing has completely re-charged my classroom. I am having more fun. My students are having more fun. They sing in Spanish. They complain that their friends sing the songs at home without knowing the words. They do the motions and learn vocabulary (yay for kinetic learning). Their parents are amazed to hear them "speaking" some Spanish. Just when I had begun to despair that they would ever be able to memorize vocabulary. It's a beautiful thing!

But what is most interesting to me is that the first time I teach them a song, it is usually a disaster. They complain that they can't learn the words. They fumble everything up. I hear strange phrases repeated from kids who insist they are saying what I just said. They complain that they don't know what the song is talking about. But the second day, it's more familiar. By the third day they're requesting the song. It is the good, old fashioned repetition that cements the song in their minds and helps them to become better Spanish speakers.

I'm also in a Sunday school class right now about Worship and the Prayer Book led by our minister, and it has made me think about how important repetition can be during a worship service as a teaching tool. The prayers and creeds we say weekly as a part of our liturgy teach us to think a certain way about prayer and faith. They, like the songs we sing, are good training. They are what we will really remember.

Of course, this does not automatically mean that we will know how to apply the truths we memorize. If my students thought they were "speaking Spanish" to someone just by singing their songs, a native speaker might laugh at them, or maybe recognize the song and join in. But too many people have rejected the educational value of this "rote" memorization. It is a good, necessary and enjoyable jumping off point. A solid ground to grow in.

Thank you, Thomas Cranmer. :)

P. S. From a NYT article on recent Math education research:

"[T]he report found it is important for students to master their basic math facts well enough that their recall becomes automatic, stored in their long-term memory, leaving room in their working memory to take in new math processes.
'For all content areas, practice allows students to achieve automaticity of basic skills — the fast, accurate and effortless processing of content information — which frees up working memory for more complex aspects of problem solving,' the report said. "

How this is going to begin...

Sometimes I try to see Julian of Norwich from a traditional theological perspective. From that high position, she is unorthodox, to say the least. One might call her a universalist in her perspectives on salvation and strange in her ideas about sin. But when I actually read Julian, I am completely taken up by her words and her images. There is none of this Post-Enlightenment "this is that" and "that is the other" propositional theology. Hers is more comprehensive and less systematic. Hers is more personal and less interested in categorizing who will go where after death (the true downfall of most American Theology). I like the word "organic" (although it is now becoming trendy and commercialized and thus losing all meaning).

What draws me to Julian is her immediacy. She certainly reached across 600 years to speak to me. Okay, so I'm decidedly a sympathizer with the premodern way of percieving the world. That must be almost entirely due to my precarious situation as a postmodern. It is also due to qualities that I might call, hmm... romantic (as in Whitman and Wordsworth and Coleridge, although I like their poetry some days more than others). I think like an artist and, if I might put it humbly, a seer. It is difficult to say that I aspire to understand truth and beauty in the world, but that is what I hunger for. Every instant is important in this light. The white buisiness man who shoved a young latino on the train this morning is important. The snippet of a conversation I overheard last week is important. It is important when anything out of the "ordinary" happens.

Needless to say this sensibility seems to be completely squashed in my day job right now. Middle schoolers have an incredibly poor sense of the abstract (and terrible vocabularies). I have a really hard time with the concrete (and usually they don't have the foggiest idea what I'm saying). Put us together in a classroom and chaos is likely to ensue. However, sometimes I forget to make the connection that right now discreetly telling a sweet, dark-skinned girl not to wear a white bra with a white sweater is also important. It is also a part of discerning a universe full of truth and beauty.

This blog is for me to write about God and books and culture and especially poetry. My life is exciting in other ways, which will determine my choice of books and topics. But I have a Xanga for the petty, daily parts of my life. I want to start a more serious blog to record my ideas. I need some sort of impetus to dream of returning to the life that I left when I joined the Teaching Fellows.