THINK PIECE
Hola, Teacher!
“They’re here!”
A few miles from the NMH campus, a fourth grader at Gill Elementary School looks out the window and sees the van pulling into the parking lot. The classroom starts to buzz in anticipation, and soon a quartet of NMH students is peeking in the doorway. “Hola,” they call out. “Hola,” the fourth graders call back. Spanish class begins.
The NMH students, 11 in all, come to the Gill school once a week to teach basic Spanish to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders. The teens are enrolled in NMH’s Spanish IV/Service Learning Project class (SPA412) with teacher Bea Garcia. They meet on campus Monday through Thursday to create and refine lessons, then head down the road to Gill on Friday to put their plans into action. The teaching serves as the students’ workjob as well as the culmination of a week’s study in Spanish.
In one elementary classroom, the sixth-graders are acting out verbs. A boy stands up in front of his classmates and jogs in place. “Correr, to run!” someone shouts. Another kid takes his turn, opening and closing his mouth repeatedly and gesturing grandly with his hands. “Hablar, to speak!” comes the answer. Nick, one of the sixth-graders, calls the class “awesome” and attributes its high quality to the fact that the NMH students aren’t a whole lot older than he is. “They’re not really kids, but they know us; they know how kids are,” he says. “They make Spanish really fun.”
That, Garcia says, is the result of hours of preparation, both inside and outside her classroom. Her students “quickly see how challenging it is to make a lesson plan work,” she says. Making activities engaging and hands-on, finding the right number of them to fill a class period, establishing rules to manage behavior—“it works for a particular kind of student,” Garcia says, “someone who is creative, who’s good with working in a group, who likes young kids.”
Garcia introduced the service-learning Spanish class to NMH three years ago. She’d been an elementary school teacher for years in Uruguay, and missed interacting with young children. Once the program got off the ground, it expanded to include NMH French service-learning classes that work with students at the Northfield, Massachusetts, elementary school. Garcia finds that SPA412 gives her deeper understanding of her students’ skills and progress. “It’s so interesting how their learning styles have an impact on how they teach," she says. "Some of them are more visual; others are more oral or musical. Some stay attached to whatever lesson plan they’ve developed; others are more flexible. Some even take on a different persona when they teach.”
Down the hall at Gill, fourth graders are using simple adjectives to describe family members. “If I wanted to say ‘My brother is tall,’ what would that be?” Nisha Malik ’11 asks. “Mi hermano es…” “Alto?” one child asks. “Si! Yes!” Malik answers, and holds up her hand for a high-five. Malik chose SPA412 over a typical advanced Spanish class because she liked the idea of incorporating community service into her learning; besides, being with kids just feels comfortable to her. “I tend to get nervous when I speak Spanish in a regular class, but here I can say anything,” she says. Malik also thinks she's found a potential career. “I’m a patient person," she says. "Patience is a really important part of teaching."
Spanish IV at Gill Elementary from Northfield Mount Hermon School on Vimeo.
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