"What's up?"

My recent adventures of the last two days have included: introducing myself to the professors and the newest matriculating students at San Fernando Rey where I will be teaching, searching out and introducing myself to a professor at the city's university in whose class I hope to attend over the next couple months (and obtaining e-mail addresses for two other profs who weren't at the university when I visited), sitting in on another couple English classes at a school near my house, and playing some basketball with the local club team.  All of the above mentioned activities went exceptionally well and I'll share more news on several of them soon.

I wanted, though, to share a brief reflection from my time spent at the local school in English classes with junior high aged students.  These students (to the best of my knowledge from asking questions so far...) attend a school that operates on a block schedule format, in which some of their core subject classes meet every day and other classes like English meet only twice, or maybe even only once, per week. Claudia Gomez, the teacher in whose class I have been observing, confirmed my initial thoughts that this scheduling creates a serious lack of time for her as a teacher to implement comprehensive, effective lessons and real language practice for her students. However, I stray from the point that I want to convey: Claudia's other pressing concern is that some of her students have yet to purchase their books, despite the fact that they have been in school for a couple of weeks already if I'm not mistaken. While public education is free in Argentina, the students have to purchase their textbooks (at the least for this Spanish course). It appears that this delay in purchasing happens for a variety of reasons, one of them being that the students and their parents have to go to their local bookstore to find these materials. When several schools/teachers decide to use the same text for their class (as, Claudia shared, is often the case), this creates a sudden shortage of books for the students' needs.  Students have to wait in these circumstances for new books to be shipped to the store.  While I do not know if this is the case for all classes (that students must purchase their own textbooks), I imagine that it might be \and that similar delays in commencing with curriculum materials may occur in other subjects too.

As a result, my thoughts drift to the pro's and con's of this textbook provision practice related to my own public school experiences in the United States. For me, to think about giving two thumbs up to a foreign language textbook, I would certainly expect up-to-date vocabulary. Other necessary elements would be highlights of relatively recent cultural icons and events, at least brief coverage on diversity of the people in place(s)/country(ies) where the foreign language is used, hopefully media in the form of music, audio conversations or short films (at least in the teacher's addition to share at large with the class but even better if the student has his/her own cd or access to an on-line resource bank), etc. Yes, I have many expectations. The book that the students are using here, titled "What's up?" has many of these elements. Recalling my own high school Spanish textbooks, I know I could say little of the same as the books were nearly 20 years old-- no exaggeration. Nonetheless, there was no question that every student in my Spanish class had a textbook from day one. Which is the greater sacrifice: the educational material's quality or the students' time in the school? What is the teacher's role in each of these situations to fill the gap created by the system in which they work? And thus, this academic debate will ruminate in my brain and most inevitably become more complex as I spend more time in the schools here.

Also, I'm going to have to make time to write these posts at a different time of day. There is no way I can be up til 2 am at night when classes start next week....