Take a walk with Julieta Venegas
More than a decade ago, I taught at a small, rural high school near the border in southern Arizona. One year, the Spanish teacher had to take disability in the middle of the year.
Needing coverage, the principal pulled my personnel file. He noted that I had six college credits in Spanish. Seeing that her class met during the same period as my German section, he reassigned her students to me. For the rest of the year, I did my best to teach Spanish I-II and German I-II in the same room.
My students knew a crisis situation when they saw one, and they showed remarkable patience, especially the Spanish students. Many of them were native speakers who — having lost a teacher fluent in their mother tongue — had inherited a bumbling güero objectively unqualified for the job.
I devised what seemed like a workable plan: I put the German kids on one side of the room with seatwork while I drilled the Spanish students. In the middle of the period, the hispanohablantes got a book assignment while I taught the Teutonophiles.
My plan utterly failed. Instead of attending to their written assignments in class, the students started listening to the lesson in the other language. And participating. Some of them even took notes.
Initially, I resisted, but the kids promised to finish their assignments at home…
