Reply to Day 1 and already stressed about Spanish 4

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid's 8th grade Spanish 3 teacher spoke Spanish at the class about 90% of the time. It was a jolt on that first day of class, and my daughter panicked as well! But actually she had straight As that whole year.

Just because at first it seems scary to be talked to in a language you don't understand, doesn't mean you can't pick things up from context clues. That first week, DD realized she could fill in all the words she didn't know from her teacher's gestures, and over the year, it became easier as class routines become ingrained. So it wasn't actually difficult to follow.

Please reassure your kid, OP! His teacher is doing him a favor. Creating as immersive an environment as possible is the only way to learn.

And he should be careful to memorize all the vocab lists and grammar irregularities. This is what's going to get him good grades. DD's 8th grade teacher told them this at the beginning of the year and repeated it to us parents at Back-to-school Night.

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In our experience (immersion) it takes a very talented teacher to be able to do this. They need to be patient, speak slowly at times, gesture and repeat certain things with the gesture. All the while speaking 100% in the language.

Teacher in the OP just sounds incapable at the most generous, and a-holey at the least generous. [/quote]

OP here. He actually said the teacher seems nice. I just think she's a native Spanish speaker who probably thinks students coming out of Spanish 3 know more Spanish than is the case, so she just speaks Spanish to them like she would to anyone else. For the poster who say my kids was given an inflated sense of mastery in Spanish 3, I'm not sure he thought he'd mastered it. He just didn't expect Spanish 4 to seem like it's several levels above Spanish 3![/quote]

I'm the PP who said your kid was given an inflated sense of mastery. I'm not saying it's your kid's fault, but Spanish in high school tops out at Spanish 5, I believe. So it makes sense that Spanish 4 would be 100% in Spanish and truly be advanced. Your kid's Spanish 3 teacher didn't prepare your son adequately for Spanish 4.[/quote]

It doesn’t really top out at Spanish 5 — there’s AP Spanish and Spanish Literature after that.  I don’t think even the kids getting 5 of the AP are truly fluent - I’d call them more highly proficient.  So expecting a kid to follow along with 100% Spanish at full speed at the START of Spanish 4 seems a little much to me.  Slowing down a bit seems appropriate, with the goal of getting to normal speed by end of Spanish 4 or into Spanish 5.  Fwiw, my kid took AP Spanish as a sophomore, got an 5, and then did two more years of Spanish in HS.  And I still wouldn’t really call her fluent, although she’s pretty capable.  [/quote]

My kid's Spanish 3 teacher spoke to them in Spanish.  Stop blabbing about stuff you don't know.

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At Westland Middle School. [/quote]

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