Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My sophomore came home from school stressed that his Spanish 4 teacher only speaks Spanish in class and she talks fast and no one understands what’s going on except one kid who speaks Spanish at home. He said everyone’s saying the class is a gpa killer and he’s really worried he’ll end up with a C or a D. I had heard that there’s a big jump from Spanish 3 to Spanish 4, but this seems extreme. Has anyone had luck with a tutor for Spanish 4? I feel like my son doesn’t know any Spanish despite getting As and Bs in Spanish 3. We would’ve let him drop it this year, but we keep hearing most colleges require two years of the same language *in high school* (and he keeps telling me he has lots of friends who aren’t doing that, including some who have older siblings who’ve been through the college process). What are we missing? Should we have let him drop it??

If at all possible, for liberal arts colleges, you should take the language through the first AP level. This is not only for admission, but, often, language is a graduation requirement. If you know that your student is going to focus on STEM and not at a liberal arts college, you can consider dropping. Get the tutor.

Anonymous wrote:My sophomore came home from school stressed that his Spanish 4 teacher only speaks Spanish in class and she talks fast and no one understands what’s going on except one kid who speaks Spanish at home. He said everyone’s saying the class is a gpa killer and he’s really worried he’ll end up with a C or a D. I had heard that there’s a big jump from Spanish 3 to Spanish 4, but this seems extreme. Has anyone had luck with a tutor for Spanish 4? I feel like my son doesn’t know any Spanish despite getting As and Bs in Spanish 3. We would’ve let him drop it this year, but we keep hearing most colleges require two years of the same language *in high school* (and he keeps telling me he has lots of friends who aren’t doing that, including some who have older siblings who’ve been through the college process). What are we missing? Should we have let him drop it??

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol to all the parents asking teachers to speak more slowly. Seriously?

I know. I cringed when I read that. Like you're at the 4th level of a world language. Speaking slowly at that stage is a sign you have not made the kind of progress you should have in learning and mastering the language.

Anonymous wrote:Lol to all the parents asking teachers to speak more slowly. Seriously?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

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!

Anonymous wrote:Spanish is widely available here to everyone since birth. We learned to understand Russian, German, and Finnish just by watching tv. Spanish would have been piece of cake.
Learning should be happening all the time and not just in classroom. I speak Spanish after two semesters.
So many words are the same as in English and many are only few letters different. Tv, youtube, tik-tok blast Spanish day and night.
Your kid is just not into it.

Anonymous wrote:My sophomore came home from school stressed that his Spanish 4 teacher only speaks Spanish in class and she talks fast and no one understands what’s going on except one kid who speaks Spanish at home. He said everyone’s saying the class is a gpa killer and he’s really worried he’ll end up with a C or a D. I had heard that there’s a big jump from Spanish 3 to Spanish 4, but this seems extreme. Has anyone had luck with a tutor for Spanish 4? I feel like my son doesn’t know any Spanish despite getting As and Bs in Spanish 3. We would’ve let him drop it this year, but we keep hearing most colleges require two years of the same language *in high school* (and he keeps telling me he has lots of friends who aren’t doing that, including some who have older siblings who’ve been through the college process). What are we missing? Should we have let him drop it??