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A Difficult Language

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I hate “projects” and never assign them but this semester I teach with other people’s syllabi and have to sit through endless and boring “projects” while nothing gets learned by anybody.

One of the “projects” requires students to incorporate a song in Spanish that the class has to listen to while looking at the lyrics copy-pasted into a PowerPoint. I have no idea what the pedagogic value of this activity is supposed to be in a Spanish 101 course, but I can’t cancel the project at this late stage in the course.

So today a student showed us the lyrics of the song he had chosen, and we stared at them. Finally, one of the students exclaimed,

“I’m sorry, but I feel like I’m learning exactly nothing in this course. We are in November, and I don’t think I have learned any Spanish. I look at these lyrics and I don’t understand anything. It’s like they are in a completely different language!”

“Yes, this song is in Portuguese,” I said.

All we had time to do today in this course was listen to two of these “projects.” I have never felt this useless in my life. I mean, I’m getting paid to sit and stare at Portuguese song lyrics in a Spanish course and listen to students read out slides they copy-pasted from Wikipedia and don’t even begin to understand.

12 responses to “A Difficult Language”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    How did the student find portuguese lyrics instead of Spanish ones? From what I remember, in the new world brazilian lyrics tend to be more interesting and memorable than Spanish lyrics so maybe it wasn’t a bad thing….

    On projects: I have students do some kinds of projects but I don’t let them use powerpoint (the enemy of all that is good and kind and true in learning). They have notes on paper (which the other students get too) and they get feedback on the content and delivery from the other students.

    In short, there are projects and projects and they’re not all a waste of time. Though this one certainly seems like one. How much freedom do you have to alter the way the songs are presented? I could get away with completely reworking an existing assignment (and often have) but I understand you might be locked into a syllabus that gives too many specifics.

    I also may have found a way to scare students away from google translate (crossing fingers). I gave them a text that had been run through and told them to fix it (without havng access to the original) and then after they made their best guesses as to what it was supposed to mean showed them the original and talked about some of the problems with GT. Crucially they realized that fixing a gt text into something that was vaguely acceptable was no less (and in some ways more) work than translating from scratch.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      This project requires a PP and assigns 20% of the grade for students to have the required number of slides in it (30). It takes them forever to go through the 30 slides! Boring!

      The worst part is that half of the students presented before I got to the course, and now I can’t change the assignment without making it seem unfair.

      There are only 3 weeks of teaching left, so I guess I can resign myself to this.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        “This project requires a PP and assigns 20% of the grade for students to have the required number of slides in it (30)”

        That really sounds like some of the stupidest shit I’ve heard recently. I don’t allow pp but a co-teacher for one course of mine does and so I’ve had to stay awake through a few, but I’ve yet to see a student pp presentation worth pissing on.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          These PP projects really develop the hugely marketable skill of looking up pictures of kittens in Google Images. Every student feels the need to include pictures of kittens to the point where I’m wondering if the course is titled Felinology 101.

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  2. Vanessa Sosa Avatar
    Vanessa Sosa

    I completely understand, I hate these dumb projects and doing shit on PowerPoint. My Intro to Special Ed teacher loves this shit, she’s a young teacher who thinks that PowerPoint allows the students to be “creative” and it’s less work for her to grade when you cut and paste crap from Wikipedia instead of writing a paper. I’d rather write the paper, the student would have to actually read a damn book and write something on paper but that’s more work for her to grade. When and if I have my own class, I’m not letting them do PowerPoint, they are writing a paper and they have better show the sources. And no dumb group projects in class, my teacher is big into that shit too.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      There were also 4 group projects scheduled in this course but I cancelled the remaining two because there was no class time left for actual teaching. Just projects.

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  3. David Bellamy Avatar
    David Bellamy

    I don’t like group projects at all. I do not understand why some faulty think they are wonderful.

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Projects are awful.
    Honestly, if I were you, I would take absolute control over the course and screw what the old syllabus said. Syllabi are subject to change, and these students will get a lot more out of your teaching style than frivolous projects!!!!!

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I know but I don’t want to make the poor students who already did their projects to feel bad. In anotehr section where there are no projects, we are having a great time, and everybody is at least learning something.

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  5. Z Avatar
    Z

    What is a project and how is it different from a presentation of highlights from a research paper (which I do do)?

    How bad is the assignment I sometimes do, which *is* about a song — present a song (such that the whole class is exposed to musicians, famous songs, and musical styles, and learns that they can understand lyrics) … and the student has to use adjectives, verb tenses, etc., to tell us about the author/singer/band, their interests, their impact?

    I don’t use PP but will let people present brief clips from music videos, films, etc.

    ?

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      A presentation has a topic while a project has several different parts which are not necessarily even related to each other.

      I think it’s great to bring music to class but telling Spanish 101 students to find lyrics to a song in Spanish and put them into a PP has very dubious educational value.
      Maybe I feel this way because I hate Spanish 101. I can do 102 and upwards well enough but 101 is driving me up a wall.

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      1. Z Avatar
        Z

        Hm. I do the song presentation in the 4th semester sometimes, or in a different way, sometimes, in the intro to literature/poetry.

        Projects: apparently my 201 (3d semester) students had a lot of their time wasted this way in the first year, and this is why they do not know anything.

        I am as happy with 101 as with any language class but people do not approve of how I teach it / what I teach in it. I teach the four skills and culture, and I require full sentences (simple ones, but full ones), and insist students talk about real things. Do you like grapes? Yes, I like them, but I prefer bananas — I think it is legit to expect students to work at this level in 101 but they and the other faculty think I should instead have them matching the word banana to a picture of one and leave it at that.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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