The wind down to the end of the 2023/2024 school year is bittersweet. I am signing yearbooks and packing away school supplies and posters, and while I am looking forward to the rest and rejuvenation that summer brings I will miss these kids. Last year I discovered the power of positive phone calls which helped me get my groove back and fall in love with teaching again. This year I continued that practice. I planted seeds of positive calls in the fall and winter and by spring most of those seeds had blossomed into the fruit of mutually respectful relationships.
I also implemented two new strategies this year which have contributed greatly to those healthy relationships. The first strategy was instituting a password the kids had to to tell me before they could enter the classroom. I began with a password to help me learn their names. I stood in the hall outside my door and asked each student ¿Cómo se llama? and they had to say Me llamo and their name before they could come inside. Using this strategy I learned every name in one week. That is the fastest I've ever learned all the names of my students plus I learned what they liked to be called and how to pronounce it correctly. Then I changed the question to ¿Qué es tu appellido? (What is your last name?) Asking this as my password allowed me to quickly learn the correct pronunciation for the last names as well.
Every few weeks I change up the password. But what I noticed was that seeing and speaking to each student in a way that required us to interact and to look each other in the eye was a great way to develop relationship with that student. Interestingly, I did not do this with my Advisory class and I never felt that I developed the relationships with those kids that I did with my Spanish classes. Next year I plan to do a similar activity with each Advisory student and see what difference that makes.
The second strategy I implemented was a way to make lemonade out of lemons. I have been sick more this year than any other year since I've been a teacher. I decided to create maestros invitados (invited teachers) using students to run the first ten minutes of class. I invited and trained students from each class to run the class through our opening routines and first few slides of our daily slideshow.
Each day's opening task is a daily question the kids have to copy down and answer. I then call 3 or 4 students to answer the question, paying them a paper peso when they answer. I read through the plans for the day and the daily objective. Next they study their flashcards for two minutes and write the number they know on their monthly calendars. Then I tell them the weather and temperatures in Fahrenheit and Celsius to practice numbers, which they also write on their calendars.
These routines are not complicated but are hard to explain to a non Spanish speaking substitute. Now I leave the names of my maestros invitados as part of my sub lesson plans and they run the whole class through those routines. The maestros invitados are allowed to pick someone else in the class to help them and that has worked amazingly well.
I started doing this in April after I caught pink eye the first time. When I caught it again three weeks later I had the maestros invitados trained and they were able to help the substitutes. It worked well when I had to leave early for track meets and a non Spanish speaking colleague covered for me. And when I got food poisoning last week and was out unexpectedly for two days I knew that the kids would know what to do.
Interestingly, one of my best maestros invitados is a boy I wrote a referral on earlier in the year because of poor behavior for a substitute. But giving him a job and making him the ally of the substitute completely changed his behavior! No more bad sub reports. Now that is a win win!
