The Spanish Program at St. Joseph-Ogden High School places an emphasis on realistic and applicable situations.
Teacher Zak Sutton told the St. Joseph-Ogden Board of Education during their October meeting that numerous SJO students have told him how they have used Spanish in the real world.
Sutton said a student who has a job at the local grocery store has a Spanish speaking customer who prefers to come into the store when she is working because she can talk to him in Spanish, another student used Spanish at her job to help a customer get the right tools for a home improvement job, yet another told a stranger that they dropped their coat at Disney World.
“I have received numerous emails, letters, texts and I’m person feedback from graduated students who tell me how they are still using Spanish in their lives,” he said. “It’s really rewarding and awesome they are walking away with those abilities.”
SJO graduate Mark Maddock took Spanish at SJO and said what he learned was invaluable, so much so that it helped him test out of every required Spanish class at the University of Illinois.
“It’s hard to be comfortable using any foreign language without full immersion into the language but I believe that the teachers at Saint Joseph-Ogden were able to get us as close to fluent as possible without us living in a foreign country,” he said. “The comfortability level depends on the student but the teachers do their best to foster a comfortable learning environment.”
SJO has 295 students who currently take Spanish.
“As an elective, we are not scaring kids away,” Sutton said.
On average, 300 students take a Spanish class each year.
Teacher Veronica Harbaugh told the board how they have completely changed the Spanish curriculum in recent years.
The classes no longer use books. Instead, they rely on videos, movies, TV series, online articles, songs, infographics memes and guest speakers.
“Over the past three years we have been producing the majority of our own activities and unit plans,” she said.
Sutton said the students like the approach.
“They appreciate getting to do real Spanish instead of textbook Spanish,” he said.
In Spanish I, students learn greetings, descriptions, time and dates, weather, pronouns, regular and irregular present tense verbs, commands, present progressive tense and culture.
Harbaugh said that Prairieview-Ogden and St. Joseph Middle School offer very little, if any, Spanish.
“Everyone comes in at the same level,” she said.
In Spanish II students review Spanish I, learn the progressive tense, reflexive verbs, commands, verbs in the subjunctive, comparatives and superlatives, short stories and culture.
Spanish III is different as it is an immersion classroom.
The goal is 100 percent Spanish communication.
“The reality is closer to 95 percent from teacher and 80 percent from the students,” Sutton said. “The jokes go over better in English.”
In Spanish III students speak in a wide variety of time frames and work on approaching a mastery of language styles that do not exist in English.
“Students are pushed to speak Spanish as much as they can,” Sutton said. “It is great to see them do things they were afraid to do at the beginning of the year.”
Advanced Spanish III has an increased amount of activities, a faster pace and a closer approach to mastery of topics.
“Many of these students have reported ability to communicate in simple conversations with Spanish speakers in daily life,” Sutton said.
Spanish IV has students focus on news, weather, culture, disasters and human response, articles, TV broadcasts, health, accidents, human bodies, hospital visits, holidays and celebrations and immigration to the United States. They also watch a TV show called Gran Hotel. The show is set in an early 20th-century aristocratic hotel during the reign of King Alfonso XIII and is centered on the mysteries that involve the owner’s family and the hotel servants.
In the Advanced Spanish IV class students are able to develop lifelong practical abilities for Spanish communications, Sutton said.
Maddock said he thinks it’s important for all students to take a foreign language while in high school.
“It’s important to learn a foreign language because our country is so diverse,” he said. “With English, you are able to communicate with so much of the world but being able to speak another language broadens the number of people you can speak with and places you can go immensely.”
