Matt Wilson
EPSF 2010
TT 1300-1415
Ms. Hilliard
Brookwood High School
1655 Dogwood Rd.
Snellville,GA 30078
770-972-7642
At Seven O’clock in the morning the traffic is already at a stand still. The wind is cool to my face and the sun hasn’t yet arrived to greet the commuters. Loud radios boom and cars drone one-by-one up to the four-way stop sign. As each car takes its turn, it becomes clear that they are all headed to the same place, a parking lot that should belong to an enormous shopping mall. I am not as amazed by the size of the lot or the number of cars entering, although the sheer volume of traffic was a bit extreme for such a residential area, as I am the types of cars. Lexus, Mercedes Benz, Chevy Camaros, Pontiac Firebirds, show-class cars and trucks, and even a restored 1965 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray rolled into the lot of Brookwood High School, in Snellville, Georgia. The odd part is these cars were all driven by the students! I think to myself, “I wish my daddy was that rich.” I parked my little VW Jetta and proceeded to go inside to sign-in.
After I signed in, I found my way through a large Commons Area (their term for a cafeteria), which was decorated with a wall of trophies, art-deco lunch line, vending machines, and several tables, to the Foreign Language wing. The students flowed from the expansive hallways into their classrooms as a tsunami crashes unto the Asian shoreline. Upon finding the classroom, I knocked, entered, greeted Ms. Hilliard, and introduced myself. After some brief formalities, she showed me to a table cluttered with Spanish books and allowed me to begin my observations. First and foremost, I noticed there were no desks, aside from the teacher’s desk that was located in a corner of the room. Instead, six Arthurian tables were scattered throughout the room, each having four chairs placed around them. There was a bank of five computers placed in the back, a tape deck with four headphones on the front-most table, two TVs (one wall-mounted unit for the morning announcements, and a second, with attached VCR, in the back corner), and a bookcase for Spanish-English dictionaries.
The room had a wall-treatment similar to a travel agency; every square inch of wall not already occupied by the dry-erase board, window, or door was littered with posters of exotic places, events, and humorous signs, of which all but one was in Spanish. It added a loud, vibrant atmosphere to the classroom. This would truly be a daydreamer’s paradise. The rest of the classroom, though, gave an impression of disorganization, clutter, and a fundamental lack of space. The desk I was perched at was head-high in old Spanish textbooks, none of which Ms. Hilliard used, and her desk needed the popular bumper sticker “God Bless this Mess.” Soon, I noticed a few students find their way to the round tables.
At first, I wasn’t sure if I was at the “first school of clones.” They all looked the same; they each had their Abercrombie and Fitch or Old Navy outfits, always perfectly matching top to bottom, their Eastpack backpacks, and their Timberland boots. Their manurisms were the same; their vocabulary varied by at most three words, allows followed with “Oh, my gosh!” I suddenly realized that I was in the most isolated part of society: the upper-middle class, white dominated, “over-privilaged” portion of society that thinks that CNN presents an unbiased account of the facts.
Ms. Hilliard began her third year, college-prep, Spanish III, 1st period instruction, the students put their packs underneath the tables. The day began with a fill-in-the-blank page from the students’ workbook. Ms. Hilliard explained the task at hand to the students in Spanish, using English in short, precise bursts, as the students looked at her with a semi-conscious, just waking up look on their faces. After the students filled out their pages, opened up their listening comprehension workbooks to the assignment they had left off on from the previous day. She gave them instructions in Spanish once more, accenting the important points by stressing the words which conveyed the bulk of instruction, followed by repetition of the key concept of the instruction given. As the students heard the vocabulary terms that they were supposed to write, Ms. Hilliard raised a finger, counting the number that they were should have written down. The final task was for the students to look through a Hispanic TV guide and answer questions pertaining to the schedule of programming.
During the class, a substitute teacher from another class ask if she could put a student, who had been misbehaving in her class, in Ms. Hilliard’s room. He was shown a chair in the corner of the class, away from the other students. He did not say anything, although I found out later he did not understand Spanish; he was learning German.
Soon after, the announcements were on TV and then the bell rang. As the students left for their next class, Ms. Hilliard stopped by my desk and talked to me about how her next class would operate. Explaining that her next class was more mature, Ms. Hilliard told me that she had to try a new teaching approach called the “Circle of Knowledge” for her gifted certification class. (This will be discussed a bit later.) Second period was an AP Spanish class. Ms. Hilliard began by setting nine pairs of chairs in a circle, one facing the other, as to make an inner and outer circle. Then as each of the students took a seat, Ms. Hilliard would hand them an index card with a question on it written in Spanish. Once all the students sat down, Ms. Hilliard explained to them, in Spanish, that they were to use the proper verb forms to communicate their responses. Each question, she said, would take no more than one minute to respond, and then the exercise would continue after the students shifted to chair to their right. After each student had responded to every question on the index cards, Ms. Hilliard read to the students a biography of the author whose short story they would later read. After the biography, Ms. Hilliard explained, again in Spanish, that the students were to read the story, fill in the appropriate lines with the proper verb or adjective, and answer the questions at the end of the story. After that, the students created another three questions that would be realevant to the selection.
During this period, Ms. Hilliard seemed more relaxed than in first period. She acted less like an administrator of knowledge and more like a mentor, guiding these particular students on a journey of Spanish exploration. She even exhibited a bit of humor with these students. When asked, “What’s the point?”, she responded, “¡Yo soy el punto!” (I am the point!), with a matador’s flare, which gave just shy of an outburst of laughter from the class. Her instruction was always in Spanish, even to the point where I was lost in some of her instruction, yet her students responded quite receptively. When she read the biography, she illustrated and reiterated the difficult parts for them, but she never used English. Her students never fell back on the “crutch” of English; even the most humorous question asked to the teacher was in Spanish with properly conjugated verbs, and adjectives that agreed with the subject.
Later, Ms. Hilliard explained that she changed the story for the students from a difficult one in the book to the one on the handout because she knew that they wouldn’t understand the first as well. “As a teacher you have to make that judgement call. You must decide what is relevant material and what is an insult to their intelligence.” When she changes the assignment to increase the competency and learning of the students, she usually says, “¡Qué aburrido!” (How boring!) “The students immediately reply, ‘¡Queremos el aburrido!’ (We want the boring stuff!),” Ms. Hilliard chuckled.
Her next period was her planning period, so after her students left the room, she tidied her room for the floating French teacher. During this period, she and I discussed various topics in the field of education. Ms. Hilliard graduated twice from Georgia State University, first with a BA in Spanish, and then with a MAT in Spanish, and has spent twenty-four years in the teaching profession. She came from a family of teachers and she “always knew she would be a teacher.” She enjoyed the “discovery of kids in language;” and watching her students use the language in the real world. Above all else, Ms. Hilliard hated the paperwork; “I didn’t go to college to become a secretary.” Her attitudes about teaching reflect a love for the profession in its most un-adulterated form: the sharing of knowledge from one person to another.
Ms. Hilliard feels that she is given a great deal of autonomy. “Foreign language is the step-child of education. For the most part we are left alone.” She claims that she expresses academic freedom often, believing teachers at Brookwood are treated as professionals, but expected to be extremely competent. Ms. Hilliard does “lesson planning as she sees fit.” She does not recall the administration encouraging nor discouraging her to use corporations’ curriculum in place of her own.
Ms. Hilliard is against teachers’ unions. She recognizes certain advantages to belonging to one, but she neither belongs to one nor believes that it has a place in school. “Keep politics out,” Ms. Hilliard states, “I just want to teach. No gossip, no politics.” However, Ms. Hilliard does belong to a few foreign language teachers’ associations.
With regard to teaching theories, Ms. Hilliard is an essentialist to the core, rarely entertaining the ideas of the other theories. She believes that the knowledge conveyed to students, by teachers, must be essential in value for two reasons. First, the material covered must have some relevance to the topic at hand. Second, Ms. Hilliard believes that if one does not stay focused on what is essential, you will loose that attention span of the student. Ms. Hilliard tries to incorporate her students’ previous experiences into her lesson “to make them more relevant,” but rarely uses an encompassing project as a method of discourse. Ms. Hilliard takes firm stance in believing, “I’m the adult and must take leadership because I’m wiser (than the students),” refusing to believe that students’ desires, questions, and experiences could guide a class through the learning process. She does not use Spanish equivalents to the classics, unless it fits the purpose and has relevance to the topic at hand. Responding freely to the questions regarding theory, Ms. Hilliard stated, with a demeanor of a combat veteran of trench warfare, “I don’t believe your professor could or has taught in public school. You can’t stray away from the essentials out here.”
Another essentialist characteristic is Ms. Hilliard’s use of technology. She uses three main types of technology: audio, video, and computers. With regard to audio, Ms. Hilliard uses tape decks for listening comprehension, testing, and preparation for the National Spanish Exam. Ms. Hilliard uses TVs for video technology for watching authentic Spanish TV shows, commercials, and videos, aside from the school mandated morning announcements. Finally, Ms. Hilliard uses computers to allow students to browse Spanish websites, design products with web pages, and use Spanish software. The majority of these technological functions are manifested during her “centers” period of discourse.
During each chapter-lesson set, Ms. Hilliard sets apart approximately one week for “centers.” “Centers” is a teaching method in which Ms. Hilliard breaks the class up into groups of four to five students. The students are assigned to one of the five of the six round tables and the computer bank in the back, called “centers.” At each center, students perform a given task: listen to the tape and take down pertinent information, read and answer questions regarding a given article, write about a particular experience using the new grammar lesson, watch the TV show and answer the questions about the plot and vocabulary, or look p a selected website and take down information, and a final center where the students must take the chapter lesson and apply it to real life.