Fall 2005
The first-day class writing activity indicated that students initially knew less about Spain than those enrolled in fall 2004, so their base knowledge level was lower. However, I was not too concerned about this because I would be using more visuals and having more discussion. The course went smoothly and everybody was able to keep up with its pace.
The first day writings showed that there was a lot students wanted to learn; the last day of the course I showed them that we had effectively dealt with these topics. Their papers showed the variety of students who participated in the course. One student, student A, for instance, wrote that she had never been to Spain but that she would like to know more, since she was going to study there in the spring semester. In her paper she listed that she was interested in Spain’s history, daily life in Spain, food, religion, government, and relations between Spain and other countries. We dealt with all those topics during the course. Another student, student B had already been to Spain twice and knew already something about regional differences and daily life, both aspects the course dealt with. She hoped to learn something on “a variety” of things, something the course effectively offered. A third student, student C, listed extensively what she knew—she had studied abroad already—but she wanted to know still more about Spain.
Overall, the papers ranged from excellent to very poor, both in ideas and in writing style. The rubric proved very useful for the grading process; students usually agreed with the grading done with the rubric. In addition to the midterm and final papers, as an extra task, I included another paper based on the screening of two movies. I was surprised to see that the papers based on the analysis of a text were generally less well-developed than the papers based on the analysis of visual materials. See Graded Writings Fall 2005 for more information.
Fall 2006
For the first-day writing assignment, when I asked students to list topics they were interested in, the fall 2006 class had lists that were far shorter than the year before. Only one student had been to Spain, so they did not know many relevant topics: “They are all Catholic,” one student wrote. “I don’t know much,” was another reaction. A third student knew about flamenco dancing and that the Spanish in Spain is different from the Spanish in Latin America (pdf files: Student 1, Student 2, Student 3, Student 4).
Even though they did not know much about Spain, and there were no native speakers of Spanish in the class, their overall performance was good. Some students still struggled with Spanish. I noticed that students lacked the extreme highs and lows of the 2005 group, and generally their work was better. This might be due to the fact that my instructions were far more precise. Sometimes I feel that this “handholding,” although it helps the students obtain very acceptable results, also kills creativity. Only one of the students a wrote paper in which (s)he went further than the required assignment. I also noticed less difference in quality between the various papers. See Description of the assignments and Graded Writings Fall 2006 for more information.
At the end of the course we did the same hands-on culinary activity (preparing tapas) for a little extra, and several students turned out to be great cooks. The most common grade was a high B, but with the extra credit several students made it to an A: the final grades were 7 As, 4 Bs and 1C.
Oral Presentation
Students’ oral presentations were much better than fall 2005. Before we started I gave them an outline with what exactly I expected from them (link to Oralpresentationinstructions.pdf). I included the task to look for information from two extra, recent sources. On this task, some students did well, but some chose sources that were not always relevant for the content of the presentation. They also had to come up with questions for class discussion; again some students did that well and others did not. For the final presentations they had to prepare a handout, and most students were able to do that well. Although I encouraged them to use PowerPoint, only two students actually did so. Check here for an excellent example of one of the PowerPoint presentations that exceeded my expectations.
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