Tell To Teach
Back in 2003, when I first started teaching Spanish at Summerfield Waldorf School and Farm in California, I felt lost.
The typical methods of teaching foreign languages, such as how I first learned myself, made no sense to me after having studied child development and practiced Waldorf teaching. Rudolf Steiner did not give many indications regarding how to teach foreign languages. The methods proposed by Waldorf foreign language teachers made sense to me for the first two years in Lower School, but after that, I was not completely satisfied. It was hard for me to step out of my “grammarian” mind, and at the same time, I felt I was swimming against the current.
I tried everything — I contacted everyone I could, I observed lessons, I practiced, I tried to come up with my own ideas... nothing really worked well enough for me. I was extremely frustrated. I knew that some children were “getting it”, but they usually forgot by next month (or next week). I spent too many hours preparing, and the results were not what I expected. Many alumni I met from different Waldorf schools told me they had had Spanish, but all they learned
was a lot of songs and how to make tortillas! That was exactly what I didn’t want for my own students.
I sat for long hours trying to fathom what my students were truly asking for, what magic I needed to concoct so that they would easily and fluidly enter into my Spanish-speaking world, a world that sounded and felt so different from their English world, both worlds being deliciously enjoyable. All my attempts to reinvent the wheel just took a toll in my health, my family life, my sanity. In my desperation, I prayed. Soon after, a colleague introduced me to a technique called Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS). It seemed strange in the beginning, but a closer look showed me that many principles were actually congruent with Waldorf education.
I want to share how the basic techniques and philosophy behind TPRS match recent brain research as well as the principles that Rudolf Steiner laid out almost one hundred years ago regarding foreign language acquisition.
The result is a holistic, new idea with techniques worthy of consideration for the teaching of foreign languages in Waldorf schools.
I chose to focus on the fourth grade curriculum because this is where foreign language literacy actually begins in Waldorf pedagogy, and for TPRS, reading is a crucial component.
Through my Waldorf Teacher Training and my personal path to become a language teacher I have also worked on my own individual challenges. This has become a spiritual practice to me, a way of getting to know more closely my soul, my countrymen, and my beautiful mother-tongue, Spanish.
I would like to quote Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest contemporary Spanish-speaking poets and 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature:
Qué buen idioma el mío, qué buena lengua heredamos de los conquistadores torvos... Estos andaban a zancadas por las tremendas cordilleras, por las Américas encrespadas, buscando patatas, butifarras, frijolitos, tabaco negro, oro, maíz, huevos fritos, con aquel apetito voraz que nunca más se ha visto en el mundo... Todo se lo tragaban, con religiones, pirámides, tribus, idolatrías iguales a las que ellos traían en sus grandes bolsas... Por donde pasaban quedaba arrasada la tierra... Pero a los bárbaros se les caían de las botas, de las barbas, de los yelmos, de las herraduras, como piedrecitas, las palabras luminosas que se quedaron aquí resplandecientes... el idioma. Salimos perdiendo... Salimos ganando... Se llevaron el oro y nos dejaron el oro... Se lo llevaron todo y nos dejaron todo... Nos dejaron las palabras.
Confieso que he vivido, Pablo Neruda, 1973
What a great language mine is, what a good language we did inherit from the grim conquerors... They went by strides over the tremendous mountain ranges, over the curled Americas, looking for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with that voracious appetite never to be seen again in the world... They swallowed everything, with religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries, equal to those they brought in their big bags... Wherever they passed, everything was razed to the ground... But off the boots, the beards, the helms, the horseshoes of the barbarians, the luminous words were falling, like pebbles, the words that stayed here, shining bright... the language. We lost... we won... They took the gold and they left us the gold... They took everything and left everything... they left the words.
I Confess I Have Lived, by Pablo Neruda, 1973