The Upper School Spanish program has seen complete turnover over the past two years.  Two of the Spanish teachers, Corali Sabir and Mark Hernandez, began teaching at Parker literally five weeks ago.  And the third and most senior teacher in the program, Julia Garner, came here only a year before them.

If there were ever a time to see what could be improved, this is it. Fortunately, Garner, Sabir, and Hernandez realize this.  They have begun to discuss the “scale and scope” of the Upper School Spanish curriculum — i.e. how to make sure that when students switch between teachers and classes, students don’t skip or repeat important information.  

“The Weekly” is happy to hear about these changes. We support them wholeheartedly — and would like to suggest a few more.

Students have two main frustrations with the current Spanish program. Firstly, they find intro-level courses, like Spanish 1 and 2, too easy, but struggle in upper-level classes, like Spanish 3, 4, and 5, for which they feel unprepared for.  

Secondly, students wish the goal of teaching literature and history in those upper-level classes took a back seat to the less lofty but more achievable aim of proficiency.

On the first goal, Garner, Sabir, and Hernandez are moving in the right direction.  Every student “The Weekly” spoke to for this article said that their Spanish class had become more challenging.  

The sort of planning that led to a member of the editorial board spending two class periods watching an English-language movie set in a fictional South American country in Spanish 3 has all but disappeared. And that’s a good thing.  

It would be an even better thing if students always had the knowledge they needed to reach the higher bar, which requires them to know material that the current curriculum just doesn’t cover.  And so “The Weekly” encourages Garner, Sabir, and Hernandez to keep working on building a better Spanish curriculum — one in which A) intro-level courses cover more material, and B) upper-level ones build on that material to help students achieve proficiency.

Right now, the Spanish teachers are doing a good job with part A — and the “The Weekly” applauds them for that.  However, we suspect that if they listened to students’ second concern, which they have so far ignored, it would help them with part B.  

If Parker students started out proficient, they might welcome Spanish classes centered around the sort of analysis and exploration that progressive English and history classes do.  But, like most high-school students, the vast majority aren’t, so it doesn’t work well.  Students already realize this — teachers should too.

Students know that they don’t know enough of the language to analyze at anywhere near the level they could in an English or history class, but that analysis still takes up a lot of time that might be devoted to getting students to the level at which they could actually get something out of the analysis.

That’s why they think that, even if doing so doesn’t seem in line with Parker’s progressive philosophy, advanced Spanish courses should emphasize the basics of grammar and vocabulary more.  Learning a foreign language requires a lot of non-progressive memorization and repetition — that’s just how it works.

Currently, as a result of their insufficient proficiency, most students in upper-level classes feel that they must “fake” their way though overly-advanced texts.  What they really want, and get only a few chances to do, is to increase their ability to converse in Spanish.

The Spanish department itself acknowledges that proficiency is not reached often enough.  Only slightly more than 50 percent of students in Spanish 5 leave speaking the language proficiently, according to Garner (the only Spanish teacher who’s taught at Parker long enough to know), even though the class is in the higher track and consists of students who have taken Spanish since junior kindergarten.

There is a lot of room for improvement, clearly.  And right now the Spanish program is in perfect position to make changes, without the obstacles of any decades-old curricula or ossified traditions. The Spanish faculty should seize this opportunity for reform — another one like it won’t come around for a long time.