Mis Pregrados

My undergrads! Here they are! Claudia, Jocelyn, Aldo, Jocelyn 2, Leticia, Cristian, May-Ling, Franco, Fernanda, Valeria, and Pilar. Don't they look happy? (That's because class was over!) :) I am having a ball with them. They're the level of our juniors and seniors, and I have them for a course called "Discurso Escrito" (Written Discourse). Their first writing topic is education reform (since they're pre-service teachers of English), and we watched a YouTube clip Mary-Lou, my associate dean, sent me of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussing community schools and accountability. This led us to lots of discussion about educational issues in the U.S. and in Chile. We discussed merit pay for teachers, which many of them chose as the topic for their first essay, a perusasive letter to either Arne Duncan or Monica Jimenez, Chile's Ministra de Educacion. She was in the news recently because an 8th-grader threw a glass of water on her when she wouldn't answer a question - things are a little stirred up here! Anyway, my students have very strong opinions, which I love. They are also teaching me things like Spanish "text speak" - for example, they write "tb" for "tambien"(also), the way we write "ur" for "your," and so forth. How fun is that?!