Episode 97: From Colombia to the Classroom - My three greatest takeaways

¡Hola! Thanks for listening! I can't wait to share my three greatest takeaways from one week in Colombia with you! I'm sharing exactly how these takeaways apply to the classroom too! 

Links mentioned:

Blog: Unpacking Experiencia Colombia

Ode to Ben Tinsley Podcast episode

LFL 4th Annual Summer Conference

Taller Experiencia Colombia

Join La Familia Loca PLC

Letter to request funding

We will have our FOURTH Annual LFL PLC Summer Conference this July 30th and 31st! Check it out here! This is included in a La Familia Loca PLC Membership!

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Transcript:

Hi, it's me. And before you listen to this episode of Teaching La Vida Loca, I wanted to tell you about an incredible summer learning opportunity with me and with many other members of La Familia Loca PLC. This summer, we are hosting our fourth annual conference via Zoom, so it's a virtual conference two days, July 30th and 31st. Viviana and I have finished the schedule, and we have curated something really incredible for the summer. You can see the schedule and the presenters and read their bios on the link listed in the show notes. But what's most incredible about this conference is it's all the best parts of La Familia Loca PLC in one place during the summer when our souls are fed and we are most energized, and our community comes together for this learning opportunity that is truly unique and one of a kind. The conference itself is included in a La Familia Loca PLC membership, so the probably the best part is the energy and inspiration that you feel during the two-day conference. You get to carry on through the entire year as we learn it and grow together within our PLC. So, if you're interested, check out the link in the show notes. We would love to have you. I am simply so excited for this summer. I hope to see you there.

Welcome! 

Welcome back to Teaching La Vida Loca, the podcast you come to for short and sweet and sometimes spicy episodes full of enthusiasm, magic, and tips and tricks for your classroom. I'm Annabelle, your maestra loca, and I'm here to bring you inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host; I'm your cheerleader, and I'm thrilled you're tuning in. So, let's do this. Let's tackle teaching La Vida Loca together.

Experiencia Colombia

Hey there, welcome to episode 97 of Teaching La Vida Loca. I am happy to be here today. Today is the day of the World Cup, and I'm so stinking excited to watch it this afternoon, I just put the baby down for a nap. Paul had surgery last week, so it's been kind of a wild week with everybody at home and trying to make sure he does very little while also keeping the kids out of the way, etc. etc. But I'm excited for some downtime this afternoon to be able to watch Spain kick Argentina's booty. At least that is the hope, and that is what I'm putting out into the universe. So, yay! I hope you're doing really well. I'm coming to you from my office after a week's break from the best professional experience I've ever had in my career in Colombia with Experiencia Colombia, and I would love to tell you about it today. But I'm going to be very specific because if you want to read about the trip itself, the experience, what is Experiencia Colombia, the ins outs, etc. You can read my blog, which I'm going to be publishing within the next couple of days, and I will link it in the show notes. But what I'm going to tell you about today is specifically my three greatest takeaways and how it applies to the classroom. Like my three greatest takeaways of the entire experience and how I am going to translate those to my career as a classroom teacher. I think it is really beautiful that I attended as the workshop leader. I was in in charge of the Desarr Rio Profesional. Every single minute of every single day is in Spanish, and I was worried that that was going to be challenging, not on the on the personal like non presenting side, but on the presenting side. I was nervous, and so I was like, "I'm going to practice in advance. Of course, there's no practice in advance. I'm me, and I literally am the busiest person I know, and I have mommy summer camp every day. So, there was no practice, there was no anticipation, and it went really, really well. It was beautiful. It was also no tech, which was a new, new, like thing altogether for me to be honest, and I was more scared of that than I was the challenge of delivering PD exceptional PD in Spanish, and both were not an issue at all.

So Wonderful!

It was a wonderful week, and the connections I made with women who were from all over the United States was incredible, and I got to strengthen a lot of bonds with familia loca members, and it was just wonderful. But, anyways, I'm going to get started with explaining to you my three greatest takeaways from the week and how they apply directly to. Classroom, let's dive in. I feel like there should be some music there or something, but I'm not gonna put any because you know me in editing. So, we'll just use my little to intro this next part.

#1 

The first one is no hay afan. So, in Spanish, the statement I've always used my whole life is like "No hay prisa, no hay prisa. Like, there's no rush. Don't rush it. It's no big deal. But there they say "no hay afan, and I have no idea how to spell it. My guess, if I had to, would be "a f a n" with an accent over the "a. But I heard it a million times from the very first day that I got there. Meg and Craig had told us that the hardest thing for people to adjust to would be the schedule, like the timing of things, because there is no timing. Like when is breakfast? Breakfast is when breakfast is. When are we going to get on the bus? We'll get on the bus when the bus arrives. When are we going to paint? We will paint when the artist gets here with the supplies. But for me, that was not an adjustment. For me, it was like my time-blind ADHD self-found a place to thrive because it was like Annabelle, are you ready to present? Sure. Okay. When do you want to get started? Ah. Okay. Cool. Yep. Whenever you're ready. It was extraordinary to live in this world where there's no urgency, there's no time constraints, there's no expectations for starting or ending, or which was really bizarre. But when I think about no hay afan when it applies to my classroom, I get really crystal clear, and I know exactly what it's talking about, and it's that there's no rush, there's no deadline, there's no ha y prisa, there's no like need to rush through X Y Z A B C. I can just take it easy, go slow, and teach, and look at the humans in front of me, and remember that what I'm doing in front of them as their educator, as their Spanish teacher, is so much more than introducing them to Spanish and cultivating their love and joy for other people's other cultures, language in general, but I am nurturing whole humans in front of me, and I know that there are people listening right now who are going to say, "Yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but I have to teach X, Y, Z. I have to do this by this. I have these common assessments. I have yes, you do, and we still have whole humans in front of us, and we are still people who need to be able to take a breath and do our best with the time we have. And a lot of the conversations, the one-on-one conversations I had with people there, because outside of the workshop times, I did a lot of one-on-one consultations with people to hear about their teaching journey, what they're experiencing, and a lot, a lot of people had the same frustrations or challenges that many members of Familia Loca face, which is I have to do. I believe in acquisition-driven instruction, and I'm implementing it. But I am doing my best to implement it in bits and pieces here and there because I'm required to do A, B, C, X, Y, Z, and or teach a certain amount of vocabulary by a certain date, or I'm required to use these thematic units, and so we had lots of in-depth conversations about how they can integrate acquisition-driven instruction when they're having to do these, you know, required things. And still, I think that even with requirements and deadlines and expectations that are put upon us, we can still pause, take breaths in our classrooms, ensure that we are connecting with our students on a human level, taking time to see them for the incredible people that they are and what they bring to the room, because when we have that mentality of no afan or like tranquila, Annabelle, todo esta bien no hay prisa, it allows us to. Build the classroom community that we need in order to have acquisition-driven instruction work. Does that make sense? A lot of people, when they attend my demos specifically, will say it was crazy how you clearly had a plan, but you didn't really follow it. You just really listened to the people in front of you, to us as students, and went in whichever direction we guided it. And that's a skill that takes a lot of time. It's something we talk about a lot again. And familia loca is like this idea of truly letting students guide organic conversation. It's not just that simple. It's really intentionally thought out about how can I stay in bounds, use the high frequency language, let them think they're driving it, but still hit the targets and the goals that I'm wanting to, but the reason I'm able to do that is because I just I'm going slow enough to allow for that. Porque no hay a fan. There's no a prisa. There's no rush. Tranquila. So that's the first. I hope you love that one. Log it in your brain for this upcoming school year.

#2 

The next one is, oh my gosh, are we ready? 10 minutes in. I like to keep it short and sweet for you. Okay, here's the next one. Are you ready? The most delicious things that I tasted in Colombia were the simplest things. Let me repeat that. The most delicious things that I tasted in Colombia were the simplest things. For example, maracuja, cut that fruit open, that sucker open, and literally stir all those little seeds up. It looks like alien brains or something. Sprinkle little sugar on top, like Craig taught me, and then just spoon that into your mouth. Oh my gosh! Sorry, that probably sounds disgusting, but I cannot even tell you how bad I'm salivating right now. You can probably hear it. It's so gross, but also epic because there is nothing like maracuja. Okay, so simple. There was one morning. Well, every day the most incredible food ever. Again, you can read the blog for details. But there was one morning that there was this salsa with breakfast that I didn't even know was a salsa. It was like this bowl, and I had a spoonful and then I had I had to excuse myself from a consultation I was having with somebody to go and get more and I scooped half the bowl onto my plate and then I came back later to deliver my plate to Catalina, one of the chefs and she said, "Did you eat half of the bowl of salsa? I said yes and she said, "Wow, impressionante, impressive, literally so good. And I was like, "Girl, you have to teach me what the hell you did to make that salsa because it was the best thing I have ever eaten in my life. And she said, "Oh, it's really simple. It's just garlic and onion. I said, "And what else? Like, why was it so green? She's like, it's literally green onion and garlic. That's it, nothing else. I said nothing else. She said nothing else. So how do we apply this to our classroom? Well, you're probably already thinking it, and I will link an episode to Ben Tinsley's. Ooh, sorry, I just bumped my speaker. That probably sounded awful. To Ben Tinsley's episode that I did as an ode to him but keep it simple. My gosh, we don't have to do everything. Our slides don't have to be the prettiest thing. Like when I look at Morgan Bennett and her slides, I'm like, oh my god, you're like it's insane, but she, you know, requires for herself a lot of work and effort goes into those, and luckily, she's able to reuse a lot of it. For me, when I was teaching nine classes a day, and I had a five-minute plan or a 15-minute plan and a 20-minute plan, and I had to eat lunch during one of those. My slides were the first thing I had to just let go of. Like things can't look fancy, and some days I might not have slides at all because I literally don't have the plan and prep time to make it happen. Because I had four preps, sometimes five, four if I could get away with it, and nine classes a day. Like forget it. Last year, I had more plan time than I've ever had in my career, and I felt like, wow, it's so luxurious to really feel like my slides are nice every day. But there were days where I had to make more phone calls than expected, or had more required of me, and I already had that mentality of, I don't. Have to spend hours planning these slides because kids won't remember, y'all. They won't remember a single slide that we prep. They won't even remember a single solitary lesson. They will remember how we felt in their classroom, in how they felt in our space, and how we felt about them-that's what they will remember. Outside of that, I do. If I do not have the planning or prep time, then I'm not going to do it. That was another thing we talked a lot about in Colombia. We talk about it all the time in Familia Loca. I have hardcore boundaries about not working from home. Part of that is because I have a business and I can't work from home because I'm already working from home on my side business. Right, talking to y'all. The reality is, I'm not going to put more time into grading, feedback slides, whatever it is, if I can't do it at school, and so that goes back to keeping it simple. The simplest things that I tasted in Colombia were the most delicious. If we can just keep it simple and keep our prep time simple, we can enjoy the process of teaching and being present with our students more. Again, the reason I'm going to link Ben Tinsley's episode is I'm in his French class right now, and my God, the man, everything is so effing simple, y'all. Simple, and yet high, high impact. He's so present. He's so involved in just listening to us, and his slides aren't fancy. There's nothing fancy about them. He has a lot of text to anchor to, and it's this beautiful, simple way he leads class that makes it so effective. So, I'm going to remember that most delicious equals most simple.

Biggest Takeaway

And then the last thing before I let you go is definitely the biggest takeaway from Colombia, and that is this job is really hard. This job is brutally hard, and the amount of conversations I had with educators who just needed to be held-not physically necessarily-there were definitely some people that I just gave really long hugs to, but they just needed space to be heard and to share the challenges of their unique situation, and the reality is, we all are facing unbelievable challenges in our schools. I'm getting emotional because I'm thinking about one educator in particular that I was just like baffled to hear about her experience, and she's not in a place where she can go elsewhere or look elsewhere because she's in an area that's so small. There are no other schools to go to, which is why she's doing as much as she's doing. But my goodness, everybody's situations are so unique, and we need people. We need community more than anything. What Experiencia Colombia did for us was brought together teachers who were all beyond exhausted and trampled down in all of the things from the school year. The reality is, even if you love your job, it is exhausting. And so, they brought us together in this beautiful cultural exchange. Again, go and read the blog. Provided so many opportunities for us to just experience Colombia and experience relaxation at its best, and brought us together as a community who need each other, right? And when I think about when I left, I was so lucky because so many members of Familia Loca were on that trip, and I left with three new members. And what I'm so grateful for is I was thinking that you know, so many as we left, it was like, oh my gosh, I'm leaving these amazing people, this amazing family that I've established, and it's hard to go back to reality, and I kept thinking, I am so lucky to go back, knowing I have a teacher community that I get to authentically lean on every single month.

Conference

In familia, we have our conference at the end of this month, the 30th and 30-first, and I am so freaking excited to spend some quality. Time with my members because I haven't seen them all month. July is our one month that we don't have regular content because we just have our two-day virtual conference, and I miss them. Like I miss my people, I miss my community, I miss my regulars that I see all the time on the camera. I am so freaking excited because I know in the conference, I'm going to see people who I haven't seen in a few months who are going to prioritize coming to the conference because they have the summer, they have this time. It's usually when familia members make this newfound like, okay, I'm gonna attend more. So I have some people who I haven't seen in a few months, or even six months, come live because they don't feel like they can only watch the recordings, and I'm so freaking excited that I have that, that I have a community where I can show up authentically as myself and unload when I need to about the challenges and hardships of what it is to be an educator and what it means to teach, and what it means to be like or challenged with classroom management, or whatever it is, and lean authentically into them, and then be available to listen, guide, coach, support, cheerlead when my community members need a listening ear, or need somebody to share something that went really well, and want somebody who gets it to listen. So, I just wanted to share those three things. If you are a person, if you're an educator who needs community, and you don't have something like that? If you don't have a PLC, if you don't have a department who gets you, if you are an island and you are seeking community, then I strongly encourage you to check out our PLC and see if it feels like a good fit for you, because if you have shared values with me, and I think from listening you can guess what those values are. If you believe in the power of acquisition-driven instruction, if you believe in building relationships and building community over like focusing on management and discipline, et cetera, et cetera. If you want to hear your students' voices more because they authentically want to speak in the target language because they're so motivated to do so because of the culture that you have established in the classroom, or you that is something that you desire and you'd like to see happen, if you are looking for beautiful resources that you don't have to create a sub-plan database that is ready to go with subplans for when you can't even. If you're seeking a place full of people who really get it and who want to lift you up and support you as you are in your authentic self, then come on in. We would love to have you, and we would love to have you before our conference because it's so fun to spend two whole days together online. There are members who just come to a few different things and prioritize a few things, but there's a lot of us who spend the full two days with our blue light blockers, kind of glued, but everything's recorded. So, if you're looking for some PD this summer, it's all included in the membership. Look at that! You can pay for a quarter, come to the conference, experience the first couple months of the year, and decide whether it's something that fits you, and then you know, pay for another quarter. I would say half of our members pay by quarter; half pay annually. It's kind of up in the air. A lot of people have to pay out of pocket themselves, and more of the out-of-pocket people do quarterly rather than annual. 

Join us!

I would say, but I would love to support you. I'll put a letter to request funding from your school as well in the notes. But come on in, come before the conference. We would love, love, love to have you. And remember, as you begin the school year, no hay afan, no hay prisa. There's no rush. Take a breath. And the most delicious plans, the most amazing plans we can write for our classes, are the simplest. I adore you. I'm so grateful for you listening. Send this to somebody who needs these reminders, and I appreciate you supporting my podcast today and every day. You are the... te adoro nos vemos. Okay, ciao ciao. Until next time, I'll be, no, I'm still not teaching the via loca. I'm still very much relaxing, living the teacher. Summer best life loca there is, and I hope you are too. And I hope to talk to you again soon. Okay, bye bye.