Teachers and Spanish courses: You reap what you sow.<

Teachers and Spanish courses: You reap what you sow.

Sometimes as teachers we feel lost confronted with a large number of standards, rules, objectives, content and methodologies that we have had to follow in order to be able to carry out an academic course. It is essential to take into account some simple steps that if we develop correctly, we will be able to progress further our main objective:

That our students learn and achieve the objectives we have set out for them. To this end, we are going to try and understand the education as a growing progress in which we, as ‘farmers’, need to follow a series of standards and instructions in order to carry out our main objective: To produce a harvest with the aim of supplying a society.

And in order to achieve the aforementioned objective we will follow the following instructions:

1. The first instruction that we have to know is where we are going to plant our seeds and how is the earth where we are going to plant them, because it is possible that our seeds don’t adapt to our type of soil and due to this we will have to search different methods and techniques so that this does not happen. In education, we refer to this as the context of the centre.

2. Once we get to know the type of ‘soil’ where we will plant our seeds, another problem presents itself to us: and it is that not all the seeds are the same nor do they come from the same place. The only thing that we can be sure of is that our seeds have more or less some characteristics in common (they all need water and sun). It is about the context of the group.

3. Once we have planted our seeds we will have to get to know the standards that one must follow in order to achieve our main objective: that they produce a harvest which will supply our society. These standards, in education, one knows as the Educative Laws.

4. Once we know these guidelines and rules to follow for our correct growing process, another problem arises: and this is that, although we know that our main objective is that at the end of the whole process our seeds will have to give us another harvest, we must in addition take into account the other objectives that must be fulfilled across the whole of their development: so that they sprout properly, that they grow without disease and plagues and that their production is not only good, but it is the best. And the job of the cultivator (the teacher) is to help them fulfill these other objectives.

5. Once we know the perfection that our seeds must achieve in these objectives, we will need to know what equipment or material to use to carry out these objectives. For example we know that one of the objectives that we desire is that the seeds grow without disease. For this the material that we must use will be our pesticide. If we extrapolate these materials with regards to educations, we would be talking about the content of our didactic material.

6. Although we know the content that we have to give to our seeds, yet another problem arises: How and when do we have to give them this content? For example, we know that for our seed to grow without disease, we must offer it pesticides, but if we apply too much, it might die off, and if we apply too little its effect might not be strong enough to prevent infection, therefore, we need to know the adequate amount of pesticide and of course, also of herbicide, of water, and even of sunlight. Therefore, we will need to follow the guidelines of the process so that the content can achieve this objective, that’s to say we need a methodology.

7. The following problem that shows itself is this: we know as a general rule of thumb, on catering our seeds and on giving them sun, these seeds will grow and will bear fruit. But now not even all our seeds will bear the same fruit, and not all of them will have to be taken care of in the same way, that is to say, each seed is different to one another: (one will produce beans, another tomatoes, another still, pears) therefore, for each seed we will have to follow different procedural guidelines so that at the end of the journey they will all achieve the same principal aim. If we carry out the concept in the field of education, it translates into that which we call attention to diversity.

8. Once these corresponding months have passed and our seeds have bore their fruits, now the only thing remaining is to know if the fruits that they have given are useful or those which we cannot provide in our harvest. And how do we check this? Through a method that we call evaluation in which we will check effectively, if the fruit has been produced correctly, it means that all the content that we have provided to the seed has been taken in well and therefore it has achieved the objectives we originally set out. This means that our seed, has now become a fruit, it will be used to supply society. To conclude one can say that it does not matter from where the seed originates, that it will need care and that the problems that it might give us, we know with certainty that if we take care of it properly using all these guidelines as previously signaled, we will finally obtain the harvest that will supply our society.