A Good Argument

So today in bilingual art class we began doing a project themed around Halloween. I was giving instructions in English for the kids (3rd grade) to color different parts of the jack-o-lantern in different colors. Generally I consider myself to be (1) patient and (2) good at giving directions, especially since I am familiar with the techniques to teaching a foreign language. So, I go through the whole spiel with elaborate gestures and have the students hold up the colored pencils that I say to check that they understand. I tell them that the face (pointing first to my face and then to the pumpkin's face on the worksheet) should be orange (can you hold up the orange pencil, please?), the eyes (again, first pointing at my eyes and then at the pumpkin's eyes) and the mouth (pointing, pointing) should be yellow, and the stem (here I point to the paper and draw the a picture of a 'stem' on the board) should be green. I then wrote out on the board each word in English along with the color it should be: pumpkin-orange, eyes & mouth- yellow, stem-green. Then after everyone is nodding and sharpening their pencils I say, "Okay, let's start." The students are off and coloring and everything seems to be going well.

Suddenly I see a handful students doing things like coloring the face purple stripes or coloring the forehead of the pumpkin yellow or coloring the mouth green. This, of course, prompted me to talk to the young girl who was coloring the mouth green. Being a bilingual class, I tried to explain holding up her pencils and speaking in English what she was to do. She said, "Oh, okay," nodded her head, and began coloring the rest of the pumpkin orange. I walked around and helped the other students who were having problems and cleared up issues with vocabulary and comprehension. I then came back to her. She had since picked up her green pencil and was coloring the mouth green again. Then I resorted to speaking to her in Spanish, because we were losing class time and it was clear that the English with gestures thing wasn't working for her today (I had tried already twice with her). So, I explained in Spanish that the point of the exercise was to practice the colors vocabulary that we were reviewing, and that the mouth should be colored yellow, not green. She said, "Yeah, I know." So I asked her, "Then if you understood the difference between yellow and green, why did you color the mouth green?" and she said, "Well, he looks better with a green mouth, doesn't he?"

I wasn't sure how to respond. We decided to move on to cutting and pasting.

By the way, Greg posted new pictures of our latest trip to Granada. Be sure to look at them full-sized because you can see a lot more detail than the little thumbnails that they give you on the album page. We went to the Alhambra, a collection of palaces and old military buildings up on the hill. Many of these buildings were built and used by the moors when they ruled Spain, and when the Catholic Monarchs Fernando and Isabella "reconquered" Spain from the moors, they made the same site important for them too, so there is a lot of architecture that is juxtaposed either next to each other or on top of each other. It's a recurring theme all over Spain and especially visible in Granada. There are also a handful of pictures of the types of food we have been eating, including the RAF tomatoes. Which, I found out, stands for Resistente (resistant) A (to) Fusarium (plague). Mmmm, delicious and plague resistant; who knew?! I think the other food pics are churros (think a cross between funnel cake and donuts) that are eaten with hot chocolate (think chocolate sauce almost as thick as pudding, served warm to dip your churros in), and potatoes with pimentón dulce (like paprika but with even more flavor). Ehm.. I think I'ma go eat some lunch. :)