Esperanto Plans for this school year at Seattle Academy
For those interested in the teaching of Esperanto in American high schools, I wanted to take a moment to present my plan for this year at Seattle Academy, a private, college-prep high school in Seattle.
For background, this will be the third year that I have offered an Esperanto course at our school. The first year I taught it as an elective to 8 students where we together explored the resources for learning Esperanto. It was successful in that we achieved the goal of learning of the resources and students passed the equivalent of the British Esperanto Associations basic-level exam which is basically a translation test.
Last year I took what I had learned and then taught a direct method course to 8 more students as an after-school, for-credit elective. My knowledge of the language was by then strong enough to teach just in the language, and focusing on a smaller number of stratagies, I felt, would be more successful. We used Stano Marĉek's *Esperanto by Direct Method* which is a 22 lesson text appropriate for the age group and which covers all of the core grammar and about 700 roots. In our 1 hour sessions held 3 times a week, we could do 2 lessons per session for the first half of the book and 1 lesson per session for the second half, supplemented by some videos, games, role-playing, etc. We were able to finish the book easily well before the end of the term and were able to move into new activities such as those of Stefan MacGill (la laǔta vekhorloĝo, etc.) Other than in writing (which was not our focus) I would say that the students were at the B1 level on the European scale (CERF) by the end of the trimester (to be fair, our students were self-selected, had the time and interest, and were pretty strong at language learning -- results may vary).
This year my plan is to teach an interdisciplinary course to a larger number of students where the kids develop a web site for learning Esperanto in a high school setting and perhaps for an online, distant learning type high school. As a web development class they will be able to meet part of a math/science elective requirement, which makes it easier for them to select the course, as opposed to it being an uncategorized elective.
The web site will be bazaesperanto.com. It will have a Wordpress front page for content, news, and links. It will also have an instance of Moodle for tracking student progress and an instance of MediaWiki for group writing and other such content. The students will use their software development skills for making simple language games, creating and adding media, laying out pages, etc. They will use their math/statistics skills for analyzing student progress and refining the tools and course progression.
I proposed to Stano Marĉek that we be allowed to use his voiceovers and images from his *Esperanto by Direct Method* book onour website with the understanding that each of my students would own the book and that we would place a link for purchase for those who used the site outside the school. He agreed to this. As a result, the scope and sequence of the course and content of the site is much easier to define.
The goal is to have students complete the text within the trimester, collectively create and refine a website for future users, and reach either an A2 or B1 level of mastery of the language at the spoken and written level based on the scope and sequence laid out in Stano's text. While ambitious, I think these goals are attainable.
I have been scheduled to teach a software course in the Spring for a single section of mostly to upperclassmen. Since there is a strong interest by the underclassmen in both the language and making websites, I will add a second section for them. I am going to try to keep the class size to 15 each and if some of the current Esperanto speaking students and software students can join the class and help out it will be a more of a pleasant experience to teach.
The classes will be offered spring trimester (March 12 to June 7, 2012). The legacy of the course can hopefully be a web site that is useful to others, especially as a template for courses that can be taught over a single term.
Wish us luck!