And that's with good reason too, because all Spanish I does today is watch a video. And you'll never guess what movie the regular teacher has me show the students today.
Do you give up yet? The movie I play today is McFarland USA -- that's right, the exact movie that I watched and discussed in my State Meet Saturday post!
This marks the second time this month that the students in a Spanish class I sub for watches a movie that I'd watched myself just days before subbing. The other was Pixar's Coco. The timing isn't merely a coincidence -- I watched Coco on Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead), and the students viewed it a few days later. And I saw McFarland on State Meet Saturday -- and there's a good chance that this teacher is familiar with the date of the State Cross Country Meet.
And both feature Hispanic main characters (the Mexican family in Coco and the Mexican-American runners in McFarland), which make them appropriate for a Spanish class. Today, the students watch McFarland in English with Spanish subtitles. The regular teacher could have simply had them watch the Spanish dub, but that might have been too tough for first-year Spanish speakers to understand.
In each class, there is at least one runner on this school's current XC team. I have that runner explain to what cross country is, including the exact distance (as this isn't mentioned in the movie). In sixth period the runner has a PR of just under 20 minutes, while in fourth period there are two runners, one slower and one faster than my PR of 18 minutes. The runner in fifth period is a girl with a best time of 32 minutes. I (jokingly) inform her that her time isn't good enough to make it to the State Meet (even in the girls' races, where the best times are around 18 minutes).
Each time I watch the film, I look at the scene where Coach White is researching times from previous races (not State Meets, of course, since this is the first one) and comparing the top times to the times of the McFarland runners. But even when I pause the film, the distance is nowhere to be mentioned.
I also notice the scene where Coach White notices that according to his car speedometer, his #1 runner Thomas Valles can run 12 mph. "That means you can run a mile in five minutes." But in the Spanish subtitles, these are converted to metric. Instead, Valles is described as running 20 km/h, or 1.5 km in five minutes. The distance 1.5 km (or 1500 meters) is a common metric equivalent to the mile run at the Olympics. In high school track, though, the 1600 is more common (and is actually closer to one mile, as I explained on Saturday).
Posted on a wall is a poster for the McFarland movie. Apparently, it's been autographed by both the actual Coach White and his wife. I'm told that a former student gave the regular teacher the poster.
In the Spanish II classes, the students don't watch McFarland. Instead, they're working on a packet that will review them for an upcoming test next week. They'll have several days to complete the review packet, since it's ten pages long.(How ironic is that -- two years ago today, at the old charter school, I sang "The Packet Song" about a ten-page packet, and today I see a real ten-page packet.)
But on the blog, though, today is the review day for our Chapter 6 Test -- and it's a simple two-sided worksheet, not a ten-page packet. That's why I'm posting it the day before the test.
This is what I wrote last year about this review worksheet:
OK, here is the Chapter 6 Review worksheet. I've made changes to the worksheet in recent years, including the activities I give the same week as the worksheet -- and due to these changes, I didn't have much to say about this worksheet last year. Since this week's activity was already given as a multi-day assignment the last two days, there is no activity to give today, so students should just ignore the instruction to perform an activity.
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