this week's post
Immersive experiences are amazing educational tools, both for language-learning and life-learning,” enthuses Middle School Spanish teacher John Kohler who took 13 seventh- and eighth-grade Spanish students to Cuernavaca, Mexico with fellow chaperone Jen Ammenti over spring break. Staying with host families and 
taking intensive grammar and conversational Spanish lessons for six hours a day through the Universidad Internacional, students experienced “the culmination of their years of Spanish at RDS,” John explains. “They’ve acquired a vast amount of vocabulary and grammar over the years, but full immersion forces students to transform all these ‘inputs’ into ‘outputs’ and is the true foundation of bilingualism and biculturalism.”
“Students stayed in pairs and trios with host families, all of whom were hand-selected by the university which has 30 years of experience running this type of intensive language school. Usually, their mean age is high-school or college-age, but our students really displayed an impressive thirst for learning. Doing this sort of work for six hours a day over five days, reinforced by being in 100% Spanish-speaking homes in the evenings, they really advanced their fluency at a rate 
equivalent to six months in a conventional classroom. You can’t imagine how great it feels to be a teacher and after six hours of class actually to have kids say things like ‘Mr. Kohler, that was so fun’ and ‘Mr. Kohler, this is so great that I actually like to learn like this!’”
The group did an enormous amount of cultural immersion and exploration during the afternoons as well. “We started with a guided walking tour of the old section of Cuernavaca,” John explained. “The tour began at the cathedral where students learned about the fusion between indigenous religions and Catholicism in the 16th century. As we wrapped around the city center, we visited the Borda gardens for the son of a wealthy minor who made his fortune in the silver mines in the nearby town of Taxco. A festival in the gardens celebrating Holy Week gave the students a local taste of the culture.”
“We also visited Mexico City where the students had a guided tour of the National Palace, home to Diego Rivera’s murals depicting the struggle of the indigenous population during the Spanish conquest and later home to Benito Juarez, Mexico’s first native-born president. We toured the Zócalo (main plaza), which was built on top of the ceremonial center of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, as well as the national cathedral and the museo de antropología, which houses the largest collection of Mesoamerican art and artifacts in the world. As if that wasn’t enough, we took in a spectacular performance by the world famous Ballet Foklorico, enjoyed a guided tour of the ruins of Xochicalco and learned about the ‘ball game’ that was played at this site, and visited the orphanage at Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos. A cooking class and a salsa-dancing experience rounded out our cultural explorations."
“The whole experience – both academic and cultural – was certainly nervous-making and a little humbling for many of the students. In a very literal way, it took them outside their comfort zone, but showed just what depths of resilience, self-reliance, and independence they’ve developed during their Middle School years. I was immensely proud of them and very much hope that this is the beginning of an annual RDS travel/study experience.”
“As a proponent of true experiential education, I’m always looking for the ways to bring students into, through, and beyond each learning experience,” John adds. “We’ll be having conversations as a group to debrief, as well as conducting a formal post-trip evaluation by both students and their parents or guardians. And, as a way of sharing our learning with the entire community, we’ll be presenting a reflection of the trip at either an assembly or a Middle School gathering."