Over the years I have designed several different web pages.  It’s interesting to look at some of them and notice the way they look depending on whether they were done by writing out the html code (very tedious and time-consuming, although you can control everything) or using iWeb for the Mac, which is relatively simple and the results can be visually appealing. The difference should be obvious when you see them.

So many things can be a good outcome from a bad experience. In 1997 I attended a 3 week intensive class on FLES (Foreign Language in the Elementary School). Some of the attendees were on a Japanese track and others on a Spanish track.  Being on the Spanish track, I went to a Spanish class each morning and in the afternoon those from both tracks attended classes on how to teach a foreign language.  It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t done very well, which left many frustrated students. One of the projects was to develop your own lessons to teach Spanish to young children. As a result there were lots of good lessons developed, but it looked like all of this work was being forgotten and overwhelmed with useless and pointless educational theory. So, I asked several of those on the Spanish track to contribute their favorite lesson to a web site that I composed. The amazing thing was that this site became very popular with people teaching Spanish to young children all over the world. It turned out that while there had been lots of work on teaching Spanish to high schoolers and college students, hardly anyone had looked at the special ways to teach it to 5-10 year olds, especially in a fun and entertaining way.  I later added a mailing list so that teachers could share their lessons and tips with other teachers.

This is another example of something good coming out of a lot of frustration. Back in the late 1990’s, the concept of putting Hebrew on the internet was fairly new.  There were several different ways of doing it and no fool-proof standard had been developed. A friend of mine in Colorado worked with me to develop a way for people to communicate on the web with each other in Hebrew. Using the mailing program Eudora, I worked out a way to send and receive Hebrew messages on the Mac platform, while he worked on the PC side. We put instructions on how to do this along with some utilities on the web. We even started a short-lived mailing list so people could discuss different topics in Hebrew. Now with the development of unicode, writing email on the web is easy.  The only thing that is a little daunting for people is setting up their computers so that they can write in Hebrew relatively easily. I set up the Michtav site to show people in clear, easy steps how to set up their Macs.

This site, like the Michtav one, was written to solve a problem. There is a very popular Hebrew synagogue song called Ein Keloheinu. In Sephardic synagogues there is a version sung in Ladino, a very old form of Spanish mixed with Hebrew that was spoken in Spain before the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. I wanted to put the song back into the original Ladino with Hebrew letters.  Using a Ladino bible to make sure that I was using the correct Hebrew letters for the Ladino words, I wrote out the song so that others could download it and use it if they wanted.

After I moved to Vermont in 2009, I discovered a great group in Middlebury called the Addison County Farm Worker Coalition, which works to better the lives of immigrant workers on local dairy farms. After attending their conference in April 2010, I went to a board meeting and started working on developing a web site for the group to help promote their activities and to organize the work of the group.

Blogs

Before I retired from teaching in 2009, I worked for several years teaching English as a Second Language in the elementary school. During this time this type of teaching was undergoing all kinds of changes.  One of the most distressing changes for me was seeing the instruction going from a holistic one in which the immigrant child was taught a multitude of ways to adopt to American culture and language to classes that were nothing more than grammar drills. Instead of learning through games and intellectual exploration, the children were trapped in boring grammar classes in which they were taught that their speech was somehow inadequate.  Pretty much the opposite of what should be taught. So, I developed this blog to try to stimulate some thought among educators. The blog was met with such hostility in my district, that I decided to return to teaching kindergarten the next year. It’s sad when ideas are thought of as threatening.

In July 2008, a year before I retired, I was looking at the AARP web site and noticed an ad for the Peace Corps. I thought it was great that they were looking for older people to join the Peace Corps and I thought it would be fun to use my Spanish to help people. Who can forget when Lillian Carter, Jimmie’s mother, joined the Peace Corps when she was 67?  After enduring a grueling application process, I was finally accepted and went to Nicaragua in September 2009.  By the end of the month I was back in the US because of my hearing loss that the Peace Corps knew about beforehand. Somehow I guess the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn’t apply to the Peace Corps. My advice for those over 50 is to forget about the Peace Corps unless your health is like that of a 23 year old. If the government knew what it was doing, it would start a special section of the Peace Corps just for older Americans that would utilize their skills and wisdom while accommodating the physical maladies that all of us have.

Have fun reading newsletters from my kindergarten class in English and Spanish from 1996 until early 2004.  The web design is a little primitive, but there are lots of ideas that you might want to use in your kindergarten class or for teaching Spanish to young children.

Web Sites