Señora Cummins' Reflections

A few years ago a friend introduced me to the Ennegram numbers.  It's basically figuring out your personality type.  I really gravitate towards these things because I enjoy learning about how to be my best.  I think our culture tries to mold everyone into 1 type and I like celebrating my own unique self and becoming the best version of it. Anyway, I found that I'm a 2 with a leaning towards 3.  This means that I'm a Helper with a leaning towards Hostess.  This is very well-suited to being the Hispanos Unidos (Spanish Club) co-sponsor.  I love developing relationships within our club and "hostessing" to make our meetings be a place of belonging. Later today I'm taking a group from our club to the Dallas Museum of Art to see a collection of Frida Kahlo's artwork.  This is the good stuff--spending time together and sharing experiences. However, building an online class isn't this.  My husband is a 5 on the Ennegram system.  He loves researching,...

I've chosen the OER textbook going to use as the bones of my 1411 class.  I have it in an editable format.  My next step is to present it to my dept chair.  After that I present it to the dean. Today I had an epiphany:  I can use my creativity to truly make this class fit the needs of the students I teach.  My son made a great recommendation:  teach the class 1 way for students who just need 1 semester of Spanish and teach it a different way to those who will continue on for another semester.  In a perfect world that would be something to explore, but not for now. Eventually I want our campus to offer conversational Spanish which is a 3 hr credit instead of a 4 hr credit, but I want to get this new curriculum up and going before I tackle that task. For now, I can look at the concepts that typically cause the most trouble for students in my 1411 and do what I can to help make those pinch points less tricky.  One thing I'm addressing is that the las...