Angeles Berman's Page

Angeles,

I have a group 15 intermediate students with whom I'm going to be starting a unit on Mexico at the beginning of October. Would you have any interest in working together? One thought that I had was that we could use blogger and have each student post a question about the the target culture. Your students would post their questions in English, and mine would post in Spanish. Then they could all go on and post answers in their native language as comments....thus providing a ton of good colloquial reading material and first-hand cultural info for both of us....
Another thought is that in the past we have watched and discussed Amores Perros, de Alejandro González Iñárritu (with parental permission). The kids love it...and it presents some pretty critical viewpoints on several sectors of Mexican society. His most recent film, Babel, as I'm sure you know, is in English and is very critical of the U.S. in many ways. Might we watch the two films and exchange ideas? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Angeles,

I don't know my exact number of students yet, but I will have around 45 14-year-olds. A blog would be great. The first few chapters of our text book deal with train travel and restaurant vocabulary. Though that might be a little boring... Maybe we could have them writing about the kind of music that they like or something like that. Let me know.

Maybe you know Janice Rosenburg? I think she started doing teacher certification in 2001, but I'm not certain about that date. Yeah, Corvallis is a nice town.

Angeles, thanks so much for your kind words. I am really looking forward to hearing your voice, you've got more obstacles to deal with than I do, in the "digital divide" over access to the technology tools. I look forward to your voice!