by Faith Chojar, staff reporter
Tenth and eleventh grade students in Spanish level II with Mr. Vargas were recently assigned a project to prove they know their Spanish around the house. The project? Building their own model house, more precisely, the house of their dreams.
On October 28th the project entitled “La casa de mis suenos” was e-mailed out to students with the due date of November 15th. This project required immense amounts of work and overall was taken just a bit too far. Students had to construct their house out of essentially nothing, using “cardboard, boxes, plastic, construction paper, wood, paper or any other material you think is good to make your dream comes true,” stated in the project description.
The houses of their dreams called for not only a fully furnished, fully painted, fully labeled floor model of a house, but a written description of the house in complete perfect spanish and a drawn out floor plan of the house.
“This whole project overall, on and off, working on it everyday took me just about two weeks. By the time I finished, my house looked like a hurricane came through here,” junior grade spanish student Adva Fuchs said. “I have so much other work to do, I have SAT’s to study for, other tests, essays to write, I did not have all the time in the world just to build the house.”
“By completing this project the students got in touch with their inner strengths and explored diverse vocational skills, both academic as well as art and creativity with a hands-on project that provided a full experience into the learning process. Mr. Vargas said. “The primary objective of this project is to assess written and verbal language expression as well as comprehension skills.”
After two straight weeks of nothing but spanish project work and added stress just from one project, on top of everything, the project was due on November 15th. That Friday, as if the projects themselves weren’t enough, students had to begin presenting their houses to the class.
“I’m not really comfortable with presenting my Spanish project to the whole class because, well, I don’t speak the language and don’t know the pronunciation of a lot of Spanish words.” junior Nicole Albino said.
Junior year being one of the hardest and most important for high school students, spanish isn’t the only stressful class. Trying to find a balance between AP classes (world and language,) algebra or algebra II/trig, spanish, and physics is nearly impossible. Earlier in the year a map project was assigned to AP world students. At the time, among the students that project was the hardest assignment out there. This house project makes the map seem like a walk in the park.
Although the assignment was a lot of work, some people really did take a liking to it.
“I really truly did enjoy the spanish project. It gave me the ability to be creative, and I was able to spend a lot of time with my friends not just working on this project but hanging out and having fun too.” 11th grader Dominique Cachia said.
On the bright side, certain aspects of the project were fun, like making the furniture and decorating and painting. On the darker side, hot glue does not agree well with fingertips.
