Recently, Honors Spanish 4 teachers Carolyn Zeligman and Teresa Lindberg, feeling that their students had completed the requisite amount of vocabulary and linguistic rules learning, assigned to the junior class a project to explore the culture of Spanish-speaking countries.

This past 2012-2013 school year has been comprised largely of an exploration of world culture through all foreign language classes. In first semester , Honors French 2 students created a culinary project; later, Spanish 3 classes explored famous Spanish-speaking artists among the likes of Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo.

Additionally, the classes of Zeligman and Lindberg had explored Spanish-speaking culture through examinations of history, literature like Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes and previous and current popular culture icons of Spanish-speaking cultures, alike.

This recent assignment, which required students to prepare three typical and traditional foods from a given country and video the process in the manner of a classic cooking show, was the next step in the World Language department’s expansion of students’ knowledge of foreign culture.

The projects took weeks to make, and presentations spanned across the week of May 18, all of which lead up to AP Spanish 5, a class that further places depth over breadth, a class that places cultural issues like the Dirty War of the 1980’s and human rights issues over rote vocabulary memorization.