It occurred to me as I was reading bluebooks and Destinos worksheets that it might not be clear to all of you why we do these assignments and/or what you’re expected to do with them.  Destinos isn't just a torture device; it has the potential to help you develop listening comprehension, grammar and vocabulary, cultural knowledge, and even your own general critical thinking and intellectual reasoning abilities.

You’ve all heard language learning compared to learning to play a sport or a musical instrument.  That’s really a very good comparison.  Let’s use the analogy of learning to play basketball.  Up until now, you’ve been learning the rules of the game and some of the basic skills, in isolation.  In 506 & 507, you did the equivalent of learning to dribble in place and learning to do lay-ups.  This semester, the goal is to be able to dribble the ball across the court and shoot without stopping.  Your in-class activities are like having short scrimmages with the rest of your grade-school gym class—necessary, but not enough.  Destinos is sort of like watching tapes of a professional game (maybe an exhibition game, but pro nonetheless.)  The hope is that you will listen to it and say, "Oh, that’s how you do that thing we talked about in class."

The worksheets are designed to help you pay attention to specific things, kind of like having a coach watch the tape with you, pausing it and saying, "Okay, now watch carefully.  Look at this player’s form when he takes the shot.  See what I mean about follow-through?"  They also try to get you to analyze certain forms according to the rules you (supposedly) know.  For the ejemplos sections, be sure to do the explanations when asked.  Trying to explain something to someone else is the best way to make sure you know it. On the detalles section, use ALL of your skills.   Especially for the "How do they say...?" type of questions, you'll have the best luck if you first try to predict what they might say, then listen a few times, then write it down and use your grammar knowledge to make sure you got it right as far as gender agreement, etc.

The bluebooks are sort of like taping your own practice for the coach to watch and comment on.  The more you do in them, the more feedback you’ll get.  About half of you are doing a really good job on these, and the other half are frankly pretty pitiful.  If, when you’re asked to describe something, you write "Raquel es muy inteligente," you haven’t shown me anything and there’s nothing I can say back to you.  (If you then, when asked to make a comparison, write "Raquel es más inteligente que Angela," you’ve wasted your time and mine!)  If, on the other hand, you give a good, detailed description of a painting on the wall in La Gavia, you’ll be experimenting with all sorts of new vocab and maybe even some different forms, and I can give you an idea of how successful your experiment was.  Plus, remember that part of the final grade is based on creativity, originality, and effort. Please see this assignment as an opportunity for personal attention and spend some time on it, rather than scribbling something at the last second.  The whole Destinos assignment (worksheet and bluebook) should take you 2 1/2 to 3 hours to complete.  It's a lot of work, but it really will pay off at test and composition time.