[I wrote this Wednesday on the plane ride home but am just now posting.]
[See By the Numbers below!]
I returned home Wednesday evening after being on the go for the past 32 days. It actually seems like I've been gone longer, as I was in Puerto Rico with my students and colleagues for eight days just before leaving for Spain. Speaking of school, I saw a group of students from Texas at the airport in Madrid this morning. They were returning home after an adventure through central and southern Spain and were so excited to tell me about the places they had visited in Madrid, Sevilla, Granada and along the coast. They reminded me of how I felt when I came back from Spain in June 1997 following my first trip out of the country to a Spanish-speaking place. I hope their enthusiasm will be contagious when they go back to school in a few weeks!
Seeing those students today and chatting with them for a bit has got me excited to return to school in a little more than one week. Even though I haven't done much planning yet for the first couple of weeks of classes, I feel as prepared and as excited as ever to return to the classroom and incorporate my experiences in Spain into our everyday class activities. While we talk about Spain in my Spanish IV classes for the first nine weeks of the school year, I have always preferred to teach about Latin America because I have been fortunate to spend a combined year there visiting 15 countries since 2001. I love everything about South America and could spend hours talking about my travels through the Andean nations to backpacking through Patagonia and drinking water directly from the river because it was so clean. Spending time in these places has allowed me to grow extremely found of them, and I treasure sharing these stories and pictures in class that my friend Jason and I took while there. I always hope that my pictures will come to life through the stories I tell about South America, Central America and the Caribbean.
I really haven't been able to do this with Spain, as I was only 16 when I visited -- before digital cameras were the norm and long before I thought like a teacher and collected items I could use in class. I have thought for some time that I do my students a disservice when I teach about Spain because my knowledge was limited to what I learned during my one visit there and in textbooks.
After spending the last four weeks in Spain, however, I feel so much more prepared to teach about the Iberian Peninsula. I've learned so much about its history, geography, culture, foods, politics and people. This trip has reawakened in me a passion for Spain that had been dormant for too long. In fact, I feel as excited, energized and rejuvenated as those students I saw this morning.
I have so many ideas racing through my mind about how to best use my experiences from the last four weeks. I took 1,549 pictures, and I'm planning to create 10 to 15 slideshows that will show everything from the different regions of Spain to the Juanes concert I attended. I also have 33 short video clips that I will be able to incorporate into the slideshows. I was hoping to capture more video by interviewing people at some of the sites I visited so they could explain the history behind the location. Perhaps I had bad luck with the people I asked or perhaps it was because of something else, but people in Spain were reluctant to be videoed. But, I'll be able to do voiceovers on parts of the slideshows to incorporate some audio into the videos. Working with the pictures and video will be my main focus throughout the next few months.
I would also like to create another blog about my trip to Spain that I will use in the classroom. I'm planning to edit and condense what I have written so far and put it into another blog or Web site that is both educational and narrative. I want to add links and make the site more interactive. It will probably take me most of the upcoming school year to complete the Web project and I'm looking forward to the challenge. I hope it will be a great tool in the coming years.
Incorporating all of this technology into class will be great, but it will be no substitute for the anecdotes and experiences I'll be able to share after actually traveling through 17 different cities across central, northern, southern and eastern Spain. I am so fortunate to have had this opportunity, and I can't begin to express how much I appreciate what this grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. has done for me. The foundation's generous grant turned my 14-year dream into a reality, and I'll always be thankful for this unique opportunity.
Thanks for coming along with my on this Spanish sojourn! I had 1,173 page views on my blog, so thanks so much for your support!
Here are a few facts I found interesting as I looked back at the past month:
- I was gone for 32 days.
- I wrote about 28,000 words on my blog.
- I took 1,549 pictures and 33 short video clips.
- I stayed in nine different hostels / hotels in the 17 cities I explored.
- I journeyed 1,759 miles on buses ... from Madrid to Segovia and Avila, from Madrid to Toledo, from Madrid to Salamanca, from Salamanca to Leon, from Leon to Oviedo, from Oviedo to Sevilla, from Sevilla to Cordoba, from Cordoba to Madrid, from Madrid to Granada, from Granada to Murcia and from Murcia to Barcelona.
- I spent 52 hours on those buses to cover the 1,759 miles, or a little more than two full days.
- I walked about 185 miles to visit monuments, cathedrals, mosques, gardens, ruins, universities, parks cities and more, an average of 6 miles per day.
- I traveled 8,988 miles on planes ... 156 miles each way from Fort Wayne to Chicago, 4,188 miles each way from Chicago to Madrid, and 300 miles one way from Barcelona to Madrid.
- I spent nine hours on trains to travel 260 miles
Adios,
--Justin
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