Maya McFadden photo
Nathan Hale's Trudy Anderson on the Spanish-teaching job in class.
Nathan Hale Spanish teacher Trudy Anderson showed the seasons el invierno, la primavera, el verano, and el otoño on her classroom Smart Board then asked students “¿Cuál es tu favorito?”
“El verano,” answered Cameron Troutman.
“¿Por qué?” Anderson followed up.
“Es mi cumpleaños,” Troutman responded.
That was the scene in Anderson’s third-floor classroom Monday morning as she taught Spanish 1 to 22 middle schoolers at Nathan Hale School at 480 Townsend Ave.
The Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages named Anderson its teacher of the year in 2022 and she won Teacher of the Year for Connecticut in 2021 as awarded by the Connecticut Council of Language Teachers. Next week Anderson will be the keynote speaker at the New York State Association for Language Teachers Annual Conference.
Anderson has been bringing the Spanish language to middle schoolers in the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) district since 1992 and most recently shifted her teaching to follow along with the most up-to-date pedagogy of immersing students in the language through dialogue rather than focusing first on learning grammar rules. (Click here to read more about this shift, as described by NHPS’s supervisor of world languages.)
During Anderson’s Monday class, she asked her students “¿Qué tiempo hace hoy?”
With raised hands the student answered “sol y nubes,” meaning there was sun and clouds.
“Si pero ¿hace frio? hace fresco? hace calor?” Anderson followed up.
The class responded that Monday’s weather in the mid 50’s was “fresco.”
While practicing vocabulary words like “nieve” and “viento” Anderson first pronounced the words aloud then asked the students to “repite.”
Student check in at the start of Monday's class.
Anderson then asked the students to “make the connection” between the root of Spanish words like calor, viento, and frio with words in English.
One by one several students answered that calor has the same root word as calories, viento is like ventilation, and frio is like frigid.
“¿Qué tiempo hace la primavera?” Anderson asked next.
“Hace fresco en la primavera,” seventh grader Verra Ockan answered.
Anderson went on to ask about the weather during each of the seasons.
“En el otoño hace fresco,” answered one student. “Y viento mucho,” Anderson added.
Anderson then engaged the class in a discussion by asking the question: “¿Por qué Connecticut está en otoño y Argentina en primavera?”
“Think about what you learned in your social studies classes,” Anderson added.
After ten minutes of conversing with the students Anderson gave them a quick geography lesson about the different weather patterns due to the earth rotating around the sun and the two places’ distance from the equator.
On Monday principal Tara Cass described Anderson as the “Queen Bee of Nathan Hale.”
She described her as a historian and amazing educator who constantly brings a a wealth of knowledge to students and staff.
As of Monday Nathan Hale’s student population is 50.6 percent Hispanic, 27.9 percent white, 15.2 percent Black, 5 percent two or more races, and 1.3 percent Asian.
Fifteen percent of students at the school are multilingual.
Bulletin board outside of Anderson's classroom.
Before class was over, students worked for the final minutes on interpreting a flyer in Spanish to answer questions in English.
“Am I expecting you to know everything written on the page? No. What did I teach you guys to look for?” Anderson said.
The students listed off that they must look for cognates, numbers, words they’ve learned, pictures, and to use their common sense and background knowledge to piece together the flyers’ message.
Seventh graders David Masresha and Adana Gueye.
Seventh graders Verra Ockan, 12, Adana Gueye, 12, and David Masresha, 12 each agreed they enjoy Spanish class.
Ockan said she enjoys Anderson’s way of teaching although was intimidated by the idea at first of being fully immersed in the language during class.
Gueye said she appreciates that Anderson has poster reminders around the classroom to help her and other students if they ever forget how to ask for the bathroom or say the date. She added that she hopes to become fluent in Spanish because she loves to travel and wants to travel the world one day.
Masresha added that he appreciates Anderson’s patience which helps him to stay invested in learning. He said he hopes to learn enough Spanish to hold a conversation around New Haven. “I love this class. It’s a lot of fun even though sometimes words can look like scribble scrabble,” he said.
"I Want Them To Have Bigger Lives"
Trudy Anderson.
Anderson began her teaching career at Nathan Hale and has remained there as the school’s longest current educator of 31 years. Her first year she taught at both Nathan Hale and Wilbur Cross.
When she first began teaching she didn’t fully immerse her students in Spanish speaking during her classes, but along her journey she learned that “you can’t talk to someone in English if you expect them to learn Spanish.”
She added that most times her students “understand what I say but just don’t have the knowledge yet to know how to answer.”
In recent years Anderson said teaching has gotten more difficult but is still worth it despite students’ shorter attention spans and desires to have more ownership over their education.
To tackle these issues she incorporates the students in the making of some of her lessons and does three or four activities each class to keep students engaged.
During the second marking period, Anderson does a theater lesson with her students where they learn and act out a play in Spanish for the school’s kindergarteners and first graders. This idea stemmed from a student’s suggestion years ago.
She added that she sees student interest peak when she connects her lessons to other subjects like history, science, or the arts.
Anderson said that teaching students Spanish is important because “living in New Haven they will have plenty of opportunities to use the language” and because “these kids need to live a bigger life than just Morris Cove.”
Raised in Jamaica, Anderson recalled visiting Mexico and learning that “my life could be bigger” by learning another language.
“I want them to have bigger lives,” she said.
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