The word “identity” has always been a recurring thing that people are questioned about or think about. Identity follows a person around in their life like clockwork and somehow people can’t ever seem to get away from it. There is a constant love and hate relationship with identity and it is something even in today’s time where we still try to talk about it or even try to figure out sometimes.
Talking about things like this is essential for people to know about because identity can be the one thing that can sneak up on somebody without the person even knowing. Only to realize it when it finally consumes them to deep confusion. It is best to think about things like this, than to ignore it and let you deal with it later in life when you don’t know if you’ll still be able to handle it as much as you would in the moment. When thinking about it now, it can only help one with being self assured long term in life.
Every school year, an interesting project was presented to the 11th graders in their Spanish classes. This creative project is called “Así Soy Yo,” which means “This Is How I Am” in English. This was a project that had given Baruchians an opportunity to dive deep into specific things about themselves that they wanted to share in a different language other than English.
This project perfectly compliments the things I first mentioned about identity and it gave students the creativity to be able to research themselves and be able to do it in the sense of the culture of Spanish. Many students at BCCHS enjoyed this project and offered to share their thoughts.
Maria García, one of Baruch’s Spanish teachers who had taught the 11th grade Spanish classes, said that when assigning work, there is always a meaning behind them and a goal that teaches what their students can achieve when doing the assignment.
“It’s my favorite project, honestly, to do in the whole year because I do see how the students grow in the different vocabulary that they are using. But also, it’s really nice to see the students write and all the different things that maybe I don’t get to see or know about,” she said when talking about the Asi Soy Yo project.
As García is known as a teacher who is always working, even in her “free time,” she is always working, grading or planning something for her classes. As like all teachers, she constantly is thrown with the responsibility of teaching multiple kids a day in the week of Spanish work. Most likely throughout all of what she is doing, she doesn’t always get the chance to build a deep relationship with all of her students and so she is not able to see her student’s personality in total.
With this project, she was able to really see interesting things about her students, that she did or did not expect to learn about them. “I remember one year that this really quiet student said that she was very good at playing poker and so I was like ‘What!’” said Garcia.
As getting to know her students better was a sweet bonus, García also had a lesson that she wanted her students to learn from this project.
“I just wanted them to learn to know who they are better. Sometimes we create this idea of what we can or what we cannot do or what we can show and what we should hide, based on social standards,” she said.
García had wanted to help students learn this idea that there is no right or wrong when it comes to a person wanting to be their true authentic self.
There are many ways that someone that’s in high school could benefit from this and García knew exactly how. “It’s just to see with questions that I asked them to fill out, to reflect on those questions and while they are reflecting, they have to find the answer within themselves,” she said.
This project had a lot to do with people really reflecting on how they see themselves answering certain questions based on who they are and as teens who are in high school, going into the steps of growing up, a lot of teens might be stuck and still trying to figure out their identity and what that means to them.
This project just helped bring those questions out into the open and students were able to really see themselves to a certain extent.
To end it off, García said that she felt that it would be nice for other students in different schools to do these types of projects with their students but not just limit this project to only Spanish three students but also Spanish one and Spanish two students as well.
When asked about what students learned from this project, junior Christina Katzen said that this project helped her to discover new information about herself.
“I’ve always known that I like public speaking and doing that in another language was really intimidating but after doing this project, I’ve learned that I am really confident when it comes to public speaking,” Katzen said.
Junior Peyton Samuel said, “I feel like this project taught me about myself that I love a lot of things and I feel like I love to explain what I love and she told me to make it into like short little captions so that was a bit difficult. But overall, it was a great experience,”
Junior Alexandra Balgar explained that this project did what it set out to accomplish—it helped her to further explore her identity. “It taught me to dig deeper into my identity. I always thought I knew I had a sense of self and that I always knew who I was but I guess not,” Balgar said.
This project had a large impact on students at BCCHS. Something so small as a project on a sheet of paper helped students discover more about themselves and push them to think more deeply.
