New Spanish teacher Mangione enthusiastic about language

By Léa Ringeval, Reporter and Katy Sassara, Content Editor

 

 

Louis Mangione’s classroom looks more like an art class than a place where students learn Spanish; paintings, paintbrushes and drawings are everywhere. As I enter for my interview, he cleans up the supplies, his students having left for their lunch break.

 

This is the price of being a teacher with playful methods.

 

Mangione has been teaching Spanish at high school and middle school levels since 1979. September marked the beginning of his first year at VHS. He and his family have been living on Vashon since 2005, when they moved from Seattle.

 

“I love the Island!” he said enthusiastically.

 

He believes he was very lucky to get the job. His first days consisted mostly of meetings, allowing him to enter his new job slowly.

 

“I was really excited to meet all of my students, and it felt good to be in the classroom speaking Spanish the whole time again,” Mangione said.

 

Mangione grew up in an Italian-speaking household in Spokane, Washington, where his parents, both Italian immigrants, instilled in him a passion for language that would influence him for the rest of his life.

 

“I loved the language,” he said. “I would have studied it in high school, but it wasn’t offered, so I took Spanish, and I fell in love with it.”

 

This passion for Spanish prompted him to continue his Spanish studies in college, and he eventually majored in the language in 1979.

 

After getting his first teaching job that same year, Mangione spent 21 years in education — first at Mountlake Terrace High School and then at John F. Kennedy High School — in Seattle.

 

“[I then] began to do workshops for teachers,” he said, describing his most recent career, which involved a lot of traveling. “When I found [Harris Levinson] was heading to Tacoma, I knew that this position had come up, and I thought, ‘Now it’s time.’”

 

Since his arrival, Mangione’s focus has prioritized his students’ ability to speak over their ability to write, similar to how his parents taught him Italian as a child.

 

“[Learning a new language is] closely related to the way we learn our native language,” Mangione said. “We learn through doing, through acting things out, drawing pictures, [having] conversations, and then reading and writing.”

 

The way he teaches Spanish could be defined as a conversation and communication approach, also called comprehensible input.

 

“We use anything and everything to learn a language, and that’s why you see paint on the tables today, because we are working with colors. We are learning colors from practicing — we are mixing colors together. We also draw a lot in my classroom.”

 

Using materials helps the understanding of the language.

 

“We also learn Spanish through situations,” he said. “So the grammar is learned through situations instead of rules, like native people do.”

 

If you walked into his classroom on a typical afternoon, you would see a lot going on — students standing in circles, grouped by pairs, threes, or fours, with others moving around the room. Learning by practicing for him is the key to learning Spanish. Indeed, the students start to learn grammar rules by speaking.

 

Mangione is also teaching himself to use technology, an indispensable resource in our modern society. He feels that technology can enrich his lessons. During his classes, he uses videos and photos that depict certain cultural information or events. Students can even access interactive lessons from a website.

 

Mangione doesn’t have a lot of classroom policies, except one rule that is, according to him, the most important: he wants the students to respect and listen to each other. When one person is talking, everybody must listen to him or her. The more language they are taking in, the more quickly they will be able to use Spanish.

 

“They are not just listening to me; they have to listen to each other. They have to be respectful of everyone else’s ability to learn in that space,” he said.

 

Concerning the homework, he doesn’t assign too much at first, especially for the students taking their first year of Spanish.

 

“They don’t have the ability to do things on their own yet, contrary to my third-year students, who are able to do some things individually,” he said.

 

He does, however, assign many projects. One project he assigned to his third-year classes consisted of finding three things that were personal and that had great meaning to them. They had to talk about the things they had chosen with their classmates, and then everybody had the chance to ask questions about the things that were so important to their lives.

 

Mangione describes himself as a very understanding teacher with regards to an individual’s situation or learning needs, but he is very specific about language in the classroom.

 

“Spanish, no English! Always. That is one thing I am tough about,” he said.

 

When asked his favorite age or grade to teach, Mangione sat back to think for a moment, and nodded.

 

“I can’t choose,” he said.

 

He has taught middle school and high school, and loved them both.

 

“I have no preference,” he said. “However, there are differences. Differences out there, in the hallways, in the courtyard. That’s how you see the differences between the freshmen and the seniors. By the way they act, the things they have to worry about.”

 

According to him, juniors and seniors have more pressure for college than freshmen, who are not thinking about it yet. However, he said, “In the [Spanish I] classroom, there are no differences because everybody starts out at zero knowledge of this language, so it’s all new for everybody.”
Over his time as a teacher, Mangione has noticed something at both levels: students want to be able to use their Spanish as soon as possible.

 

“In fact, it’s like teaching music,” he said. “You don’t want to study about music without playing it; you want to be able to perform it. Well, it’s the same with language. People take a language so that they can actually use it … They want to be able to say what they are thinking.”

 

He also loves working with colleagues who share the same students.

 

“All of the teachers of this building are highly educated and passionate about what they teach, and so it’s really nice to work with these kinds of professionals,” he said. “I have very good relationships with them.”

 

It was clear that what Mangione likes most in his profession is simply being in the classroom surrounded by his students. But he also recognized that being a teacher is not that easy. In his opinion, the biggest challenges are the things that teachers are required to do outside of teaching.
“There are many procedures teachers have to go through,” he said. “Not only that, [but also] technology has added hours of responsibilities and emails and answering emails and signing forms, constantly being ahead of everything you are doing. It wasn’t like that before. It has changed dramatically … your ability to plan for teaching is really cut back. And so you’re spending 10, 12 hours a day getting ready for this. That’s the difference I’ve seen, compared to when I taught before.”

 

Most important, Mangione wants his students to understand that learning a new language like Spanish is a wonderful experience.

 

“First of all, it allows you to not just travel, but [also to] understand someone else’s culture,” Mangione said. “It’s not just technology that makes us a global society — it’s relationships. And when we are able to speak other languages, we are able to form relationships with people around the world. And when we make these connections, we understand somebody else’s culture a little better. That is probably the most important thing: to open yourself up to the world.”