Bravisimo! began as a way for me to share with other teachers the fruits of my
eighteen years of experience teaching high school Spanish. I have
always enjoyed adding a variety of new activities every year that
support the text, as most teachers do. But the most rewarding
experiences for me were the individual units that I began to create
and write myself several years ago in an attempt to add breadth and
richness to my program. I have been teaching, field-testing and
refining these units and activities for the past 10 years, and I
finally reached the point where it only made sense to share the
products of those countless hours with other teachers.
My experience is that teachers all too
often end up reinventing the wheel rather than pooling their
resources – not by choice, but out of necessity. Most teachers
simply don’t have the time to devote the hours and hours required to
write complete instructions and text materials for the great lessons
they teach every day so their colleagues can duplicate them. In my effort to do exactly that with
my work, I have come to appreciate just how demanding and
spectacularly time consuming that extra step can be.
How do I do
it?
So how do I manage it, you might ask?
I do it simply because I enjoy the process of creating, writing and
publishing. I’m a supremely organized
person and fairly compulsive about visual presentation, so I tend to
put in way more time than is probably necessary refining my
lessons, just for my own personal satisfaction.
I hope you and your students find these
materials to be enjoyable and rewarding, and that they become
favorites for years to come.
