Expectations
¡Bienvenidos a la clase de español! (Welcome to Spanish class!) I welcome all of you as your teacher to a year of learning Spanish, and I have high expectations for an academically successful time for all of us. I hope that, individually, you will perform to the best of your abilities in my class, and I know that you are very capable of doing the work that will be presented to you this year. My aim is to teach you Spanish, and I hope that you are interested in not only achieving the expected amount of fluency in your course, but perhaps surpassing those bounds and going beyond the prescribed syllabus through individual study and research.

You will have to work hard in this class. I want you to become an active learner, and not just a passive note-taker, and in order to do this you will need self-discipline as you study and learn on a daily basis. To be honest with you, hard work is the only way to succeed in my classes, and I feel you should be aware of that from day one. Your rewards as a student will be the good grades that you will receive as the result of your effort, and the assurance that, day by day, you are getting closer to the goal of becoming fluent in a foreign language.

Materials Needed for this Class
It is your responsibility to have the following items in your possession within the first week of the beginning of the school year. Make sure that you always bring the following items to class.

A textbook. Your textbook might be given to you by the school, or you might have to buy it, depending on the class you're taking.

A notebook. Either a composition style notebook, or a spiral notebook is fine. You will be taking plenty of notes, and experience has shown that a small notebook will not last you for very long. Therefore, make sure that you purchase one that has plenty of pages so that it will last you for the entire school year. It is good to have all your notes together in one notebook, especially during Midterm and Finals time.
Note: Make sure that only Spanish is kept in this notebook, no work from other subjects, please.

A folder. Please keep your returned graded quizzes and homework in it.

A binder with loose-leaf. This is for quizzes, or class work that you must hand in.

Homework
The work that you take home that reinforces the previous day's work, usually referred to as homework, is an integral part of your education. Homework will be assigned every night and it will be collected the next day. Homework is to be HANDWRITTEN in blue or black ink, on white loose-leaf paper. Collected homework will generally be worth 10 points. There will be times when you will have to type the homework, but this would be the exception rather than the rule. Failure to hand in homework in the proper format will result in a grade of zero (0) for that assignment.

Quizzes and Grading
In this class you will have a quiz every day. It might be tough at first to realize that you are being tested every day, and that you are required to know the material on a daily basis, but with time you will understand the importance of this procedure when learning a foreign language. A quiz will cover the material covered the day before. Each quiz will generally be worth 20 points. Vocabulary and grammar are two important topics covered by these daily quizzes, but throughout the year you will also be responsible for culture and history quizzes. With so many grades accumulating day in and day out, it is not unusual at the end of the quarter to have over 500 points worth of quizzes and homework.

What if you're absent?
It's important to take into consideration that as a student you are responsible for everything that happens in this class whether you are present or not. In the rare case that you are absent for health, retreat or other personal reasons, it is your responsibility to get in touch with one of your classmates and to find out the work that you missed (homework, and the topic for the quiz.) Upon your return you are required to present your homework, and to be ready to take the day's quiz, plus the quiz that you missed on the day of your absence. There are no exceptions to this rule. By the end of the first week of school you must have the phone numbers of at least two students from the class that you can call, and that you feel will provide you with accurate and reliable information.