Welcome to Spanish 2 and Spanish 3/4 at Santa Fe High School.  My name is William (Bill) Byczek.  This is my first year at Santa Fe High School.  Previously, I taught at Ball High School in Galveston and Ross Shaw Sterling Aviation High School (Sterling High) in the Houston Independent School District.  Besides Spanish, I am certified to teach English Language Arts, English as a Second Language, Business, and Special Education.  Teaching is a second career for me.  Prior to becoming a teacher, I was an accountant in business for over 30 years.  I became a teacher because education played such a major role in my career success.  I am now "paying it forward."

As you may have guessed, I am not a native Spanish speaker.  I began learning Spanish in high school.  I enjoyed it so much, I continued taking Spanish classes even though I was an Accounting major.  I studied at the University of Barcelona for my senior year. After graduation, I used Spanish in my career on occasion.  I also traveled a lot, often to Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish speaking countries. 

I know that many of our students do not look forward to taking a foreign language.  They question why they have to do so and think it will be of little value to them later on in life.  To address this issue, I frequently point out the many ways that learning Spanish can help them in their other classes, especially English, History, Social Studies and Art. 

While I try to make my class fun and enjoyable, I have high academic standards.  I expect my students to work as hard in this class as they do in their other classes.

An absolute requirement for all of my students is that they actively participate in class activities.  Active participation includes:

1.  Speaking in Spanish when asked to do so, as when I call upon the student to answer a question regarding the lesson material we are working on.

2.  Listening to other students when they are answering questions, reading, etc. and listening to the teacher as I try to explain the lesson objectives and content.

3.  Writing in their own words responses to worksheet and essay assignments.  Copying the work of others is not only not actively participating, it is considered to be cheating.

4.  Making a bona fide effort to read assignments using skills learned and developed in Spanish classes and not using an online translator to translate the Spanish text to English.

A class participation grade will be given daily (or almost daily) beginning with the second nine week grading period.  If a student is using his or her phone to watch videos, text with friends, talking with friends in class, eating and/or drinking, they are not actively participating in class and their class participation grade will reflect this.

For the week of October 22, 2018, we will be learning about the preterite (past) tense of AR, ER, and IR regular verbs, the past tense of Ir, Ser,  and Hacer and how to properly use pronouns after prepositions.

For the week of October 29, 2018, we will be learning how to speak and otherwise communicate about daily routines, the use of reflexive verbs and the present progressive tense.