Students find lessons in Martini’s Spanish roots

By Lauren Radomski (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Walk by Jeannie Martini’s Underwood classroom and you’ll likely hear a chorus of children’s voices. As they sing about numbers and days of the week, students stand beside their desks, swaying to and fro to a rhythmic, Latin beat. This may be a fourth grade Spanish class, but for Martini, music is the best tool at her disposal.

In her third year as the Spanish teacher at Underwood Public School, Martini says music is especially effective with younger children. Underwood students as young as third grade spend six to seven weeks in Martini’s classroom each year.

“Little kids are so observant — they’ll catch all those little nuances,” she said, explaining the importance of learning a second language at a young age.

“What if you tried to start playing basketball in tenth grade? It would be really hard.”

To aid in learning, Martini relies on roughly 500 Spanish songs on her school-purchased iPod, songs she played over a set of speakers for a class of Underwood fourth graders last week. A song may be as simple as singing the alphabet, but repetition, Martini says, works wonders.

“In order to remember it, you have to keep going over things,” she said. “When you know those basic sounds, you can say anything in Spanish.”

For Martini, movement is also an important part of successful language acquisition. Dancing and especially twirling, she said, helps reinforce what students are learning verbally.

Martini also incorporates music into her advanced Spanish classes, where older students sing at least two songs a day.

“Some high school students don’t like singing,” she said, “but I usually make converts out of them.”

Martini, whose given name is Regina Maria Garcia de Quevedo, is the grandchild of two Baptist missionaries — one from Puerto Rico and the other from Pennsylvania. Though Martini grew up in Scranton, Pa., most of her relatives are Spaniards who moved to Puerto Rico. Martini’s cousin, Don Luis Munoz Marin, was the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico and the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.

Though she often had Puerto Rican relatives visit her childhood home, Martini said she learned Spanish later in life. As an exchange student in Brazil, she first learned Portuguese — only to “unlearn” that language to study Spanish as an adult. She completed her teaching degree in 1999 and taught in Park Rapids and Sebeka before joining the Underwood district. She is currently working on her master’s degree, focusing on second language acquisition with music.

After students filed out of her classroom last week, Martini said music continues to be an asset to students, whether they realize it or not. Via songs, she said, “they can learn without really knowing that they’re learning.”