About me

Contact me:

The best way to contact me is to email me at asaalfeld AT ftcpioneers.org because I tend to forget to reply to text and voice messages, but you can also text or leave me a voicemail at 402-210-8383 (Google Voice number). If you're texting, please identify yourself so I know who I'm talking to. 

My professional background:

I'm Anita Saalfeld (aka Profe), and 2017-2018 was my first year teaching Spanish at Fort Calhoun.  I've been teaching Spanish since 1999, when as a clueless new grad student in a Spanish literature master's degree program at UNL, I was thrown into a Spanish 1 classroom with a book, a syllabus, and a couple days of teacher training.  I loved the opportunity to share my enthusiasm for Spanish, but recognized that I lacked a lot of experience and expertise in teacher training.  When I finished my master's degree, I decided I wanted to pursue additional study in applied linguistics so that I would understand how people learn languages, and how we can best facilitate that through our teaching.  I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and in conjunction with my doctorate in Hispanic linguistics, I pursued a graduate certificate in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education.  I finally finished my program in 2009, 15 years after I started college.  Along the way, I've taught a number of different Spanish courses at various post-secondary institutions (if you're interested, you can see the full list of courses I've taught here, and you can see my educational credentials here). 

My approach to teaching Spanish:

I will be the first to confess that I love grammar.  I love learning about how a language works, and I love explaining it (sometimes to friends and family members who have no interest in it, but they nod and smile politely because they love me).  But there is a considerable volume of research that tells us that people don't actually learn to communicate in a language by mastering its grammar rules.  It turns out that what we need to be successful in learning a language is a lot of exposure to the language, and the exposure has to be something that we can understand in order for it to help build our developing linguistic system.  Every expert agrees that this exposure is essential for someone to acquire another language, which means that it's critically important to provide as much exposure to Spanish in the classroom as possible.  This means that the main focus of the class will be using Spanish to communicate.  Our objectives focus on being able to carry out communicative tasks and make ourselves understood in Spanish, rather than on mastering a particular grammatical form.  That said, there is also considerable evidence that teaching the rules of a language can help speed up the language acquisition process for adolescents and adults, as long as teaching the rules keeps meaning in focus.  In other words, we don't study the grammar rules so that we can pass a Spanish grammar test; rather, we study the grammar rules to understand differences in meaning that are conveyed by the grammar of the language, with the ultimate goal of communicating successfully in Spanish.  You can read my general teaching philosophy here.

In my free time:

I love spending time with my husband Scott and my son Staffan (pronounced SteFON).  We like being outside in nature and going to baseball games. On my own, I like to read and listen to jazz.  

My professional websites: