Rethinking the Modern Classroom with Jalen Waltman

Waltman felt her anxiety spike as she walked into her classroom in August of 1999. “I’m really not as much of an extrovert as people might think.” She had just been hired to teach high school Spanish at Norman North High in central Oklahoma. With no experience under the belt and no safety net in place, Waltman jumped head-first into her teaching career.

Ten months later, as she bid her first class goodbye, she was struck by just how little Spanish they had learned over the past year with her. She took action and attended the Blaine Ray Workshop in 2000. It was here, listening to Susie Gross speak, that her perspective on teaching was changed forever.

During her second year of teaching, she began to develop her first book, “Dime Uno”. She filled it with interactive skits, vocab, and grammar worksheets.

Finding small success with her book, Waltman wasn’t done striving for perfection. In 2005, she moved to Monument, Colorado and began teaching middle school.

It was there that she wrote her first complete Spanish 1 lesson plan book. She found that other Spanish teachers began asking her where she found her skits and offered to buy copies from her. Waltman quickly realized that she was on to something big.

“I try to be a super straight shooter on there, I’m like — you know — eff this, that don’t work, just do this,” she said. “I hate when you get advice from people who aren’t in the field or they just flat out lie about how hard it is or what you really have to do to control a class.”

According to Waltman, teaching isn’t as simple as it appears on the surface. “Usually at night, I just have to recover from this job. That’s the reason why it sucks. It’s not just the teaching, the teaching’s hard while you’re there. But the time it takes to recover from it makes it sort of a wall-to-wall job.”

Despite its challenges, Waltman enjoys “the fun and variety that you can interject into your classes if you know what you’re doing.” She says that there is nothing better than “seeing kids having fun and laughing, especially high school kids because there’s so much pressure on them — you know — a lot of time school is really stressful.”

“A mom brought me flowers to Parent-Teacher Conferences because I was the first teacher that recognized the potential in her son. And let him know,” she said. “…He was really good at art. He actually had a learning disability, but [was] a brilliant, brilliant artist. So I would really praise his art when he did art in class.”

It is her ideology like this that makes Waltman a student favorite around her school. She touched the hearts of many students.

“I had fun in her class and she taught me a lot — not only Spanish,” said Devynn Ritchie, one of Waltman’s former students.

Over the years, Waltman has been Nationally Board Certified in World Languages Other Than English, received her Master of Arts in Teaching, received a Master Teacher License in the State of Colorado, and been hired by ETS as an AP Reader for the AP Spanish Language and Culture exam.

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