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For Teachers and Principals

LAD was founded in 2005 to draw attention to the importance of foreign languages in modern society and to facilitate the teaching of high school foreign language in SE Georgia in three ways:  (1) by hosting LAD annually, we periodically remind residents of SE Georgia of the importance of language and language learning in modern society;  (2) by providing a venue for a day-long program of learning through fun and competition, we give students and teachers a break from their usual language-learning routines; and (3) most importantly, by focussing the majority of competitive events on commonly taught grammatical and communicative skills, e.g., "ser and estar", LAD provides a competitive incentive for students to work harder in the Spanish classroom.

To help make LAD an even more useful incentive for students to work harder in class and to increase the overall quality of competition, beginning in LAD08 we limited the number of students to 25 per school.  Consequently, in addition to the incentive of having to compete with students from other schools during LAD08, students had the additional incentive of having to compete within their own schools to earn a spot on the LAD team.  For LAD10, we plan to reduce the number of students per school to twenty and increase the number of participating schools to eight.

While LAD events are by nature and design competitive, and while only one school will earn the Bryan Rampey first-place trophy, we go out of our  way to assure that LAD competition is fun and never fanatical.  More importantly, we stress that there are no losers in LAD, only winners, by virtue of having done one's best in competition with the best.

To participate in LAD10, scheduled for Friday, March 26, 2010, e-mail Professor Bell at "jbell@bpc.edu" with (1) your name, (2) name of your school, (3) your e-mail address and (4) your telephone number.

The following teachers participated in LAD09 and would be happy to provide first-hand impressions:

Rebecca Water

Metter High School

.bwaters@metter.org

Tracy Contreras
Claxton High School

tcontreras@evans.k12.ga.us