---

---

for New York Family's FREE weekly newsletter with our picks for the best family events, resources, shopping, giveaways, and fun in the city and beyond. CLICK HERE

Speyer Educator Finds the Medium Means More than the Message

Alonzo uses film, music and different media to teach coursework

By Max Sarinsky

A blond 1st-grade boy sporting a fake moustache stands inside a classroom that has been temporarily transformed into the Wild West. He is visually distraught as a voice from behind the camera—the voice of his teacher, Rodrigo Alonzo—asks what has just happened to the once quiet frontier.

“They dug up all the land to find gold,” he says with a traditional cowboy accent.

“What happened to you?”

“I lost most of my land.”

The interviewer presses on: “Are you interested in gold?”

“No,” the student retorts.

“What are you interested in?”

“Cows!”

“Cows, why?”

The student thinks for a moment before responding: “Because I’m a cowboy.”

The scene is just one of many in a 30-minute film that Alonzo made with his class at Speyer Legacy School on the Upper West Side as part of a unit on the California Gold Rush. But it demonstrates an important lesson that Alonzo, 40, has embraced through 18 years of teaching: that the medium is often more important than the message.

“It’s as much about how the kids are learning as what they’re learning,” he said.

Alonzo contrasted this with his philosophy when he first began teaching at St. Ann’s, when he “thought that just presenting this stuff was in and of itself enough.”

The film premiered in the winter to a full class of parents and the response was so positive, Alonzo said, that he decided to write a musical with the class revolving on another topic of study: the early 20th-century immigration wave. The class recently wrote three original songs together and will perform the play next month as its year-end project.

Alonzo’s decision to bring songwriting into class represents another step in his embrace of different teaching media. A longtime guitar player, Alonzo said that he was reluctant to incorporate song into the curriculum.

“I take songwriting very seriously,” he said. “I didn’t want to dominate.”

Alonzo taught kindergarten last year, and now has most of the same students in his 1st-grade class. Several of the parents said that Alonzo had a special ability to tailor instruction to the unique ways that each student learns.

Jennifer Elk, whose daughter Celia is in Alonzo’s class for the second straight year, credited Alonzo’s use of visual teaching methods with her daughter’s progress in math, a subject in which she has traditionally struggled.

“He really has a great understanding of what makes each child motivated,” Elk said. Malena Belafonte, a founding board member of Speyer Legacy School whose daughter Sarasina is also in Alonzo’s class, offered similar praise.

“He really was able to make the kids who they are and still learn,” she said. Belafonte described her daughter as an idealist, which she said has fostered sensitivity to other childrens’ feelings that has previously interfered with her own learning.

“He completely gets her sensitivity,” Belafonte said. “She’s become this full person who can handle everything but still believes in her vision of how the world should be… She wants to go to school on the weekends.”

Recent lessons include a lyrics-writing session for the class musical and a synonym matching game including several words that most students didn’t recognize.

“There has to be a little element of challenge,” Alonzo said. “You set up the structure and they take it to places you didn’t think it could go.”

_
Rodrigo Alonzo
The Speyer Legacy School
15 W. 86th St.