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The national pastime has been a truly international game in recent years, with a wave of Latin Americans coming to the U.S. — many scrambling to pick up English along the way. Now their American-born teammates and coaches are returning the favor by learning Spanish. Miami Marlins CEO Derek Jeter made news last year with the announcement his club would require its minor league coaches and players to start learning Spanish. Not every team goes that far, but at least half the league’s 30 clubs now offer some level of Spanish lessons for English speakers, says MLB Vice President Paul Mifsud.


"The Marlins’ industry leadership on this is extremely helpful," Mifsud told the Associated Press. Marlins manager Don Mattingly, who like Jeter spent his entire playing career with the New York Yankees, told The Washington Times recently that if learning Spanish helps communication on and off the field, he’s all for it. "I’d heard Derek (Jeter) say once that it never seemed fair that the Spanish kids gotta learn English but the English guys don’t have to learn Spanish," Mattingly said. At the major league level, a confluence of cultures and languages is a standard feature of the clubhouse — but it can also be a hindrance to coaching, Mattingly said.


"Even if they kind of understand it, (a word) may not mean the same thing to them," he said. "We always have interpreters back and forth. So, like a growing number of other American coaches and players, Mattingly puts the onus on himself to pick up more Spanish. He uses the language-learning app Duolingo. Others download Rosetta Stone. That’s how Michael A. Taylor became known around the Washington Nationals clubhouse for his Spanish proficiency. When the Nationals outfielder was in the minor leagues, Taylor would spend hours-long bus rides using the software program to learn Spanish. Spurred on by "not being able to talk to half my team," Taylor learned the language in four months. "I definitely think it helps, especially the younger guys as they kind of learn English," Taylor said.


Still, in a league with 750 players on active rosters and several thousand more in the minors, Taylor is more the exception than the standard. That’s why the Marlins include year-round language lessons as part of the mandatory player development program for all rookie ballplayers. It’s not unlike a high school class — two or three times a week, 30 to 45 minutes at a time in a classroom setting with full-time teachers, interaction with classmates and even homework. Luis Dorante Jr, the Marlins’ translator this season, helped coordinate Spanish lessons in Jupiter, Florida, last year while serving as a player development intern. "Globalization is taking over, shrinking the distance of the world," said Mr. Dorante, who was born and raised in Venezuela and came to the U.S.


The language barrier was creating problems. MLB set a new rule in 2016 requiring each team to have a translator so the sport’s Latin stars could speak more easily with the media. The translators often fill multiple roles: Mr. Dorante also works in player relations and as a Spanish media liaison. Washington’s translator, Octavio Martinez, is the team’s bullpen catcher. The Washington Nationals’ Juan Soto, 20, and Victor Robles, 22, are generally seen as the team’s most exciting and promising young players. Both hail from the Dominican Republic. But when it comes to learning English, they are at very different steps on the journey. Robles, who hasn’t spent as much time at the major league level, needs a translator to speak with most American journalists.


But Soto told USA Today he prided himself on learning English while coming up through the system. Martinez stands by during Soto’s interviews, but the outfielder hardly ever needs his help. Taylor isn’t the only National who can speak to Soto and Robles in Spanish. Adam Eaton said he’s learned a few phrases and spare words in Spanish in order to better connect with his teammates. "If (a teammate is) talking about a famous pianist in Spain, I would never, ever be able to, but in baseball, I can kind of follow along," Eaton said. Eaton tried Rosetta Stone for a few weeks several years ago, but let it fall by the wayside. Now, he says, he wished he learned Spanish in the minors while he had more spare time. "It can only further your career and better your career if you take full advantage of it," Eaton said. "Not everybody has the resources to learn and do it with this much help and as much … experience, so to speak, of learning it. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.


It’s an alternative to expensive private schools, tutors, and camps, thereby addressing a much larger market. Parents increasingly want more than schools can reasonably offer, thanks to a focus on tests and deep budget cuts. Teachers could use extra income to supplement meager salaries, and also an outlet to channel passions that standardized testing have tried to kill. "Too much of K-12 is focused on the end result and we are losing sight of the base purpose," Nathoo says. Megan Hardy was a stay-at-home mom and found Outschool when she was looking for a way to get her son interested in history.


She found the five-dollar course "Big Picture History: American History in One Lesson." Her son loved it. He took a few more classes. When her husband lost his job a year later, Hardy thought about creating a class to teach critical thinking and problem solving through Dungeons and Dragons (which she and her kids play all the time). She applied to Outschool and was interviewed, provided a lesson summary overview, and got approved within three weeks. After clearing a background check and going through on-boarding to learn the Zoom videoconferencing technology, she started teaching, in spite of never having taught before.


Hardy now teaches 40 to 50 hours a week. "It turns out, a lot of kids want to learn this," she says, laughing at the sound of it. 7,000 a month—Outschool takes 30% of teachers’ earnings for marketing, admin, and handling all the billing. Hardy’s classes run for six weeks and are 80 to 90 minutes each. She’s capped each class at six kids, so she can better manage the group. The average class at Outschool is three to eight kids; 18 is the maximum. 10-15 a class. Nathoo estimates that about 80% of kids use it for fun and 20% for core learning. Benjamin Corey, who taught middle- and high-school biology for eight years in Atlanta and San Francisco, says he loves the freedom he has to build interesting classes.


He teaches five to six hours a day, and offers 40 classes. Eleven are core classes, each four sessions long, which make up the equivalent of freshman biology. He also teaches 29 one-off classes, including a series on endangered species that address environmental topics via specific animals (orangutans and deforestation; orcas and biomagnification of pollutants). He misses the interaction of a classroom—shared physical space and body language are key to teaching, he says—but has worked on making the online experience as rich as possible. He caps his classes at nine students and does a lot of diagraming, calls on everyone a lot, and never has a segment go more than 10 minutes.


"I don’t see myself going back to the classroom any time soon, because it would be a pay cut and a lot more stress," he says. Nathoo founded Outschool in 2016, with the idea that social connection was key to learning. "So much of ed-tech today is automated, putting tools or AI in the classroom," he says. It was the social aspect of Outschool that drew Jennifer Carolan, a former public school teacher and founder of Reach Capital, to invest in it. The big failing of MOOCs, where completion rates hover between 5-15%, is to ignore that humans are, at heart, social learners.


"We learn from each other and teachers can be very impactful," she says. Outschool matches curious learners to teachers who teach. "There’s a teacher who is passionate about the subject matter, and a small group of learners, and the tech that can enable social interactions between kids," she says. The biggest challenge was how to get started: parents won’t sign up without classes and teachers won’t teach classes without students. The company’s first iteration was in-person learning: Nathoo organized field trips in San Francisco for kids to go to museums with teachers and some learning goals in mind. Parents joined their kids and saw how they got more out of a visit when a teacher was there.


Carolan loved the idea, but didn’t think it could scale. When Nathoo pivoted to online, with small, live classes, she jumped in. As due diligence, she signed her daughter up for a class, watched, and was impressed. She vetted the team who vets the teachers, and ultimately invested two weeks later. The challenge now is to attract teachers and students beyond the home-schooling community, aiming for kids who log on after school, in the summer, and during holidays. It might not be easy to gain traction beyond this community, namely for those parents uncomfortable with their kids taking classes from non-certified teachers.