¡Sí, Señora!
My Spanish class is making me crazy. I believe I should be in the intermediate group but I’ve placed myself in the one labeled “Advanced Intermediate” for two reasons: 1) It’s a morning class and the other classes are in the evening. It’s a well-know fact I become exponentially dumber as the day wears down and 2) I have a friend with whom I’ve studied Spanish for a few years and this is the class she’s chosen. I like her a lot and since I moved to the other side of the state and the classes are via Zoom, it’s a chance for me to see and interact with her from three hundred miles away. If someone dropped me in the middle of Mexico, I could make myself understood. Granted, people would probably snicker at some of my grammar and usage, but they’d know what I was trying to say. Writing in Spanish is much more difficult. Every other week, as part of our assignment, we write an essay based on a specific reading we’ve been assigned. It doesn’t have to be strictly about the piece or the author. It can be a short essay about something we thought about when we read the piece. These get corrected, though this adult ed class has no official grading. The instructor returns them so we can try and fix our errors. Usually we go over them in class and work on corrections together. This week the teacher must have had time to spare, because he sent essays back ahead of class time. A missed tilde or accent mark in a word, a tense that would better express something, incorrect order of words, all marked in red. He is a stickler for every detail, which I consider a plus in a language teacher but I was disheartened when I looked at my essay. I made changes and emailed it again. I’ll see how that goes but when I first saw what I needed to amend, my immediate reaction was to give up on learning it altogether. I was discouraged and called my class friend to tell her, “I feel like quitting,” She didn’t miss a beat and adamantly answered, “That is exactly the reason you CAN’T quit!! We want to l learn to be better at it!!” A good outlook on things.
Photo courtesy jairojehuel on Pixabay.com
