Movin' On Up

 

I am pleased to report that I have just completed my first semester of Advanced Spanish!  This was quite a milestone for me, as I have taken Intermediate Spanish seven times.  And Beginning Spanish quite a few times also.

I have wanted to learn Spanish since high school.  I did not take Spanish in high school, because, little nerd that I was, I thought that Latin would help me on my verbal SATs.  Latin at my high school was taught by the extremely eccentric Ms. B., who ultimately suffered a manic attack during my younger brother's Latin class and had to be permanently removed from the school.  

At the University of Virginia, I studied computer science.  Due to the newness of the subject, computer science was part of the Engineering School.  So I had to take all the required engineering classes - material science, thermodynamics, solid mechanics, chemistry, physics, graphic drawing, and SO MUCH MATH, in addition to the computer programming classes.

As engineering students, we were actually forbidden from taking beginning foreign language classes, even if we could have fit them into our schedules.  So although I learned LISP, FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, Pascal, and C, I did not learn any Spanish.

After college I took a job in New York City and signed up for some evening Berlitz Spanish classes.  The classes were enjoyable, but I did not retain very much Spanish.  

You know how they say children's brains are like sponges, soaking up knowledge?  As regards Spanish, my brain is more of a rock with a few cracks in it, where a few Spanish words occasionally lodge themselves.  Also, I never practice.

Fast forward many years, and once my children were all in school, I tried a daytime Spanish class at our local senior community center.  It was taught by an older lady who was very pleasant, very disorganized, had never taught Spanish before, and may not even have been fluent herself.

At around this time, my oldest daughter was in sixth grade and started to ask for help with her math homework.  Okay, fellow parents, tell me if this sounds familiar:  the child shows you a fleeting glimpse of the problem in the book and then demands an explanation.  You ask to hold the book so you can properly see the problem, which results in a tug-of-war.  Once you have the book, you flip back a few pages to review the material, at which point the child starts moaning "You don't know ANYTHING."

It bothered me that although I had taken eight advanced math classes in college, I couldn't remember sixth grade math.  So I signed up for Algebra at Foothill Community College.  And as long as I was on campus, I signed up for Beginning Spanish as well.

Over a few years, I took about six math classes, up to Integral Calculus, and got through three semesters of Beginning Spanish and three semesters of Intermediate Spanish.  It was so much fun being on campus. I even liked the cafeteria food.

After I embarked on re-learning math, I was so excited to help the girls with their homework!  They were NOT excited.  In fact, as a result of my math enthusiasm, they worked super-hard on figuring it out for themselves since they very much did not want to ask me.  So although it didn't work out as I had foreseen, they did get pretty good at math, and in fact, Susan is now a math teacher.

The teacher I had for my first five classes at Foothill was a small, witchy woman from Colombia who taught all the Spanish sections in one room.  She would divide us up into groups by level, assign us things to work on in class, and then just float around between the groups.  Grading was extremely loose.  I didn't learn tons of Spanish, but we had a lot of fun.  We learned some Latin partner dances and had to dance with each other, which was pretty weird, not gonna lie.

Then Señora moved back to Colombia, I think, and we got a young popinjay who wasn't going to take it easy on us just because it was community college Spanish.  His tests were absolute nightmares.  I disliked him immensely and dropped out of the class.  I felt extremely sorry for the kids who had to stay in the class and I hope karma has managed to kick him in the ass somehow.

I took a break for a few years and then decided to give Spanish another go.  I didn't want to go back to Foothill, but luckily there are many community colleges in our area, so I applied to the Cañada College Spanish program.  Because of my break in studies, I was required to go back to Intermediate Spanish 1.  I thought about challenging the placement, but I am actually quite bad at Spanish so I figured I could use the repeat.

Cañada also uses the one classroom model, but Señora was very hands-on and had us all do the same things in class and just expected the upper levels to be better at it.  There were a lot of presentations, which was very entertaining.  I made non-alcoholic daiquiris for one, which was extremely sticky.  I even made a friend!  Ann is my age also has three daughters.  We did all our presentations together, despite Señora's stricture that we were to switch partners each time.  Ann and I were like, bite me, we're feisty old broads and we're sticking together.

Then the pandemic hit, and when I was ready to go back, I discovered that Cañada didn't offer Advanced Spanish that semester, which turned out to be an awesome blessing, because I switched to West Valley Community College, which I LOVE.

When I attempted to register for Advanced Spanish, I was once again put in Intermediate Spanish, but at least in the third section.  West Valley also has all the Intermediate and Advanced Sections grouped together.

The teacher is a beautiful, friendly Italian woman who has two young children and understands that life is chaotic enough and thus rarely assigns homework and has very few tests.  

The first semester was taught via Zoom, so I got to see the faces of my classmates, but not their bodies.  The next semester was in person, but masked, so I got to see the bodies of my compañeros from the previous semester, but not their faces.  Then we got to remove the masks, which was amazing.

So, my first Advanced Spanish class!! We had such a fun group of students this past semester.  I felt like I was in an episode of Community every Tuesday and Thursday.  After the first couple of classes, we had arranged ourselves into little groups for the in-class discussions.

Grupo Uno:  Renee, a lovely mother of three who did not go to college after high school and is getting her degree now that her children are all in school.  She has a great laugh and often brought snacks.  Gabriel, a curly-haired young man who is getting married and transferring to nursing school next year.  Gabriel has a wicked sense of humor and is very smart.  Renee and Gabriel took Arielle, a fifteen-year-old with learning differences, into their group, and were very patient with her.

Grupo Dos: Seiki, a 60-something Japanese man who loves language classes. He has taken all the French and Italian classes at West Valley and is now working his way through Spanish.  Seiki tells Dad jokes and his presentations were always incredibly long, but he always brought pizza, so we forgave him.  Robert, a recent high-school graduate who loves soccer.  Pretty much all his presentations were about soccer.  Hunter, a high-school classmate of Robert's, who also loves sports.  Robert and Hunter were unfailingly nice to Seiki (and me) and never made us feel old and stupid.

Grupo Tres: Kate, that would be me.  Señora decided that I was Kate and I decided to just go with it.  It was only a problem when she would say "Kate, por favor lee el párrafo" and I would just sit there dreamily until Joseph kicked me.  Joseph is a mid-twenties guy who tells truly terrible jokes.  When we did a presentation together, he insisted on ending it by rickrolling the class with a link on the last slide.  His Spanish is very good and mine is very bad, so we made a pretty good team.

Grupo Cuatro, The Gigglers: Anastasia, a stunning 19-year-old from Belarus.  Anastasia speaks six languages fluently and also picked up Spanish at an astonishing speed.  Anastasia often spoke about members of her family still in Belarus and the horrible situation in Ukraine and we sympathized as best we could.  In addition to taking a full course load, Anastasia is also a nanny.  As is Paulina, another  beautiful 19-year-old who is a heritage Spanish speaker.  The third member of their group was Valerie, a home-schooled 15-year-old who is also a heritage Spanish speaker.  The Gigglers sat in the back of the classroom and there was always a lot of whispering and giggling.

Señora is such a fun teacher.  This past semester, West Valley kept having campus events that involved free food.  Whenever Señora heard about free food on campus, she would call a break so we could go get the hot dogs, pizza, popcorn etc and bring it back to class.  Señora loved to have us perform skits.  We spent a lot of time in class writing outrageous dialogue in our groups and then performing for each other.

There were also a lot of individual presentations.  For my last presentation, I talked about the Peruvian folktale El Sueño del Pongo.  A short version: The Spanish master of a hacienda is consistently cruel to the shortest, darkest native servant, Pongo.  Pongo tells his master about his dream in which they both go to heaven and the angels cover Pongo with shit and the master with honey.  Then they have to lick each other.  So I made Pongo cookies for my presentation:

Half covered in shit(fudge), half covered in honey!  I was very pleased with myself.  

I enjoyed this past semester so much that midway through the semester Señora offered to fail me so that I could take Advanced Spanish 1 a second time in the fall.  Whenever I was tardy to class (quite often) she would laugh and say "I am going to fail you!"

I very much look forward to another semester of Advanced Spanish and I hope some of my fellow students will be back for Season Two!!  (I think I'm Shirley.)