Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the pace of life was slower and children respected their parents and, you know, in general, everything was, um, better than it is now, I joined an after-school Spanish club.
We met once a week for an hour and learned such infinitely valuable, life-saving terminology, such as the colors of the rainbow, how to count to 10 and how to name the different parts of the face.
Perhaps I was driven by a sense of duty, a sense of the opportunities for a blooming bookworm heroine like me. Tune into the breaking story on your local news: "Young girl saves entire family from a tragic death when she warns them, in heroically broken Spanish, that 'only you can prevent forest fires!' She incidentally saved a California redwood forest, 10 endangered species and a runaway pet cat, which has now been returned to its very thankful owner."
Okay, or maybe my mom made me go. I was in third grade after all. I somehow don't remember the names of any of my many Spanish teachers (yes, I'm a fourth year, so old), so we're just going to have to name them according to distinguishing characteristics. This teacher had curly reddish hair and gave us fun stickers. Ms. Red Hair & Fun Stickers. Understand the naming process? Good.
The after-school club continued for several years, and my vocabulary extended to include several food products and domesticated animals.
Moving on. In eighth grade I only remember how several of my fellow students were swooning over the musical stylings of Immature (oh God, I am old), and every sentence they wrote for Spanish homework had to incorporate Immature in some way. Examples (in English of course): I love Immature. Immature is my favorite. Immature are my brothers. I want Immature. I am Immature. Ha. Um, so that teacher is: Ms. My Students Love Immature.
Now, as I entered the dreaded dungeon hell-hole of high school, my ninth-grade Spanish teacher was there to alleviate the brunt of stressful social dynamics and teenaged depression. She had perfectly styled, curly, dyed-blonde hair and dressed like a home-ec teacher, which is some sort of strange classy mix between fifties housewife and...well, no, just fifties housewife.
She somehow made the mistake of letting us know she was dating a man named George, who of course we always referred to as Jorge, since we didn't speak English in class (right). And whenever we wanted to get out of some horrid worksheet, postpone a test, or hell, just not even have the planned lesson at all, someone would sweetly ask, "And how is Jorge?" And she would blush and go into some detailed story about a Christmas dinner party or his new pet dog which she was allergic to.
"Ok, time to learn how to conjugate verbs (which will be the basis for everything you learn from now on in Spanish and if you don't get this right you will be majorly screwed up and perpetually behind until the END OF YOUR DAYS)."
"But wait! You didn't tell us about the special date with Jorge!"
"Ohhh. (blushes) You don't really want to know. Okay, well..."
And those little un-conjugated verbs flew out the pretty window and took their place in the sky with all that other unlearned stuff from high school, like the correct placement of a comma and, yeah, grammar in general. As you may well have guessed, I learned no Spanish from Ms. Jorgita.
The next two years of Spanish blur together. Maybe I had the same teacher? In any event, by this time my learning disability with foreign languages was flagrantly apparent, and I would have been all too overjoyed to damn the Spanish language to nonexistence or at least to a very far-away, uninhabited and unvisited desert island stocked only with rum and a loaded gun.
Taking the SAT II in Spanish was like looking at something completely unknown, like the elvish languages of Middle Earth or the American codes of WWII.
I kept my quarter grades up with awe-inspiring group projects. For example, my friend Rene and I accomplished a tourism project by singing and dancing in front of the class in limited Spanish about why it was so extremely urgent and completely necessary that you should "Venga la Ciudad de Mexico!" We really sang. I'm not kidding.
And then, of course, we cooked authentic Spanish cuisine. Or actually, I think it was something like French toast, renamed. I think there was also a banner that read, predictably, "Venga la Ciudad do Mexico," and there might have been costumes involved.
We held a raging bonfire after the final, and as the devilish flames leapt up to the midnight sky, we chuckled manically and tossed in notecard after notecard, shouting "Que Lastima!" with all the sarcasm we could muster, so certain we wouldn't have to face the dreaded language again (we obviously forgot about the well-stated language requirements of the colleges we were planning on attending).
At the University I was subjected to three semesters of torture by way of the drilling of special cases of IR irregular verbs in the subjunctive case into my poor brain.
The language lab nearly killed me. Even if I was having the best day of my life, the skies would crack open with a thunderous jolt and the horses of the apocalypse would come riding jollily along whispering "Language lab today! Muhahahah!" No matter how hard I tried I could not understand what Maria and Jose were saying! Always Maria and Jose! Ah! Jose and Maria! The insanity!
The second after I turned in my final for the class which completed my language requirement, I leapt through the halls like a rejuvenated ballet dancer and frolicked on the Lawn with a bottle of wine and a custom-made shirt that read, "I'm an English Major damn it!"
Unfortunately, the torrid dance between Spanish and me is yet to be over. Knowledge of two languages is required for my field of study at every graduate school I applied to. I die.
I meant this to be some scathing reproach on the inadequate process of teaching languages in the American public school system. And suggest that perhaps every student should be made to jump out of a plane and land in an unknown land among the tigers and deadly, um, diseases, and learn a language out of necessity for survival. Somehow magically learning phrases for such important queries as: "Please, food? Very hungry," and, "By the way, where can I check my e-mail?"
And I was going to bring in all this evidence about my little sister's participation in the Spanish immersion program at our elementary school, which resulted in her being able to rattle off the Pledge of Allegiance in perfectly accented Spanish but left her without the knowledge of actual grammar rules and therefore, left her unable to do any of my homework. How unfair!
But wasn't my story much more interesting?
Adios. (Now don't be too impressed by the extensive knowledge of the Spanish language betrayed by this column. Truly, I owe it all to Ms. Red Hair & Fun Stickers).
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