Week one progress report

This is great: The Panamanian Drill Sergeant brooks no complaining: if you miss a day, you miss a week’s worth of material and your grade drops by one. One student asked if he could leave an hour early one day a week because of his job, and she said no. Just “no.” I used to get requests like this all the time, and I also said no, but I’d add a long explanation about how important class time is, and if I make an exception for one student. . . . I once had a young woman ask if she could finish the class two weeks early because she was joining the Marines and going to Officer Candidate School, which started before our class was over, and her recruiter told her if she didn’t make this OCS class, she might not have a shot at another one. I told her she should get a new recruiter.

And but anyway,

Class is four hours a day with a five-minute break at the hour: she doesn’t hesitate to switch to English occasionally to explain something (which was just not done when I took French at UCSC exactly one hundred years ago), but otherwise class is almost completely in Spanish. I can understand her quite well, though if I hear her talking in the hall to another Spanish teacher, I can’t understand a word they say.

I’m at just about the perfect level to start this course. It’s a challenge, but it’s the workload and not yet the material that is close to overwhelming. After class I spend three or four hours on campus using my laptop to access the Website which has all of our film and audio materials (my WIFI connection at the trailer park is slower than a constipated turd), then back to the trailer to study from the book and do other written homework. I go to bed feeling like I need at least one more hour of study to be ready for the next day, but I long ago made the vow that I would never miss sleep over work or a class. It’s worked for me.

The other students are all about twenty and seem to have formed circles of friends before I got there, so I’ve been a little isolated, but finally yesterday a young woman sat down and visited with me during the break. My kind of kid. She and her husband left Boise State where they were studying business and came to Ashland, known for it’s lefty orientation and whole foods ethic, to study international relations. Jobs? They’ll worry about after graduation, and I expect they’ll sooner or later find the kind of work they want to do.

The class has dropped from 25 to 15 in the first week. Now I’m home for the weekend, where I can relax a little and do some things other than study Spanish. Still, I have a lot of work to do to be a little ahead when we start week two on Monday.

You don’t finish an eight-week class like this fluent, or even generally conversational, in a foreign language, but at last I’m actually learning fast in a structured program, and if I take time to stand back and look at it, I’m really enjoying it. I have to find a way to also eat during the day, but that’s not so important yet; I’m thinking microwave burritos (“Little burros”; who knew? ).