Teaching Spanish

Learning a foreign language was, for me, quite fun.  For whatever reason, I took to it like a duck to water.  My wiring is such that I can understand the vagueries of languages far better than I can the mysteries of calculus or algebra.  For that matter, the only solid connection with algebra I have is that I know its root is Arabic and that comes from my study of Spanish.

I enjoy teaching Spanish.  I enjoyed learning not only the language but also Spanish literature.  Sure, some of it stunk -- Cien años de soledad confused the heck out of me in Spanish, so I read it in English only to discover that I understood it better -- if at all -- in Spanish -- but it opened up new vistas, new worlds that I never understood even if I knew they existed.

For whatever reason, I also took to teaching Spanish.  I never felt uncomfortable or uneasy about professing to understand a language I was still struggling to learn.  Teaching freshman year Spanish wasn't much of a challenge.  The department gave us the textbooks and we followed along like lemmings.  Where my own contributions came into play were in the presentation of the materials.

I'm no stand-up comedian.  But when a male student used the false cognate and protested that he was embarazado, I told him he was a medical miracle, which caused him to smile uneasily until he found out that instead of being embarrassed he was pregnant, thereby compounding his shame.  Another student called it Dondi instead of DON day, which prompted me to tell him I wasn't familiar with comic strips.  The confused look on her face was priceless.

Perhaps my favorite classes, however, were the attendance optional ones that I ran once a semester.  Had the administration known what I was up to, they would not have sanctioned them.  I gave any student who was morally or religiously opposed the option to not attend the next day's class with no penalty, but the subject was, for lack of a more didactic term, swear words.

Before one has a coniption fit about this, please realize that I wasn't teaching students how to swear.  That's not to say that some students didn't try to use it for that purpose.  I was able to navigate through their thinly-veiled attempts to procure this information from me.  One notable attempt involve a woman in her forties who asked me how to say the filthiest thing any student had ever asked me.  I looked her in the eye and said, Do you know you could be my mother?  I was twenty-four at the time.  Needless to say, these classes always had perfect attendance.  I even taught a couple of these for fellow grad students.

The high point of my teaching career had to be when we played keg softball at the local park.  We chipped in and bought four kegs of beer, commandeered a local baseball diamond and, against municipal ordinance, drank our way through nine innings of softball.  I think I got home at one in the morning.

Some students couldn't have cared less.  Some actually may have been inspired.  All I know is that I found another hobby that kept me interested doing something I found I loved to do.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles