Have I told you all about the Spanish class I’m taking this summer? It’s kind of a crazy story.
Sometime in the spring the school sent home a notice for the parents. They had a grant to do some kind of community outreach to the parents and they sent home a list of options of things they would like to offer. One of the things on the list was Adult Spanish Class. It looked interesting. I checked the box, Yes I am interested, and sent it back with my student. A couple months later, another notice was sent home. Ok, we’ve narrowed down the options of what people want, we are offering these things: Adult Spanish Class…and a couple others I don’t remember. So, I again checked the box, Yes, I am interested in the Adult Spanish Class. Then maybe another month later, they sent home another notice. These are different times available for the Adult Spanish Class, which ones could you do? I checked off the right boxes and sent the notice back. Then a bit later, I got an email asking me to confirm that I wanted to take the Adult Spanish Class at THIS time, on THIS day. I sent back an email confirming and wrote it down on my calendar.
So, this was my thought process. It looked like a fun way to get to know other parents in the community, and it would be a great chance to brush up my Spanish and maybe get some better grammar skills. I lived in Chile two different times and I picked up a lot of Spanish, but my grammar is pretty poor. I did not study Spanish in high school, I did French. So, I have a lot of gaps. I also haven’t had to speak Spanish for almost twenty years so I had forgotten a lot of what I had learned. I knew it was a beginning class so it would be easy, but maybe I’d learn some new things, meet some new people…
I signed into the first class via Zoom and met the teacher. We sat and chatted while we waited for the other students to sign on. But no one signed on. The teacher was puzzled. She said she had eight confirmed students signed up for the class. We waited, chatted. After twenty minutes, we finally decided to just move on with the class. By the way, this is a two hour class. She ran me through the paces and started figuring out where I was in my knowledge and what my goals were. And we spent a lot of time talking in Spanish, me frantically racking my brain trying to remember very old vocabulary. But it was fun. She gave me homework and said she really wasn’t sure what we would do the next week when, hopefully, other students showed up, but she assured me she would find a way to keep it challenging for me. Yay.
I signed into class the next week and again, none of the eight confirmed students showed up. Just me. And so began my weekly, free, two hour, personal Spanish lessons that will go all summer. She started off keeping it pretty simple, but this week I am having to memorize the Preterite Verb conjugation and be able to use it easily in conversation next week. Yikes. But, it’s nice to be challenged.
I am, of course, a little nervous. This feels like a set up. Like God just flung open this door and let me have this opportunity and now I’m nervously looking around me, pretty sure that sometime in the near future I’m going to be having some non-English speaking people show up in my life. Cause we get blessed so we can bless others. Right? I’ll let you all know when these people show up. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing my verb conjugations.
Life With Esther 