RANT

---

written on my laptop a few nights ago...

2 October 2008
Thursday 21:00

This has been a looooong effing week and I am so glad that tomorrow is Friday. Today was almost unbearable. I alternately wanted to cry or to hit someone for the whole afternoon… and was desperately wishing I had rugby practice so I could run it out …and have a legit reason to tackle someone.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A RANT ABOUT SPANISH CLASS AND MY FRUSTRATIONS WITH THE LACK OF A CHALLENGE IN THOSE CLASSES.

And by lack of a challenge, I mean that although I love Iowa and VTech dearly , my level of Spanish is quite a ways above theirs and I am terribly bored and frustrated because we can only go as fast as the slowest buffalo in the herd.

We have a new professora - we’ll call her FrasesCompletas as she’s always imploring my compañeros to stop answering with just “si” and “no” but to use, gasp, whole sentences. She is very different from our first profe, and I am really enjoying her… as a person, and as a facilatodora.

However, apparently the group who had FrasesCompletas for the first three weeks wrote bad reviews about her, as the BigWig has been having class with us all week… and she will all next week, too. I do not get along with BigWig. My initial gut reaction to her was not good, and the longer she’s in class with us and taking legitimacy away from FrasesCompleta’s lessons, the less I like her. This is supremely unfortunate because my training depends upon me passing my Spanish interviews at the end of next week…. and with my luck, the BigWig will be the one evaluating me… I just find it exceptionally distracting because she is always checking with FrasesCompletas before she begins a new activity and constantly stepping in to “reinforce”…

Today I about lost it. First of all, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. It has been raining and raining and there are floods all over Nica. We’re fine up here in the hills, but the rain sucks after a while. Woke up late, still raining, messed up my morning flow… and I was having weird dreams last night, too.

So there’s a phrase in Nica - actually a question - that might very well be a question that is often asked in other Latin countries… it’s “Como amanecio?” … and it literally means “How did you dawn?” or roughly, how did you sleep? Moncha or Xilonem asks me this first thing every morning, usually on my way to the latrine. Usually the answer is, “Bien, gracias, y Ud?”… this morning I kind of grunted and kept walking.

And then there was Spanish class. 8am-noon. Four hours. The first HOUR AND A HALF was spent on working on questions. Being able to ask a question properly is important. It was a useful exercise. Our homework was to come up with 5 questions for daily activities, 5 using verbs in the past tense, and 5 more using the future tense, so 15 altogether. Mmk, fine.

But the longest and most frustrating day of Spanish started with those 15 questions. BigWig stepped in and had the three of us, myself, Iowa, and VTech, write our 15 questions on the baby dry erase board, with only 2 markers for the 3 of us. So at least 15 minutes for us to copy it up there. Then the BigWig went through and corrected all of them. Fine. Useful. We need to know what we were doing wrong.

But then she made us copy ALL of them down from the board. So 15 from each tense, or 45 questions to copy from a 3x4 foot board. Then, as we were copying, we had questions about capitalization in Spanish… like why did she capitalize some days of the week but not others, some months but not others, etc. And the way she answered was so damn condescending and unsatisfactory that it put me even further on edge.

Then we spent OVER AN HOUR with the present and preterite tenses of the verb HACER. OVER AN HOUR. WITH ONE VERB. Using ONLY the yo, Ud, nosotros, and Uds conjugations.

Here is what we need to know about HACER:

Present tense: hago, hace, hacemos, hacen.
Past tense: hice, hizo, hicimos, hicieron.

Use HACER in the following situations: hacer tarea, hacer comida, hacer huerto, hacer ejercicios, hacer trabajo

Some examples: Yo hago mi tarea. Ayer yo no hice mi tarea. Todos los dias mi madre hace tortillas, pero ayer mis hermanas hicieronlas. Antier, nosotros hicimos nuestro huerto, y manana vamos a hacer un otro huerto tambien.

Sufficient, yes? The conjugations. When to use the verb. Some examples using various conjugations and subjects.

BUT NO. We obviously needed “reinforcement”. We spent over an hour writing and saying, “I make tortillas. You make tortillas. He makes tortillas. She makes tortillas. We make tortillas. You all make tortillas. The girls make tortillas. The boys make tortillas.” And then, “Yesterday, I made tortillas. Yesterday, you made tortillas. Yesterday, she made tortillas. Yesterday, he made tortillas. Yesterday, we made tortillas. Yesterday, you all made tortillas. Yesterday, the girls made tortillas. Yesterday, the boys made tortillas.”

Yeah, bet you couldn’t even finish reading that repetitive effing business, m’right? Now imagine doing that over and over and over and over FOR OVER AN HOUR of your life!

ARGH!

That’s about the time I started to snap. So I stood up, said I needed a recess, and walked out.

If BigWig would stop stepping in to “reinforce” and would let our profe, FrasesCompletas, get into a rhythm and teach us for a whole hour without interruption, I bet she would do just fine.

Went home for lunch, in the rain, in the mud that was over my Tevas and squishing through my toes… and broke out into a cold sweat and couldn’t even finish my lunch thinking about going back for another 2 hours of the same crap for afternoon class.

Even sitting here writing about it is making my blood pressure skyrocket!

So. Entonces. My goal tomorrow is to not let BigWig get to me. She’s not all bad. I just wanted to strangle her today with the absolute ridiculousness of copying 45 sentences from the board for the first hour and a half of class and for working with ONE verb in the most repetitive way possible for the next hour an a half.

Three hours of my life that could’ve been condensed into an hour’s worth of lessons.

Thus far, that is my ONLY complaint with PCNica.

The afternoon did get better, though, as we walked to the AgForestry school to have our meeting with our youth group and talk about our upcoming commercialization project with them. It actually wasn’t raining for our 30 minute walk down the dirt road, and FrasesCompletas and I walked ahead and talked the whole way EN ESPAÑOL about China, communism, food, family, and Cuerpo de Paz. She is super easy to talk to, she is gentle but absolutely insistent with her corrections of my Spanish - which I appreciate immensely as I want to be corrected IMMEDIATELY, and she speaks clearly and at a speed that is neither too fast nor too slow and condescending.

And our meeting with our youth group went really well, as per usual. We have a good group and the three of us play off each other really fluently with them and, somehow, we get things done with limited knowledge of Spanish and with a group of teenagers who all are speaking super fast among themselves…. our candy making venture is going to be a success, I can tell. COMERCIALIZACION HERE WE COME!

Okay. 11pm. Time to get to bed. Super late.

My goal is to remember that tomorrow is FRIDAY and that Spanish class is what I make it and it’s not good to be so damn riled up for 4 hours of my morning... so just take a deep breath and study your verbs on your own time, Baade.

---

Comments

[Cassi]

conjugation
wow, i never knew those were the past tenses of hacer, now i can say them correctly, as opposed to what i've just picked up. thanks crappy Nica Spanish teacher! by the way, here in the UAE, prostitution is legal, but Skype is censored by the government. go figure. i'm pretty sure they're just trying to force all the foreigners to buy phones.