As much as the classes here are great, I think the 4 hours per day of Spanish for three months is starting to wear on me...I'm ready for a break! Although I do really like the classes here. (If I had four hour classes everyday in the States I think I would no longer be in college...lol). For one, they are small; my class this month only has 8 people in it. This month my class is titled "Advanced Conversation" which means we do a lot of speaking. I think the class has helped me because the past two months were a lot of grammar and important information, but I don't feel like I remember the grammar if I don't get the chance to speak with it. And I definitely get the chance to speak in this class--other than just day-to-day speaking assignments (for example, yesterday we had to tell the person to our right their future using a new grammatical structure...apparently in my future I will go skydiving, have an accident, have my legs cut off, became a famous cyclist, and later a famous fighter -like Joan of Arc- during the Third World War. haha.), we have three 10-min presentations and two 15-minute presentations. And a combination of these assignments and maybe partially my slacking-ness has gotten me more comfortable with just improvising (instead of writing or memorizing something and then just repeating it), so it's just what I need. For the last presentation, we worked in partners and made a 30 minute presentation of a newscast! Not that it was anywhere near perfect (or good ha) but I never thought I would be able to do that in Spanish. We've also had to read two Spanish books that were around 100 pages woo! (I finished...one of them :) We also get to do some field trips, we went to a festival last week and next week are going to watch a court case. And tomorrow we get to watch the Veritas International talent show (for our school) for part of class. We get the chance to ask any random grammar or life questions that we have too, which is nice.
Also had another cooking class! It's nice because there's only three of us so we get to do a lot....and eat a lot :) This week we made empanadas with beans and cheese, yum! This is the teacher, she's so nice and fun:
Hang in there with the Spanish. Your goal was to be stretched toward fluency. Fully invest in the opportunity in these final days.
ReplyDeleteHow cool that you, the Communications major, got to do a newscast as a presentation. Never know when/how that may come in handy in the future....which hopefully looks a different than predicted. Well, maybe except for the skydiving part. :) And, come to think of it, I could see you as a Joan-of-Arc type given the right battle.