New Teachers

Monday, Jan 31, 2011

We got our new teachers today. Jeff is with Estuardo and I am with Vilma. I have to say, the conversations I have with Vilma are very different than the ones I had with Saul. Within minutes, Vilma and I were gossiping like long lost friends. We worked on irregular verbs and on the infinitive form of Ir and spent a ton of time in conversation. She has been divorced 20 years. Her husband left her for another woman, then went through a string of women and is now alone and losing his eyesight. Her two sons think she should take him into her house and care for him. Typical. She said she gets along with her ex just fine now, and they both have good relationships with their children, but she likes living alone. She’s independent and has a strong personality and really doesn’t want to take on the responsibility of caring for her ex. On top of things, he never paid a dime of child support, so she had to work extra hard to support herself and the kids… and now they think she should take care of him. Yeah, right. Her dad is an evangelical preacher and has had 14 children with 4 (or 5) different women. Again, typical! Her mother was the only one he married. His most recent relationship must have lasted for some time because they have 9 kids together. Man o man. It was very good practice for me to listen to her because she talks a lot faster than Saul and the conversation was more about emotions than about things, so I learned a lot of new vocabulary.

At one point I was starting to think this doesn’t feel much like going to school because we weren’t spending a ton of time going over the verbs, but the conversation is really the most important to me anyway (and we did work verbs anyway after getting to know each other). My main goal in being here is to be able to communicate with the folks in TNII and Mexico and anybody else that speaks Spanish. So, conversational Spanish is on the top of the practice list for me. Learning proper grammar is important because it helps with that, but the actual flow of conversation is getting easier for me, and I really appreciate that.

Jeff really likes his new teacher too. I’m glad. His experience with Miguel was not very good. He’s trying to cut Miguel some slack, but I think a good teacher should be able to adjust their expectations and their teaching style to fit the student (especially when the teaching situation is one to one) instead of expecting the student to fit into a particular box. Plus Miguel is not much of a conversationalist. I tried chatting with him when we were at the market, and he’s a yes/no kind of guy. He doesn’t really expand on his thoughts. That makes it muy dificil to converse when you expect the other person to carry the lion’s share of the conversation and that person barely speaks the language. Estuardo and Jeff conversed a lot today. He gave Jeff a lot of new vocabulary and told him his homework was simply to review and try to learn as many new words as possible. That’s great.