Friday, January 12, 2007

The ying and yang of Ken and Helen regarding class.


As usual Ken and I see things differently. I wasn´t ready to form an opinion of school the first day, but feel more confident now after the first week. The two odd-men-out are gone. The one man who didn´t even know his numbers has moved to a class below ours, and the other man whose skills were far superior to any of ours has moved up. The rest of us seem well suited enough in our skills to form a cohesive class enviornment. The swiss woman is the best, the sweet chinese girl has ok skills but works like the proverbial chinese grad student and takes tutoring after our class. She is improving rapidly and will probably learn more than any of us. She claims all this spanish studying is making her lose her english skills. The cute little home sick girl didn´t come today, Ken thinks she dropped out. The rest of us are doing fine. We have two teachers for different days. The one Ken took a picture of is my favorite so far. She is very pleasant, but no nonsense. She doesn´t waste any time, and is serious about us doing it right. We only have 4 weeks, I really want us to keep moving. The enormity of learning another language is daunting. Ken and I could move here and study for 20 more yrs and not become native speakers. You need teenagers around, and little ones, and a history for word context and slang. As always, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don´t know.

1 comment:

Chas said...

Y'know, I could tell just by looking at Andrea's picture that she was no-nonsense. She has a friendly smile, but at the same time, her face seems to say, Ok people, we're here to learn some Spanish, so let's get it done.

PS: Is the picture of the sign outside El Laboratorio de Idiomas really from 2004, or is your camera's clock not set? (Wait -- is it 2004 in the Southern Hemisphere?)