Spanish I

Hola caballeros y caballeras. Yesterday marked the sixth and final day of substitute teaching for a Spanish teacher at the local high school. As you may or may not know, I'm planning to return to school to get my masters degree in education so I can be a high school social studies teacher. All along I've thought teaching Spanish could be cool.

Not so fast. Talk about frustrating. These kids were asking me, How do you say "in" or "the" or "to" or "from"? Really?!?! Six weeks into the term and you don't know the most simple, useful words of all (other than, of course, "Sexo, you y me?").

Random tangent: One of the students brought me popcorn every day. I'm not sure what he was getting at, I wasn't giving any grades. Perhaps he didn't know. However, had I been, he was on track because it was delicious kettle corn. Yummmmm. But I digress... back to the teaching.

The final project, which we spent a little more than two days on, was creating dialogue for a news broadcast that we would tape and watch as a class. Some of them were very frustrated, not knowing what to say or how to say it, and I thought many had shut down and given up. Then when the lights went down (they didn't really) and the camera started rolling (that did happen) the kids, for the most part, performed admirably. I was proud. They were proud. Everyone was proud, happy, excited.

I think times like that are why you become a teacher.