You had me at Привет! (part 1)

With womankind, the less we love them,
The easier they become to charm,
The tighter we can stretch above them
Enticing nets to do them harm
- A.S. Pushkin, Evegeny Onegin

At the end of sixth grade we all had to take a test to see if we had what it took to study another language. This was in 1980. I had bad hair, was boy crazy and had no sense of style. I looked to others around me for identity and self-definition. I was not at a point in my life where I worried or cared about my grades. School was a big social adventure. It was a place to try to be a different person than I was at home. I always thought I was a braver more daring person at school. That was in my head but junior high school is an awkward time when the last thing you want to do is stand out and take a risk. The sad fact was I was growing up in a small town. The same town my mother had grown up in. the same town where other mothers and fathers had gown up. There was little room for creativity or bravery in a place where everyone assumed that they knew everything about you.
A good friend who is a guidance counselor believes that junior high school is more difficult than high school. I tend to agree. I am basing much of this on my own experience. But I am also keenly aware that junior high school for me was only the beginning of the most squandered and confusing time of my life. Looking back I now know that I wasted a lot of time and energy during that time doing nothing but spin my wheels. Teaching for almost 10 years has shown me that my life is not unlike those of some of my students. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to get kids focused. I am not sure if it helps them or hurts them. I have seen the highly focused ones burn out before senior year and the less focused kids turn out happy and well adjusted. Some of it is the kids and some of it is the parents. It is all a great struggle.
Having already stated that did not really care very much for school in general, this language test was different. There was no guarantee that I was going to get into a language class. I wanted to get into a language class. The test was devised like this. We sat in a room listening to a recoding of some gibberish language we had to answer a few questions based on what we thought was going on in the conversation. The “tape” also taught us a few “words” from this language. We then had to listen to determine if we could pick the new words out of the conversation. It was a very strange kind of test. If it was determined that you did not have the aptitude for a foreign language it was the first nail in the coffin for any hopes at a college education, although, I think few of us knew that at the time. I just knew not everyone was going to take a language and I did not want to be the only one of my friends not able to Habla espanol. So I concentrated very hard on the made my best effort. I don’t remember caring for a test that year more than this one.
I guess I passed. In seventh grade I began Spanish and so also began my very fickle and complicated relationships with language. My poor long-suffering Spanish teacher was Ms. Distefano. The first day of class she handed out our textbook. I still remember the book. Churros y Chocolate. I still remember the first day. Texts books full of fascinating new words and idea were handed out. We paged through seeing chapters on meeting people, food, culture and lists and lists of words. Then we were subjected to the ritual all language teachers live for. All language students must pick a name in the language they are speaking. If you are lucky you have an appropriate analog. Thankfully, my name is easily translated in any number of European languages. Almost every Western language has a version of Elizabeth. My friend Sheryl was not as lucky. And I really feel for all the Tiffany’s and Brooke’s out there that have to find something so exotic they do not even recognize when they are called on. So I became Isabel my friend Sheryl was stuck with Concha.
I remember a lot from that first year. Spanish was fun. Every week I had to make flash cards for all the new vocabulary. This spoke to my creative side. The cards had to have a picture to accompany the word. I spent whole evening’s carefully drawing pictorial representations for these new words. Every unit we had an oral presentation a small dialog, which we had to perform in front of the class. I still remember the first one.
Hola Juan
Hola Pepe Que tal?
Yo estoy bein y tu
Yo estoy muy bien.
With each dialog we became more involved in the fictional lives of Juan, Diego, Catalina, Maria, and Alonzo. We developed costumes, sub plots, background stories to help us get into character. One particular oral presentation finally explained to us what the heck a “churro” was. It is a like a Mexican donut, looks kind of like a cruller. Anyway Diego cannot sleep and get up in the middle of the night for “Churros y chocolate a la medianoche!” The back story for this was that Diego was a hopeless insomniac who never quite made the connection between his insomnia and the large amounts of sugar he was consuming in the middle of the night. My friend Kristin just thought he was on drugs.
One day Ms. Distafano showed us how to make fried bananas. That was truly cool. I had no idea you were even allowed to cook in school outside of Home Economics. We had drills at the beginning of each class. The alphabet, count to 20, count to 100 by 10’s, days of the week, months of the year, the date, the verb we learned yesterday. It was as closest to a cult as I ever got. And I loved it.
Eighth grade not so much. But eighth graders are not known for their really liking much of anything. It is a precursor to senior year of high school. In eighth grade you have reached to apogee of Middle school. You are the top dog and you really do not have to care about anything except the eighth grade class trip. (we went to New York for the day and could not visit the World Trade Center because someone was threatening to jump) and the eighth grade dance (it was semi formal my mother made my dress and as fate would have it my friend Corrine’s mother had made her the exact same dress) where you were hoping that boy you have been ogling over all year finally asked you out. But ultimately eighth grade can never live up to the hype. And it becomes just a huge zit infested slide into high school where you are once again on the bottom.
It was also the year Ms. Distefano was getting married and because of some rule about spouses working in the same school (this was New England after all) she moved up to the high school. I decided to take French or Latin anything but another year with Senorita Distefano, pardon, now Senora Filer. Now, she was not a bad teacher on the contrary she was really very good and if she ever reads this I hope she knows that I am truly sorry for all the crap I gave her. I would not be in this situation if I had horrible language teachers. It’s just that by 8th grade, Spanish was making me feel stupid. I blame the subjunctive tense.
And that is how it always happens; there is just one thing about a language that screws you up. One grammar issue that snatches you off the floor and body slams you into the rows and bounces you out of the ring. In Spanish it was the subjunctive tense. Looking back, I have no idea why this was so difficult. When I took French in college it was indirect pronouns. In Hebrew it was practically everything but specifically the Pu’al tense. I only lasted a week and a month in Greek and Latin respectively. But I know the issue there it haunts me now. Noun declensions.
I thought about French freshman year but the teacher was so distasteful to me and I knew we would have all manner of conflict I opted back into Spanish. Sophomore year my mom had talked me into a year of Latin, for the SAT’s. Again as I said I lasted a month. So, it was back to Spanish class. My grades were never that great but here’s the thing, I knew I was learning Spanish and leaning it well despite my bad attitude. I listened to Spanish language radio out of Springfield MA. I asked my father to pick up a copy of the Spanish newspaper for me. I began to dream in Spanish. I began to think in Spanish. My internal dialog was becoming bilingual. And then I had reached the end of my required time in foreign language land so I bailed. I was done. I think it was my frustration at never being able to prove in any meaningful way that I knew Spanish. In educational terms I “could not objectively demonstrate competence.” My spelling was always pretty bad, quizzes killed me, and tests I tended to blow off. I swore off language and all the promises of being truly bilingual. This was what I wanted to be able to fully communicate in another language. I still want this, but when I was young I thought it was easier to give up so I did.