Zack Chaffins
Spanish has always been a challenging class for me. I took Spanish one and two in high school. What made Spanish most difficult in high school was having two completely different teachers for each class. Since I went to a small Christian private school on the Eastern shore of Maryland, I was used to small class sizes and teachers that had time to work with you. The school only had one teacher for most subjects, this was also the case for Spanish. I was used to being taught by the same teacher at the same pace each year. In my Spanish one class this was the case, the teacher spent time with each student making sure we retained the knowledge we needed. The downside of this was throughout the year we as a class only made it halfway through the Spanish one textbook. After that school year the teacher I had for Spanish one retired and a new teacher had taken over. This teacher recently had come home from a ten-year missionary trip in Honduras. Since this teacher was new to the school and had not met the student body before she was not familiar with our Spanish proficiency. She started the schoolyear by handing us our Spanish two textbook and only speaking in Spanish for most of the class. After the first week the class explained to her that we had not yet finished the Spanish one book, her answer to this was explaining to the class that she was very fluent in Spanish and that we would make it from the Spanish one book where we left off to the beginning of the Spanish three book. This is where I really struggled with the Spanish course. This teacher was not as helpful as what I had been used to, in retrospect she taught more like a college professor rather than a high school teacher I struggled to keep up in the class and contemplated dropping the class because it was just too fast for me and there was little help or one on one tutoring. For the first time in my life, I was failing a class and I felt defeated. I was struggling to complete homework and was failing tests, and this was all new to me. I had never done bad in a class like this. I was mentally defeated. I was refusing to even try to do homework or the quizzes because I knew so little Spanish. But at my lowest of low I found a way out. I became very close with one of my classmates. She helped me out with all my work I didn’t know how to do. She would re teach me the lesson every day, so I had more time to concentrate on each lesson. We would spend time studying for test and quizzes. She helped me get out the hole I was in. As a class we got all the way to the Spanish three curriculum book and I ended up passing the class with a B. Without her I would have failed the Spanish two class. The second teacher I had for Spanish may have been harder, but she did teach us something very important that our old teacher skipped over and that was culture. Every Friday we would spend the class block learning about the Spanish culture and the difference between American Culture and one of a Spanish speaking country. I exceled in this portion of the class because I enjoyed learning the difference of human interaction in each country. Each student in the class had to choose a country for the year and I choose Columbia. I loved learning about life in Columbia, such as religion food and school. The final paper for the class was to write about a significant moment of the country’s history. Since mine was Columbia I choose to write about Pablo Escobar and the damage he did to society in the country. This was when I finally hit my stride in the class and Achieved a A grade on the paper. One of my other accomplishments in Spanish class was making the Columbian Empenadas, a native dish. Even though I had struggled in Spanish I had learned to enjoy it as well.
Columbian Empanada pictured below
