Spanish - Class VII

'La Pizarra' had the totally unintelligible words (as shown in the picture above) scrawled all over it when I walked in for the Spanish class on Sunday morning. From the looks of it, they were the remnants of a botany class. Wonder how the students manage to memorize these words. :-(

If I look back to my class notes of yesterday, I wonder what we did for two hours. We only seem to have learnt to answer a question in the affirmative and in the negative. Yet, we were busy the entire time. Of course we did lots of exercises. So there isn't a load of extra material to revise if the teacher does get down to conducting a surprise test on the coming Sunday. That's a huge relief.

One of the exercises in the class involved straightening out the jumbled form of words to arrive at the names of the countries and then match them to the 'las nacionalidades' i.e. the nationalities. I was so engrossed in writing down the meaning of the Spanish words that formed the question that I failed to fully grasp the question and stared at the list of words uncomprehendingly. The girl sitting next to me didn't have her exercise book but she was quickly matching the words from mine. Astonished, I asked her how she knew all of this. She smiled and said 'Aren't these words supposed to be jumbled?'. I checked, realized my stupidity and we both burst out laughing.

Another exercise involved looking at the pictures of people and matching them with their 'Profesions'. I had never thought, even in my wildest dreams, that I would be doing this again in my life! The third exercise was 'Fill in the blanks' type where we had to fill in the profession in the sentence. The word 'escuela' seemed unfamiliar (Que Significa 'escuela'?) until my neighbor said 'that means school'. I was pretty certain the word had never come up during discussions in earlier classes. But before I could open my mouth she held up her cell phone's screen. I believe she had accessed some app to get the word's meaning. Really, one of these days I have to get down to overcoming my phobia for remaining connected 24 * 7, get net access on my phone and check out this whole hoopla called 'apps'. God! I feel like a saber-tooth would feel if he is ever brought back to life in this century.

The last part of the class was total fun. The teacher made us listen to the recording of 'El Abecedario' i.e. the alphabets because she firmly believes that we don't revise it enough. In the next part of the recording a man (or was that a woman?) spoke a few words which were supposed to be names of some of the Latin American cities. Now, the quality of that recording leaves much to be desired. It also doesn't help that the class room isn't an AC one so there is plenty of ambient noise. So, we were supposed to write down the names as we heard them being pronounced. Out of the 5-6 names spoken, I only understood 'San Jose' and that too when the recording was played for the second time around. There were lots of bewildered faces and heads shaking in frustration. The teacher smiled and wrote down the names of the cities. We are supposed to find out about them. I don't know how it is supposed to help our knowledge of Spanish but that's one thing that I got to do today evening.