Day 16

I might have to stop writing about what I'm eating as this homestay does not seem as exciting. Gone are my days of fresh fruit and coffee for breakfast every morning. This morning I had corn flakes and instant powdered coffee.  However, lunch was much better with a more traditional soup with rice and chicken. Strangely, it also had dates in it which the 3 year old voiced disliking as well. Only difference, he ended up liking it once he tried it while I merely forced myself to eat them.  Nonetheless, I finally ate a meal where the family members were eating with me!

Class was very hard at my new school. My teacher's name is Valerie. She is much younger than my previous teacher and knows much less English.  I feel like after two weeks I was really starting to understand, know, and connect to my old teacher Sandra.  She was a very experienced teacher who knew how much Spanish I knew, knew how best to teach me, could tell when I needed a rest and when to change things up a bit.  She'd had a plan of when to teach what and was building up my knowledge base in her own way.  Ah, the difficulty of change. And being outside my comfort zone yet again.

It must have built up. There were a few moments in Antigua where I felt emotion beginning to surface, where I thought I might need a good cry.  At the end of class today it finally built up enough to the release point.  I was just so overwhelmed.  Valerie was just piling on new word after new word.  The pages in my notebook might be filling up with Spanish words but very little of it is being retained in my brain.  If this is the kind of learning that I'm paying for, I might as well just sit at home with my Spanish dictionary and try to memorize every single word.  I think it would be better to teach a few words and make sure they were mastered with some kind of test before moving onto even more words.

I suppose it's just different styles of teaching.  Sandra had been selective about what verbs to teach me.  She informed me that there were just so many verbs to learn but she was selecting the most important ones. Even that felt like too much!  But she said other teachers in that school taught them all up front like Valerie decided to do.  Perhaps Sandra's reducing the number she taught came from years of experience in teaching Spanish as a foreign language.

I miss my textbooks from my German classes when living there, Grundstuff 1-10, their structure and "alles in ordnung" philosophy.  I want some researched and proven highly effective method of teaching this language rather than each school and individual teacher's hodgepodge having their own ideas of what's effective.

The school I'm at now seems to believe in the philosophy of just doing everything in Spanish, in throwing it at you all at once no matter what your level of comprehension.  This is similar to the school I first went to when I was in California.  There I didn't cry until my second class but time wise it was sooner since classes were only an hour and a half while today I cried at the end of a 5 hour class.

Luckily when I got home the adorable 3 year old came in my room and we played together for awhile.  After lunch I went back to the school for the cooking class. We made pupusas.  

It is a much smaller school.  Only 5 students there right now as opposed to the 45 at my last school.  I'm not sure I like this either. I need a happy medium. I need a few more people to choose from for the possibility of a more in depth connection, say a school of 15-20 students, enough for cliques to form but not so many that you don't know everyone to some degree.  

I did end up going out to shoot some pool with people after the cooking class. But even there all communication was in Spanish so I didn't much connect with anyone.  All in all I haven't really heard or spoken much English at all today. And that was the purpose of my move to Xela, wasn't it, to be more immersed. I guess I didn't take into account that it would also be more alienating.