I'm Both Teacher and Student

I'm trying to learn Spanish. I took two years of Spanish in high school, so I know a lot of the vocabulary. For instance, I know all of my numbers and colors. I know half the days of the week, and to get to the biblioteca, you take el autobus. When working at McDonald's in college, I learned the words for everything you put on a hamburger (salsa, mustasa, lechuga y sevoya). I did not ever really know the syntax of the language though. I could only use verbs in the infinitive, and I didn't have any prepositions to put my nouns together.

Many of my students last year and, I know, many of the students I will have this year speak Spanish. I don't get the first year students fresh from Mexico, so by the time they get to my class, their English is better than my Spanish. And to get them the language practice they need, we should speak to each other mostly in English anyway. But I would still like to be able to use the language. That way, when they speak Spanish to each other, I'll be able to tell if they're saying anything inappropriate. I would also like to be able to speak to parents without having to rely on the students as translators.

So, I... ahem... acquired a language learning computer program. You know, the one that has those commercials that make it sound so easy. Well, I wanted to see if it really worked as well as they said it does. It has helped a bit. I've only gotten through eight lessons, and I've got a long way left to go. So far, a lot of it has been review for me, but I've learned a few new things too. I like that most of it is in complete sentences. So I didn't just learn the words for dog and sleeping, but I can actually say, "The dog is sleeping." (El perro está duermiendo.) (Which he is.) I realize that this probably won't help me much in the classroom. I've got a long way to go before I start holding parent/teacher conferences in Spanish. But I think that if I stick to it, this program will help me to eventually get there. Although, I'm only writing about it right now to procrastinate actually doing it. So, we'll see.

P.S. I only speak Spanish: I don't write it. So please forgive me if I've misspelled something.