TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW LANGUAGES

Randy and I are endeavoring to expand our language skills beyond the daily Hola and Buenos dias. You would think this would be easy as I have taken Spanish about 3 times now, and Randy twice, but not so.  Randy will say its due to his misspent youth but what about me? I didn't have a misspent youth! So now I am starting to believe that old dogs theory.

We have twisted our land ladys arm to teach us privately in our home twice a week for 1 hour. Her name is Susanna, we call her Susi. She is the sweetest thing and I am not sure that she has the stamina for these two gringos who interrupt and question everything.

As you can see she is trying her best to get our attention with a classroom white board. She works so hard to get us to tell her what we did yesterday.(I cant remember what I had for breakfast, let alone yesterday). Patiently correcting and coaching. Then she pounces with, "ok, now remember that because I want you to tell it to me at the end of class..." What????  Randy immediately wrote it down while she turned her back. I on the otherhand took a different ploy.

Randy is a much more studious student than I. He must have spent alot of time writting sentences 100 times on the blackboard because he has continued with that method of memorization

He has pages and pages of  Present, Past and Future tenses written down in a handy pocket sized notebook. He told me he is going to redo them on the computer and print off the pages for us... OH BOY.. cant wait. I guess I am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of student... maybe I should let up on my daughter about her study skills... nah...She gets A's. Must be that old dog thing again...

We have taken our study area to a new level. We used to work on the dining room table. So when we had company we had to move it all to the window sill.. a mess..so we went hunting at the Rotary Market, or as we like to copy Clarke, the Straw Market.  Randy negotiated and we got two nice basic matching tables. We had to squeeze into a mixto to get them home but now we have a nice long study area and our dining room table is ready for company!

So I think my sentence to practice for class today will be..   hoy me escribió un nuevo blog sobre nuestra clase (today I wrote a new blog about our class). Better start now.. and repeat 100 times....