what I did at work today...

They can keep me from the internet but they can’t stop me from blogging! I’ll just write what I want to and email the attachment to myself… or better yet, email it directly to blogger! Writing this way makes me look like I’m busy without actually doing any work. In all honesty I would much rather be very busy than with nothing to do. I feel like I’m wasting time and I really hate having to go to my superiors and constantly ask, “Do you have anything else for me?” One of the girls here in the office has just offered to let me work on a spreadsheet, but she has to check with HR because there is confidential information that must be put into spreadsheet format.

Responses

I should have a separate section just for the responses I get from telling people what it is I do. This happened a lot in college as well. I would hold off telling what my major was as long as possible, because I would always get the same reaction. “Whoa, you must be really smart!” To which I would usually respond, “Either that, or really dumb for choosing physics as my major!” Sometimes I would say, “No, I’m just ambitious.” Or sometimes I would even go into explaining that, “I don’t know about the being really smart thing, but I figure, if I can do physics, I can do anything because it’s the most difficult thing I can imagine myself doing!” And in my last semester I just got tired of being pretend-modest and just said “yeah, I guess I am pretty smart.”

Now that I am a full-time “bilingual teacher assistant” and part-time “homebound tutor,” it gets a little more complicated. I can’t really answer the “what-do-you-do” question with a simple word. Or can I? This weekend I did just that. I went to a virgin’s bachelorette party (it was so tame my mom would have been bored) and this one guy started talking to me and being all flattering and everything (ie, he was trying to pick me up!) He then asked me what I do, and I figure, well this guy is a stranger, he doesn’t know me all that well, so what the heck, why not tell a little translucent lie. So I told him that I’m a teacher. I mean, for all intents and purposes, I am, only I don’t make the lesson plans for the children nor do I worry about their reading levels. But I still provide instruction; and with homebound tutoring I am teaching the kids, as they’re not well enough to attend their regular classes. I have to come up with lesson plans for geometry, physics, and Spanish. I actually enjoy this. So it’s not entirely a white lie that I’m a teacher – hence the translucence. It’s still clear but a little cloudy because teacher per se is not my title, as I have no class of my own.

His response was, “Oh, I’m loving it. You must be a giver then.” I said, “I’m not sure about that; I’m the one who (I was thinking la que manda but I couldn’t translate it) is in charge!” But he continued to insist that I am a giver. This may be true; I prefer to be seen though as the one in charge. It’s not bad to be known as a giver though either.

It’s a tradeoff

As I might have mentioned earlier, I am taking French at the community college by where I live. I am really glad that I chose to take a class; it makes me feel more intelligent to actually be learning something. Although in this case, I don’t so much feel that I am learning as much as I am re-learning. I don’t have to grapple with the concept of masculine/feminine, gender/number agreement, conjugation, etc. like some of the other students do. Nor do I have major problems with pronunciation. I took French when I was 12, 13, 14 and 15 and my brain was still malleable, so I learned to pronounce words in french the proper way – my muscles learned along with my brain. I’m sure you’ve heard that when we are born we have the ability to learn every language known to man, but as we develop in one language, the parts of our brains and speech systems that we use to learn/speak that particular language grow stronger as the parts that would help to learn/speak another language atrophy. So I have that working for me. I also have my visual-ness working for me; I think I learned to do this when I was learning aural Spanish – I visualize the syllables that a person is saying so that I can understand better. No, I don’t use any kind of abstract visualization; I visualize the syllables as if they were written on paper. The syllables come together to make words, and since I’ve probably already studied the words extensively, and I have a photographic memory, if I can see them I can understand them. Also, being familiar with which letters make up which syllables helps me translate visually from spoken to written language. So if I hear a word I don’t know, I can at least attempt to spell it correctly and can look it up.

When I first started studying Spanish, I thought it was so much easier than French. But I’m beginning to realize that they’re probably equal in difficulty. Things that are easy in French are difficult in Spanish, and vice versa. For example, last night in class we spent too much time talking about the partitive. That is, when you want to say you want some cheese, not all the cheese in the world. You want part of the cheese but not all of it. Je voudrais manger du fromage (I would like to eat some cheese.) Je n’ai pas de fromage (I don’t have any cheese.) BUT, ce n’est pas fromage (that isn’t cheese.) Question Girl #2 could not understand this subtle difference. She thought that one would use the partitive with the verb être; but you don’t because something cannot BE part of itself. I sat and giggled with the two (ladies) with whom I sit. I say ladies because one is a girl my sisters’ age, and the other is an older woman who used to be practically my next door neighbor; my mom would go over to their house to rope cattle with them.

Well, the first day of class, A. arrived late and sat next to N and myself. There was this one girl who spoke French pretty well, but had that “attitude.” I’m pretty sure I don’t have it (I hope I don’t have it anyway) but it’s that I-speak-French-better-than-you-could-dream stuck-up with a chip on her shoulder kind of attitude. She is always asking questions. A wrote me a note. This girl is going to be the question girl. Every class has one! And I sneered and giggled at her little note. Well, last night we determined that there was yet another question girl in the class. Question girl #2, the one who couldn’t wrap her mind around the partitive. Seriously, notre professeur had to explain it literally three times (after having explained it once earlier in class and once last Wednesday!) So A and I spent those wasted minutes giggling. I know it was rude and I was trying very hard not to, but sometimes you just can’t help it. Like at my high school graduation when SS, the valedictorian giving her speech, started talking about S-land “where everything is pink and purple and there are kitties and butterflies,” the girls on either side of me were cracking up, and I wanted to be quiet because I felt bad for her, but I couldn’t so I laughed along with them. But back to French… we went over voilà and Il y a… and our prof used again the example of the cheese! I think it was established that you would use the partitive after Il y a (Il y a du fromage). I wrote A a little note: but what if it’s IL N’Y A PAS would you use DU or DE???!!! I dare you to ask! We giggled some more. N also mentioned how the pronunciation in this class was TERRIBLE! Our professor had to repeat at least five times the correct pronunciation of dessert and probably eight times the right way to say fruit.

I guess some people are just not as good at imitating sounds as others. I’d constantly have this same problem with my classmates in Spanish courses. I would just cringe hearing them anglicize every yo quiero salir esta noche. Make some effort! Nobody is going to laugh at you for trying hard to speak a language! I got over this very soon after starting to study Spanish my junior year in high school. I noticed that I was afraid to pronounce the words correctly (like rolling the rrs and pronouncing the ts and ds and rs the right way) because nobody else in class was doing it. I didn’t realize that maybe they couldn’t, but eventually I thought, this is unacceptable. If I’m going to dedicate five hours a week to learning Spanish, I’d better learn it well so that I can actually use it! I did actually have a goal in mind – to go on a Costa Rica trip that my brainwash factory went on every two years. I went to Puerto Rico that spring break and was really dissatisfied by how little Spanish I had actually learned from Spanish 1. I couldn’t even tell the local kids on the beach that they couldn’t use the hotel pool because no tenían llave. So I haven’t looked back; the only time I “dumb-down” my pronunciation is when I’m speaking in English among people who do not speak Spanish. One thing I don’t compromise on, however, is Buenos Aires. There is only one way to say that. The thing is, I don’t like to mix accents. I do the same thing when I’m speaking in Spanish – I will pronounce names of people and places, or words taken from English, as one would pronounce them in Spanish. It ties my tongue up to switch between the two. What is my favorite Spanish English word? Vamos al shopping?

So now I’ve been noticing the tradeoff between Spanish and French. There are so many more subtle intricacies to French – such as the partitive (which I’m pretty sure does not exist in Spanish, though I keep trying to think of examples); having gender agreement for possessive pronouns (in Spanish we only have nuestro and vuestro that must agree with the noun in number and gender, while in French most of them have to agree in number and gender); in French they add extra letters in seemingly random places (Y a-t-il un cheval?). The tradeoff though is that there are fewer tenses in French that people actually use. Yesterday madame le profeseur explained that generally people don't use the simple past tense except in a literary context. What they use instead is called passe compose. so for the equivalent of preterite AND present perfect (yo fui; yo he terminado) is this one tense in french j'ai fini. French seems to have many more literary tenses than spanish does. Spanish has one (preterite anterior - hubo hablado) while in French, like half of them you don't hear in normal conversation.

so that's that. this shows that five percent of my day was spent doing work, and the rest i was writing and trying to look busy. then i ran out of ideas and read the rest of the time. how nice!