Friday

For the first time in a long time, this actually feels like a Friday.  My usual Saturday morning class has been cancelled, so I've got nothing until Monday morning.

Well, maybe "nothing" isn't quite right.  I should of course be getting ahead with planning, but I got into such a routine of waking up at 7:00 to start studying in these past few weeks that this morning I finally just got out of bed at 8:00 even though my alarm wasn't set to go off for another half hour.  I just couldn't sleep anymore!  So I know that tomorrow I'll be up bright and early once again and I can dig into the week's planning then.  Tonight I just want to take it easy.

My new semester's classes began this week and I had my first "virtual" classes (basically like a one-way skype call) today.  I have all three with the same professor: Svetlana Stefanova.  She is not Spanish, that's for sure! ;)  So I'm being taught about English grammar, phonetics, morphology and syntax by a foreigner... but really, I guess sometimes they're the best teachers.

We native speakers can use the language (usually) perfectly, or at least without too much trouble; but how many of you can do morphological analysis?  Or point out the adverbial phrase in a sentence?  And probably none of you could spell "mother" using the international phonetic alphabet!  I don't know how useful any of this will be for my own teaching, but it is true that fluent speakers of a second language often know the grammar and rules inside and out while those of us who were born speaking the language haven't got a clue as to word order, sentence structure or what on Earth an extraposed subject is.

I find that this is true here in Spain.  I can write and spell and form sentences better than many native sevillanos.  That's not bragging; it's true.  I haven't had the luxury of growing up speaking this language, where being surrounded by it naturally leads to near-perfect oral production before heading off to school and  being introduced to the written word--struggling to memorize the rules of how all the letters come together to make the words we say; or how, in turn, those words come together in different patterns to make meaningful sentences.  I have learned to speak and read and write Spanish all at once.  Therefore, my spelling (in Spanish) is nearly perfect (a novelty for the girl who scored in the 9th percentile in spelling on her STAR test in the seventh grade).

So I guess it isn't so surprising that I now have a foreign teacher to tell me about all the intricacies of my own language that I never wanted to know.  Still, I can't help but be annoyed that I have to take the classes at all.  Sure, it's not all bad, and being the strange, language-loving, nerd that I am, I got sick pleasure out of doing an assignment for my morphology and syntax class three weeks ahead of schedule tonight.  Breaking down words, designating the root, the bound inflectional suffixes, etc. it was like cracking an English-lover's code!  And yet I worry about how long these new classes will hold my interest.  It seems as though they'll lose their luster quickly, and then I'll just be stuck grinding through exercises with words like "predicative compliment" and "morpheme", or "non-finite verb."  Only time will tell.

But I didn't really want to tell you about what a language nerd I am.  What I wanted to tell you all was that despite the many things I could be doing or could have done this evening, I just decided to watch a movie. :)  So while I did get a jump start on my morphology class and I did do some reading from my grammar book, I also just decided to enjoy my Friday and sit down on the couch with a good movie--The Silver Linings Playbook.  I liked it and now I'm going to sleep.

TGIF