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Spanish In Texas

Decent Essays

Spanish is a huge part of the Texan culture, so when I found out I had to take a foreign language class in high school I figured Spanish would be the best. I have never even vacationed outside the state of Texas, which leaves me with a lot of Texas culture. However, I still was missing Spanish in both ways; knowing the language and the influence in Texas.
I now have that part of Texan culture in my life. It’s been helpful in history, communicating with other people that don’t speak very fluent English, and understanding what a Texan is. In school there are even other students who ask for my help. When I teach them it reminds me of the struggle I went through to be able to understand the Spanish language.
My teacher was a good teacher at heart, …show more content…

A lot of the Spanish he learned was passed on from ancestors. This Spanish over the years however was diluted with Spanish slang from this area and the modernization of the language. Not only but he was always informed with the new forms words or phrases of Spanish from his brother who needs the language for his job in the FBI. It was still mostly similar to what we were learning in my Spanish class however it didn’t fully connect to what we were doing.
Even though it wasn’t the best help I could get; it brought my grade up from failing to just passing. This surprised me as I thought there wasn’t that big of a difference from the Tex-Mex my uncle taught me and the Spanish that we were learning. However, foreign language classes teach the language in its purest form to help prevent the language and its proper use from being lost.
There are a lot of kids taking Spanish because of how big it is in Texas, and even though they knew Spanish, there were also kids that grew up with it and took Spanish for an easy A. These kids would speak Spanish to each other when they didn’t want others to know what they were saying or that’s how their parents expected them to talk to family. Now they did have their own variations of Spanish including mine. However, they were still doing the same work that I was doing, and since they knew what the teacher was talking about they would apply their knowledge easier than I …show more content…

He was also the teacher’s best student because he had the highest grade and wasn’t scared to answer a question. I can’t remember ever getting one wrong.
I eventually let him know that I had a serious problem with learning Spanish from our teacher and if I didn’t get I was going to fail. My biggest problems were the eighteen different conjugations we had to use and how to structure a sentence. There are four present tense, four past tense, three futures, four conditionals, one simple, and three preterite tenses. He first taught me how to use all of the conjugations because without those I could never learn how to structure a sentence appropriately. Once he taught me how to structure a sentence I never felt so confident in my ability to speak Spanish.
The final eventually came along and I was nervous but not as nervous as I was before. I walked out of Spanish 1 with an 80 which was far better than my 55 that I started my year with. Though I was there to learn Spanish; I walked out realizing that it isn’t always the student that’s at fault for not understanding a subject. The teacher plays a huge part in making sure the student will understand. With my teacher; I had a communication barrier that prevented me from understanding what she was talking about. So whenever a kid looks up to me for help I either do my best to explain it to them or refer them to someone

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