I am sad to say that this is my final blog post because this will be admitting that I will have to say good-bye to the SWAP program and my student, Valentina, as well. I have had such an amazing time and it is an experience that I will never forget.
However, I would like to happily say that Valentina and I found a good routine with our daily work. I had previously mentioned before that we were going to try and role play with written dialogues. We did try that once but my student wasn’t into it. She also said that she did not like using the flash cards. But by a chance spontaneous moment, we found something that worked for both of us, reading current events from the newspaper. This worked perfectly for us. What we would do is, I would bring a newspaper or a magazine and Valentina would a paragraph and I would then ask her what that paragraph was talking about. She would recite the best she could the meaning of what she just read and I would help her fill in the blanks. Then at the very end of the article we would both have a conversation of how we felt about it and often that would bring up another topic of conversation. Sometimes I would have a hard time understanding what she was saying so I would stop her and in another way she would have to explain in another way. This was the only activity that Valentina said she really liked doing and wanted to continue with. So we did this for the rest of our classes. I did feel a little bit worried that some of the newspapers I could get a hold of had hard concepts and words in them. I could mostly only find the New York Times and the LA times on campus but I figured that this is the level most newspapers are at. If she can get through them and comprehend what a higher level newspaper is saying then this will give her the confidence to pick up any newspaper and understand the content. Not everything, like in the workbooks is going to have simple words and concepts. At first, it was challenging but towards the end of the classes, Valentina was a lot quicker about comprehending what was going on and her reading improved as well.
Another thing to brag about Valentina that made me proud was when Valentina didn’t want to throw away the newspapers when we were done with class. She said that she would bring them home with her and read with her 7 year old niece that was just beginning to learn to read. I don’t know if she actually did read with her niece but if she does just once, then I have succeeded.
Not only was I teaching Valentina, she was teaching me. I have a thousand stories that I could share about Valentina’s words of wisdom or actions but one story particularly sticks out. By the end of the semester, I beginning to get fairly well informed on Mexican politics. Previously, the topic never really sparked my interest until one day in class. I remember at the beginning I was really tired from the night before and I had a million things to do after the class and needless to say I was a little distracted. However, a quick, mindless class was not where the conversation was headed. Fairly close to the beginning of the class we read an article about the new Mexican president that was inducted over the weekend, Pena Nieto. When we would stop at every paragraph to discuss what the article was saying, Valentina would be the one that tell me what was really happening in the artice, with background information, the political party systems and why the previous elected officials are corrupt. I found myself very confused at times with the names of the past presidents and who was associated with which party. I kept on having to ask for clarification and very patiently Valentina would help me. Valentina would even correct my pronunciation of some of the Spanish words and names as I have done with her many times with new English words. From that class, Valentina gained useful knowledge in explaining a difficult idea in English and I gained an insider’s perspective on a subject that I previously would have not known.
