LOSING MY SPANISH
Judy Dickinson, my new Spanish teacher, didn’t know what to do with me.
I showed up in her classroom sometime in late October, 1967. Alameda High School, my new school, was a state-of-the-art, low-slung one-story sprawling along Wadsworth Boulevard in Denver’s Lakewood suburb. From the outside it was all brightly-colored plexiglass panels and sparkling windows.
I was told the building went up in 1960, but sometime in the intervening years before I arrived there as a junior, there had been a remarkable add-on – the physical manifestation of deep, systemic changes in the way American schools went about their work. It was an era of experimentation – the New Math, the Personalized System of Instruction, the open-campus idea applied to public schools, and other innovations were sweeping the nation. At Denver’s new Alameda, radical changes in the teaching of foreign languages took the form of two large, round buildings added to backside of the shiny modern high school. Set side-by-side and referred to as The Pods, these massive, white, sci-fi-looking tubs were special-use spaces constructed to accommodate the latest fad in foreign language instruction, a jazzy new pedagogical program created by Encyclopedia Britannica.
The idea was to teach language by immersion, a simulation of what happens to high-school-aged kids when, say, they become exchange students in a country where English is not spoken. The language enters the student’s consciousness through a kind of osmosis driven by necessity. If the only language you’re hearing outside the home is French, and every kid & teacher in the school you’re attending abroad speaks only French, you’re going to pick up French. Proficiency will simply grow over time. The Britannica language theorists reckoned that the same principle of immersion might apply if foreign language students were treated to a daily regimen of films and audio tapes, done entirely in languages other than English.
The Pods housed the projectors and tape decks. Sixteen-millimeter films and eight-inch reel-to-reel tapes, to be exact. Each round building was divided into five equal sections like those of a cut grapefruit. The sections were separated only by massive accordion-curtains, retractable to open large spaces, another nod to the mod New Learning. At the center of each Pod stood a tiny round room which turned out to be the language nerve-center housing the tapes and projectors. A student could order up a tape in the language she was studying and listen to it through headphones at back of the classroom. The projectors inside the core-room beamed onto angled mirrors which cast the film images thru screens made of opalescent plastic. Each V-shaped classroom in the Pod held one of the plastic screens, so the films appeared at the narrow front of the room where the angled curtains drew together in a kind of focal-point. Stereophonic speakers broadcast the soundtrack with crystal clarity. It all seemed like something borrowed from The Jetsons.
I was dazzled when I saw how languages were being taught at Alameda. There was a sense of breathless pride in the school’s willingness to buy into this new techno-wizardry. And no wonder: the films were state-of-the-art in terms of production value. They were made by seasoned directors, featured professional actors, and seemed like real movies, no matter how cheezy the story-lines, focused as they were on the kinds of quotidian matters that an American student might encounter if, say, he or she were boarded in a family home abroad. Families going about their daily lives, getting up for breakfast, getting ready for school, enjoying a trip to the zoo, ordering food at a restaurant.
The Spanish films offered two long series, La Familia Fernández, set in Mexico City and featuring a school-aged boy named Emilio, and Emilio en España, where the young lad travels to Spain to visit relatives. The degree of language difficulty increased as the stories went along. Familia Fernández featured fifty-four half-hour episodes and dozens of characters interacting with Emilio and his family. The second series, set in Spain, was designed to introduce students to dialects spoken in the mother country, a more formal Español, with the lisping “th’s” replacing the more familiar “s’s” of the Mexican tongue.
Spanish students at Alameda proceeded though five levels, all them guided by the film-tape progression through the mundane tribulations of one Emilio Fernandez. When I arrived in Mrs. Dickinson’s class, she already possessed my transcripts from dear old Clearfield High in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, and had made an assumption about me. Clearfield, she reckoned, a backwoods town of 9,000 in one of the most rural counties in the state, could not have offered very good foreign language instruction. Certainly, its high school could not afford the luxury of an expensive new program like Britannica, with its impressive pods and projectors. Mrs. Dickinson decided on the spot that I needed to be placed in Level 1, working with students who were just beginning – despite the fact that I had already had two full years of Spanish instruction.
“We’ll try this for a time and see how it goes,” I remember her telling me.
Within about a week, she bumped me up to Level 3, and few weeks after that – after my taking several exams and sitting with her through routine one-on-one conversations in Spanish, she placed me in a section all by myself. Halfway through my junior year I became Judy Dickinson’s protégé, working in a class of one. I also became her chief learning-lab technician – the person who spent hours in the Pod core, running the projectors and cuing up the tapes on an elaborate nine-deck contraption stuffed into the tiny room.
What I realized soon after landing amid the dazzling techno-paradise of immersive language learning was that no one was learning the language. I arrived knowing more Spanish than Judy’s best students in Level 5. It was not her fault – she was a marvelous and diligent teacher, one of the most intelligent teachers I ended up having all thru high school. The trouble lay in the theory. One cannot simulate immersion merely through films and recordings which students are exposed to for an hour a day. The very idea of immersion is that one is inside the situation; one is an actor, an agent in the scene, alongside all the other actors and agents. One feels responsible for being a member of the group – say the host family. One is on-the-spot not to seem like an idiot. So a spectacular degree of attention has to be paid to the language. Merely watching La Familia Fernandez was entirely different from living in the home of La Familia Fernandez, no matter how homey the directors and actors tried to make things. It turned out, no great surprise, that watching the films merely induced film-watching behavior. Judy Dickinson’s students were spectators of Mexican/Spanish cultures and their languages. They were learning little.
My instruction, on the other hand, had been a lot like Mrs. Dickinson’s instruction, long before learning-by-immersion. Back at dear old Clearfield High, and the even dearer Clearfield Junior High in ninth grade, we had old-fashioned Spanish workbooks, with detailed assignments and drills in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. We learned how to conjugate verbs, how to punctuate Spanish sentences with those curious upside-down exclamation and question marks, how to deal with gendered nouns and pronouns, how get nouns and adjectives in the right order. Our teachers spent ample classroom time with spoken Spanish, too – leading us through endless hours of dictados, wherein the full class would sit and repeat words and sentences in unison, seeking to master pronunciation and cadence, training our ears alongside the eyes we were developing for written Spanish. My Clearfield teachers had no films or tapes; they used the chalkboard a lot.
To be fair, it is also true that my Spanish teachers there in the back woods were immensely interesting human beings. They were a married couple, John and Marjorie Filsinger. Mrs. Filsinger taught only the ninth-grade level of the language, Spanish I. Mr. Filsinger took over in tenth grade, and took his most interested students all the way to the end of their senior year. The Filsingers were among the most cultured people in the county. They had two high-school-aged children, both surpassingly fine students. Each member of the family played a stringed instrument, so the family comprised a classical quartet. They were all members of the Clearfield County Country Club where every summer one Filsinger or another seemed to win the local men’s or women’s golf tournaments. Best of all, they were mountaineers, who lived frugally all year to afford an elaborate mountain-climbing adventure in the summer. They climbed all over the world, but their most frequent ascents occurred in the Andes – in one country or another – where they could sharpen their Spanish skills during the weeks when they were making technical assaults on insanely dangerous peaks. They were also good photographers and kept graphic records of their travels on Ektachrome slides. Mr. Filsinger was particularly fond of breaking out the projector from time to time and telling fascinating, illustrated stories about the family’s adventures in, say, Equador.
I had had Spanish I with Marjorie, and Spanish II with John, and had just started into Spanish III when our move to Denver occurred. I did not realize how superb their instruction had been, nor how good a Spanish student I was.
In spring of my senior year, still working as Judy Dickinson’s volunteer language lab technician and now reading Spanish literary works, she took me aside and told me about a rare, upcoming event in Denver. The Pan American Club, located downtown, had begun to sponsor an annual citywide spoken Spanish contest for Denver-area high school students – those who did not hail from Spanish-speaking homes. Each teacher of Español throughout the city and suburbs was invited to nominate one student to compete. The idea of the contest was to promote Spanish language and culture, calling attention to the fact that Denver housed thousands of Spanish-speaking residents, hailing from every nation in Central and South America. The Pan American Club, a civic organization dedicated to education and the arts, represented their assembly. Judy wanted to nominate me as the Alameda High School representative.
The contest occurred on a warm Saturday in April. I remember being shocked when Judy and I arrived at the Club together that morning. The building, set back from one of Denver’s sweeping downtown boulevards, looked like an embassy – stately white pillars and a broad staircase out front, flanked with a row of flags representing every member nation. I didn’t know what to expect, and neither did Judy – it was only the third year for the contest and the first time Judy had sent a student. She told me to be sure to wear a jacket and tie.
The contest ran for several hours, two main sessions punctuated by a luncheon in the middle. In the first half, contestants moved from room to room in the spacious building. In each room sat one native speaker, representing his or her nation of origin. We contestants rotated through these closed-door interviews – one-on-one conversations with each judge, who kept notes on our performances on small, lined pads. The judges were splendidly dressed, all them professionals or business people; one or two introduced themselves as professors. The idea was to hear, and respond to, different national dialects. I particularly recall the dapper judge from the Dominican Republic and how clearly and beautifully his country’s Español rolled from his tongue.
It was all quite nerve-wracking and intimidating, but the worst was to come. After lunch, the names of the finalists were called out over dessert, and we were asked to assemble in the auditorium down the hall. The non-finalists were expected to attend and become part of what turned out to be a robust audience. Members of the press were there, and families and friends associated with the club. I was one of the finalists – I think I remember ten of us in all. Around half of the original judges now sat as a panel on the auditorium stage, and we finalists went one at time to stand before them and answer a series of questions. The questions seemed to come at random, one judge after another, and everything spoken into booming microphones and broadcast to the auditorium. Not one word of English.
In the end, I won third place, the bronze. I still have the little wooden plaque carved with my name, along with a new, celebrated edition of a Spanish-English dictionary. They arrived in Judy Dickinson’s office a few weeks after the contest.
*
The thing that spurred me to write this reverie was actually a restaurant. I was making a chili verde one evening in October, and started thinking about my love of Mexican food, and then remembered the first Mexican restaurant I’d ever gone to. It was called The Original Mexican Café, and it was located on Broadway Avenue in Denver. The name was not an empty claim: that café was indeed the longest operating Mexican place in the city, dating to 1924.
At the end of my first semester with Judy Dickinson, she wanted to give her best students a gift, and so she took three or four of us out to lunch one Saturday at The Original Mexican Café, her favorite spot. We didn’t have Mexican cafes in Clearfield, Pennsylvania; my family did not consume Mexican food; I had never eaten a taco or an enchilada. I had never heard of a chile relleno. But I was smitten by The Original Mexican Café – all the more because of my pale-skinned, bookish teacher who so loved the Spanish language and Central American culture. Judy never came out and said what she thought of the fancy immersion program she had been hired to teach, but her selecting me over several dozen other students, all of them schooled by Britannica, suggested her preference for the old methods.
When I headed off to college in 1969, I took a Spanish placement exam to determine my level of instruction as an entering freshman. I placed into upper-level courses. The Origins of the Spanish Novel and advanced grammar, both at the 300-level, were two of the courses open to me, and by the end of my first year, I had taken both. The competition in class was fierce. I attended Brigham Young University, renowned worldwide for its immense program in language instruction. Because Mormons send their missionaries to every nation that will admit them, BYU offers a staggering array of languages, many taught in crash-course fashion to the nineteen-year-old men (missionaries were all-male then) who were heading in droves to convert people all over the world. The church sent more missionaries to Spanish-speaking countries than any other places abroad, and many of those young men were BYU students when they left, and resumed studies two years later when they returned. In both of my Spanish courses, I was the only freshman in classrooms dominated by returned missionaries, all of them twenty-one and older, most of them registered as sophomores. But among American students of Spanish, these were a different breed of sophomore. Everyone but me had just come home from two full years of rigorous immersion. The real kind.
I did well and decided to minor in Spanish. I decided at the same time to leave BYU after one year and take up with Colorado State, back near home. When I arrived at CSU, I immediately looked into its requirements for a foreign language minor. The requirements were very simple: a student had to successfully complete at least one 300-level class in a language other than English. CSU operated on the quarter-system, so for students with no foreign language background, earning the minor would mean taking several quarters of elementary and intermediate Spanish before finally placing into a class at the 300 level. All my credits transferred from BYU, so I realized with delight that as far as CSU was concerned, I had already earned a minor in Spanish by the start of my sophomore year.
Then I did a very stupid thing. I stopped taking Spanish. I jumped into yet another minor, history, and did nothing more with my Español. I made the assumption that my second language would stay with me, even if I did not stay with it. It turns out, that assumption was wrong. Little by little, month by month, year by year, the Español I had so prized in high school and early college evaporated. It was like an unused muscle; eventually it atrophied. I still adore Mexican food, but my Spanish is gone. Marjorie, John, and Judy would be ashamed of me.