Spanish Club!

Yesterday I led the first ever Spanish Club meeting at Morogoro Sec. after school. I founded the club after some students asked me if I knew any Spanish. After taking Spanish from 8th grade through my first year of college, I know quite a lot of Spanish...or at least I did. After a 5 year drought in studying, my brain is almost vacant of any knowledge of Spanish anymore. However, I still thought I would give it a shot. Besides, it's usually easy to relearn a language you knew when you were younger.

Before the meeting I had to look up beginning Spanish, just to reorient my brain into Spanish mode instead of Kiswahili mode. It's quite funny because when I initially arrived in Tanzania in June of last year, I couldn't help but think in Spanish. I think it's common for people who go to a country with a new language to default to trying to speak a second language that they know. Somehow thinking in Spanish when I got to Tanzania made me feel like I fit in more, even though Spanish has no use here. Since June 2010, however, I've slowly been replacing my second language competency with Kiswahili instead of Spanish. I now think I know and can speak more Kiswahili than I can after all those years of taking Spanish, but being immersed in a place for as long as 8 months can have that effect sometimes.

About 20 students came to the meeting, in addition to two student teachers who are currently practicing teaching at school this month in order to get their teaching degrees from the Morogoro Teacher's College in a few months. All I can say is I had an absolute blast. It was such a role reversal - being the Spanish teacher rather than the Spanish pupil in the classroom. All of my exposure to Spanish thus far has been dominated by me being on the student side of the equation. I taught everyone the Spanish alphabet and put emphasis on the vowels and special consonants that sound different in Spanish than in English or Kiswahili.

It's actually really useful to know Kiswahili and English when teaching Spanish because you can make a lot of connections between Spanish and the two other languages to help students understand Spanish better. Spanish is like Kiswahili in that the vowels are pronounced in the same ways (except for "y") and the language is phonetic, meaning (*almost) everything is spelled the way it sounds. Spanish is also similar to English in that English differentiates between male and female subjects and many Spanish words look and sound very similar to English words. Whenever I would try to explain a concept or word in Spanish, I would try to have my already bilingual students draw on their knowledge of Kiswahili and English to understand the material better.

After explaining the alphabet I taught the students about words that have stressed syllables and accents. It was so fun to pronounce these words together. I would pronounce a word overenthusiastically in Spanish and the students would try to repeat it as best as they could. It was a hoot! I nearly laughed as much as I taught. They could tell how excited I was to be teaching Spanish and picked up on my energy as they responded just as eagerly. After that I taught them about the gendered nature of most Spanish nouns and adjectives. I finished the first lesson by teaching them useful greetings in Spanish that they can use to practice on each other for the next week until our next meeting on Tuesday.

Overall I'm really looking forward to my next Spanish Club Meeting. It's incredibly fun to teach something other than English here for once. I mean people can tell just by looking at me that I teach English. If you're White, everyone assumed you can only speak English and not Kiswahili. Also, there's such a weird power dynamic with teaching English here, as a White person esepcially, since English is the language of the colonizers. Although it's now almost a necessity to teach students English so they can function in a world that's technologically growing and undergoing globalization at exponential rates faster than any of us can really trace, I still feel weird about it sometimes. It never feels purely genuine to be a volunteer from American who teaches English here, since English has such a nasty historical background in Tanzania. That's why I looooove teaching Spanish here.

Teaching Spanish has no such unsettling effect. It's just super fun. And the purpose of teaching Spanish here is purely for fun and for the sake of learning and gaining knowledge, not so much for practical uses (like with English), since Spanish is not spoken at all in Tanzania. Nevertheless, I'm going to continue to teach Spanish every week on Tuesday and hopefully have a wildly fun and hilarious time with my students who really love to learn. As a teacher, there's nothing I would ever want more than to reward my students who have a pure passion for learning for the sake of learning by teaching, hence I'm more than happy to teach Spanish!