From second grade until sophomore year of high school, I was in some kind of Spanish course. Of course we all started very small with colors and numbers, perhaps with some reinforcement from Sesame Street, I quickly began to really love the language and was able to think more concretely about sentence structure.
I owe a lot of this to my middle school reinforcement. All of my spanish teachers have been wonderful, but the way Spanish was taught to me felt fully immersive. We were in a classroom that was about 99% spanish speaking only until the bell rang. We went over daily emotion check-ins, Spanish history, hispanic music of the past and current, and different units of vocab such as sports, music, foods, etc.
One distinctive time in seventh grade, I remember sitting watching an Alex Rodriguez press conference on TV that my dad happened to be working. While I knew A-Rod spoke Spanish, I did not think anything of it- my only in initial intention was to find my dad’s bald head in a sea of reporters. Once A-Rod started to answer questions in Spanish, I started to notice myself actually understanding what he was saying! While I did not get every word, I could roughly translate the main idea of every answer he gave. This was such an impressive feat to my mom, who does not speak a word of spanish, that she emailed and thanked my Spanish professor at the time. It became more than homework and fill in the blank worksheets; the language became fully alive to me. This is when I truly started to find my love of the language.
Now that I am more mature, I see how even knowing a bit of another language is so helpful to day-to-day life. Going into a field that will be focused on advocacy for minority groups, learning another language can only help me. I have had the privilege to choose to add another language and have those educational resources. Some people to go through their routines are forced to learn another language or do not have the access to education to add another language. If you agave the time and resources, making another language into your contact sport! Even spending 5 mins a day using Duolingo or listening to Spanish music can help. Happy Hispanic Heritage Month!