Teacher Speak

Thank goodness for mentors - Thank you Jeanne. This part of the experience had completely slipped my mind for now and I need to get on to it because time really is flying and before I know it I will be home. I have been concentrating mainly on just listening till now and trying to hear the different sounds and trying to hear and differentiate between words. Sometimes when people are talking to me it sounds like one big long word and I get completely lost. That is a characteristic of portenos speech- they speak very rapidly in comparison to people who live outside of BsAs.

This week I will get myself into one or two of the primary Spanish classes in the school so I can listen to the teachers in there and record any formulaic type expressions that I hear. Up until now I have been used in the bi-lingual part of the school and have only worked in English speaking classrooms, so I am hearing no Spanish at school unless the students speak to me in Spanish because (a) they either forget that I am just learning and they rattle of something really quickly, or (b) they are checking my progress. Anyway, todo bien.

Some classroom expressions that I have heard are: you probably already know these but this just shows they really are used by native speaking teachers here - something I think we sometimes wonder about when we are using another language that we ourselves dont hear other people speaking and using.

Eso es - means 'thats right'

Claro - also means thats right or of course (things like that)

Sigue asi - means 'keep it up'

Bueno - means 'good' or sometimes is just affirmation like 'si'

Que lindo/a - means 'its nice' or 'how nice' etc

Buenisimo - means very good need to check the spelling of that one. It doesnt look quite right but I have been taught that there are only two consonants in espanol that are ever doubled - they are ll and rr. However it looks like there should be 2 s's to my eye.

Que divertido - means 'how fun' or 'what fun' etc

If any students from San Miguel are reading this please leave me a comment and add some of your own expressions that you hear teachers using (nice ones please-you know what I mean) or maybe expressions that students use in the classroom, either to the teacher or to each other - that would be really good. Muchas gracias.

The photos above are of the third year class (equivalent to year 11) - wouldn't you like to have class sizes like this all day, and the other photo is of Sebastian (2nd year) and I taken at the school.