The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

60 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 operated, I fell further and further behind. The conjugating of verbs, the identifying of masculine and feminine nouns, and the recognizing of various pronouns overwhelmed my thoughts. I struggled to make it through each class without completely giving up hope. Each night, I would stare at my homework, type a few words into Google Translate, and then scribble them down onto the worksheet handed out that day. I had no one at home to help me with my simple but frequent questions. My sister, who had already taken years of high school Spanish, studied abroad in Mexico, and double minored in Spanish and ESL was away at college inMichigan. My parents did not speak a word of Spanish past the occasional Mexican dishes we ate for dinner. I was left alone to drown in the homework. Though I foundmy other classes to be fairly easy, Spanish class was an impossible obstacle that I could not find any way around. I avoided answering questions in class and turned in incomplete homework and blank answers on quizzes. The trend continued for a few weeks until approximately half way through the first quarter, Señora handed a small, blank sheet of paper to each of us. She asked us to write down our individual goals that we wanted to achieve by the end of the quarter. At that point in time, I struggled to even keep a D in the course; it was due to drop again at any point. Coming from a homeschool background where I was accustomed to receiving straight A’s, it was a major adjustment checking my grades online each day and seeing a nearly failing grade in Spanish. As that little piece of paper was passed to me, I wrote down that my goal was to simply get a C for the quarter. It struck me then, the degree to which my expectations had fallen and how far I was from the same standards I had held myself to just months earlier in middle school. Not only that, but the grade on my report card started taking priority over my actual learning experience. My goal should have been education first, and the reflecting of that through my grades, second. I felt a sudden change, a new determination to transform the way I approached my Spanish training. At the end of class, I approached Señora’s desk in the front of the classroom and inquired