Goal 10 – Foreign Language Competency, SPAN 201

As a part of the general education goals, we are all required to learn a language up to the 201 level. This Spanish 201 course was my second language course here at Longwood, but by far,  my favorite. In fact, I have even considered adding a Spanish minor with how much I have enjoyed my experience in my Spanish class.

With having Profesora Waggoner as a teacher, seeing such passion for learning this language everyday really struck me as we all learned the language and began to study even more and more difficult tenses of speech. However, even as the language got slightly more difficult, having such a passionate teacher really helped with making the class more enjoyable. Unlike previous language classes, this one required participation, and also made sure that we were speaking in the language, which many teacher fail to have students do, which can really hurt the students chances at retaining the language that they are learning.

This specific course, however, encouraged us to be active in class, as we were up and about, engaging in conversation and open discussion as we learned more vocab and trickier tenses, such as subjunctive. What truly made this class enjoyable was the video project, in which we could choose ant topic, but needed to have vocabulary, and needed to show what we had learned through a ten minute video with a partner. This allowed me to choose a subject I was passionate about, and mix it with the language that we were trying to learn, which allowed my classmate and friend and I to focus on theater and music that was related to Latin  heritage. In this video, we spoke only in Spanish, and got to teach about (and learn for ourselves) how to dance the salsa, and the history behind the musical “In the Heights”, and its author Lin Manuel Miranda.

https://youtu.be/ZBh82GKw6H0