The following three entries were drafted on the 8th, 9th and 11th April respectively, however remained in draft form since then until now due to a heavy workload.
Last quarter when enrolling in my classes for Spring, I made sure I was enrolled in four so that I had the option to drop one of the classes after realising it didn’t live up to my expectations. This week, the second week of the quarter, I have dropped one of these classes. Unfortunately, the class that I decided to drop was one that could have potentially improved my Spanish to a new level of fluency. Spanish 150 ‘Topics in Contemporary Studies’ is a class that focuses on short story literature from Cuba in the early-mid 20th century. The professor, who lectured about technical terms in literature for an hour and 50 the very first day of class, had a dialect from Colombia which was interesting as his pronunciation of words were different to what I have been exposed to thus far. I decided to drop this class because the reading requirements were rather strenuous and I felt that a background understanding of the history of short stories was necessary, something I didn't have. The gap in difficulty between Spanish 25 and Spanish 150 was one I felt would have been too difficult to bridge. This isn't all bad however as it has allowed me to take an extra geography class this quarter on Spanish South America, a region of the world that, if I haven't made clear already, fascinates me. After exposure to first lectures of this class it is clear that it is very broad and that it won’t go into much detail or specificities, keeping the study on a broad regional level in term of politics and economics for the region. Dropping my Spanish class was a big decision for me as I felt that it was very important for me to take some sort of Spanish class through the year so I can maintain and build upon my current level of fluency. However, the content of the class just didn't fit what I wanted to get out of the language, and wouldn't carry a useful amount of real world applicability. When I studied Spanish in the UK at UCL, the second term would have come to a close by now and I wouldn't practice much Spanish until the final exam came around in May. This huge gap between March/April when classes end, and September when I would take a new class proved to be detrimental to my fluency in the language as it is extremely easy to forget a lot of the language if nothing is done to maintain it whilst not having classes. Thus it is very important for me to avoid this issue, and I intend to by reading the short stories assigned in the class I dropped, watching TV shows, and mainly by reading the book I have on the socioeconomic and political development of Colombia (Jimenez, 1985). I have been reading this book for a while now and I have found it very useful in learning important terms related to geography. In addition to this, the book will help me in my Spanish South America class, which is essentially identical to the content of this publication. However, most importantly I need to maintain my oral proficiency, by conversing with Daisy and the other Spanish-speaking people I know on my dorm floor. If I stick to this, I will be able to maintain my fluency I’ve build up over a long period of time.
Jimenez, M (1985) Historia Del Desarollo Regional en Colombia, CIDER: Universidad de los Andes.
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