Spanish Class and "Digital Nation"

I recently signed up for a class at the local Jr College: "Speedy Spanish." It's so frustrating understanding some Spanish and speaking a little but being unable to make it useful on the job. We are always scrambling to locate the person-who-speaks-Spanish for a customer. I always feel guilty when that person is not me, and think it should be. (Alas for all the French I took in College.) The class has no prerequisites, so I was hoping to revive and build on what I know. Several years of highschool Spanish and more decades of limping along beside the ambient Latino culture have kept me interested but not very effective.

Last Tuesday was our first class. The instructor greeted each person politely in Spanish as they entered the room. He introduced himself and explained that it would be mostly non-English and that it would be OK. After a short dictation - five sentences we were to write in Spanish as best we could - he spent the remainder of the class using the white board and we the students to demonstrate how one can learn (or re-learn) a language as children do; by paying attention and coming to understand what the teacher means. He wrote, gestured, laughed, nodded, illustrated, demonstrated, acted out, and occasionally explained in English. He invited us to talk to each other. This turned out to be possible. Everyone seemed to enjoy the class and warm up to the style of teaching being used. I was fascinated by how elegantly and painlessly the tools of learning a language can be picked up again.

I can't think of a way to tie this story to learning 2.0 or Emerging Technologies. However, I do have to hurry home from this Tuesday's Spanish class to catch the latest Front Line entitled "Digital Nation."