I had an interesting experience in Spanish class tonight. It was the first time I’d been in over two weeks, since the PIMs had been on vacation for a week and I’d missed a week’s worth (i.e. two) classes after that. The last class I went to, the students divided into cliques, and I felt invisible. In my small group of two young women who appeared to be friends, every time I volunteered an answer, they didn’t hear me. I tried that about ten times, and then withdrew into myself, both angry at what I perceived as their insensitivity in their girlish high spirits and at my inability to learn a language, after all these years of effort. The class had gone from semi-comprehensible to way over my head… but not way over the others’ heads. So it’s no wonder the others in my small group didn’t hear me: I was always wrong in my guesses.

Anyway, I have to say I’m not into this class since then, since I’ve given up: something I’ve often done before in Spanish classes. The teacher had the perceptiveness to ask if everything was okay. I’d asked him by email if I could drop down to the lower class. I said everything was fine, but I was in over my head in his class. He said, “But you seem to have withdrawn into yourself.” I was touched at his noticing; my withdrawal happened only at one class, the last one I’d attended. I told him the above story and the discussion that followed is irrelevant here. The important part is that I wasn’t invisible to my teacher, and that was nice. I still have given up, but I don’t know: I think maybe if he gave me enough scaffolding — chance to get a few things right, not pairing me with someone who knows a lot more (because I’ve said I feel awkward with someone who knows a lot more) and I don’t know what other techniques he could use… I could think about that later… I might gradually rebuild my confidence. He’d have to do something with the group’s dynamic, because there’s an insider/outsider thing going on, because it’s all young people, and mostly girls. I was that age once. I didn’t like it then, and like it less now.

At any rate, the thing I wanted to mention is that I was really nervous as class began, because I’m already out of my depth and had missed a couple of classes. The teacher convened us in the center of the room, and I was thoroughly confused by what followed. He acted out a :05 drama and the students looked at the handout he’d given us and identified the sentence he was acting. “Man,” I thought, “I am even more clueless than ever. They’re all getting this right away, and all I can do is recognize the structure of the activity.” I worked really hard to keep up, and though I couldn’t, I began to understand a little more of what was happening, and tried to participate. I mean, I was in the dark here, while everyone else was acting out things and then pairing them with sentences whose meaning was obscure. It was rather like the BASTA game, when I was in the group of people who first left their group and was the first to join a different group: partway through, I realized something was wrong in how we were playing the game, but I couldn’t figure out what was happening. We weren’t allowed to talk, so wordlessly I tried to get help from the other three. They hushed me. But that’s a subject for another entry. It was the same feeling of being in the dark in a high-pressure situation, needing to continue talking and acting when you don’t know how. Like those moments of nightblindness on the highway, when I’m racing along a 75 mph and suddenly can’t see the next turn.

We finally got through that, and by the end I got the gist of the exercise, and could even identify the occasional action of my partners.

After the class I talked with a classmate who shed light onto that exercise: they’d done it last week. They’d gone over all the vocabulary. They’d reviewed all the sentences and acted them all out. So when they came to it this week, it was not new to them. It still wasn’t easy for them, but they’d had 15:00 to half an hour of that exercise before.

What is so striking to me is that it’s my first experience of rising to an expectation. I thought that their comprehension is where I should be (minus a little, to account for my level). That’s what they expected of me, so that’s what I expected of myself. I struggled and struggle with the lesson, wanting to understand and assuming that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t. So I pushed myself further than I realized. Because, as I said, by the end I had SOME comprehension of the activity: not only a rudimentary sense of meaning of some of the sentences but — possibly more difficult — I’d figured out the “rules of the game” with no explanation. Only afterward did I find out that my confusion made sense. But in the meantime, I  had “floored it” with intellectual functioning, and understood something I might not have had I gone into the exercise knowing it was acceptable for me to be lost.

I know that when you’re in a class at a slightly higher level than you, that can be good because you’re exposed to the level you aspire to. So there’s a slight increase in pressure on the accelerator. But I’d never experienced such a jolt — which couldn’t have been sustained, I know — that led to the achievement of a task well beyond what I could normally do.