Speak
ESPANOL
My Spanish teacher is going to try to get through the entire year without speaking English to us.
This is both amusing and useful--makes it much easier to ignore her. She communicates through exaggerated gestures and playacting. It's like taking a class in charades. She says a sentence in Spanish and puts the back of her hand to her forehead. “You have a fever!” someone from class calls out. She shakes her head no, and repeats the gesture. “You feel faint!” No. She goes out to the hall, then bursts through the door, looking busy and distracted. She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. “You're lost!” “You're angry!” “You're in the wrong school!” “You're in the wrong country!” “You're on the wrong planet!”
She tries one more time and smacks herself so hard on the forehead she staggers a bit. Her forehead is as pink as her lipstick. The guesses continue. “You can't believe how many kids are in this class!” “You forgot how to speak Spanish!” “You have a migraine!” “You're going to have a migraine if we don't figure it out!”
In desperation, she writes a sentence in Spanish on the board: Me sorprende que estoy tan cansada hoy. No one knows what it says. We don't understand Spanish--that's why we're here.
Finally, some brain gets out the Spanish-English dictionary. We spend the rest of the period trying to translate the sentence.
When the bell rings, we have gotten as far as “To exhaust the day to surprise.”
