Go learn something

I highly recommend "continuing education" if you have the time. It's a pleasure to spend a morning with adult learners. They've paid their own money, of their own free will, for many reasons of their own, but primarily to exercise their brains.

Rey, a Chicano whose people have been living in Texas since long before the gringos, presides over my Spanish conversation class on Wednesday mornings. Spanish was his first language but he wasn't schooled in it, so we don't do a lot of written work.

That's good for us - we are mostly over-educated people who quibble over the conditional and the subjunctive while botching things four-year-old children know. We should just be - out there talking.

There are usually 8-12 of us in class. Sometimes students prepare "show-and-tell" about something interesting in their lives. We had a bee-keeper bring in twenty kinds of honey and describe the life of his hive; we had a jeweler bring in her tools and her work in progress; we had a gardener bring in enough samples of an invasive plant for each of us to take one home and compare it to our own weeds! A woman described her passion for racing antique cars.

Sometimes we try to discuss the world and current events. Last week one woman, typical of Chapel Hill denizens (like me) whom Jesse Helms wanted to fence in lieu of going to the expense of building a zoo, took on a retired Iranian chemistry professor, a widow who has traveled to just about every continent since we met, on the subject of whether or not global warming and other mega-disasters are real. The Iranian said, "they've been saying for centuries that everything is going to hell and we're still here!"

I used to write up anything I wanted to say before I went to class but now I'm trying to extemporize and it's going better and better. My goal is to reduce my fear and embarrassment so I can talk to the Hispanics around here without blushing and needing to sit down afterwards.

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