I consider myself to be really lucky that my parents didn’t want to speak English at home, and really emphasized we speak Spanish. Despite moving to the US when I was 7 from Mexico, I maintained my fluidity, and was able to become truly bilingual. Through middle school, I felt really confident helping my friends with their Spanish homework. Even taking French classes felt easy— French was just like Spanish, but more elegant and a tad bit pretentious, overall a fun language to learn. 

In high school, I decided to take Spanish. I can’t remember what the reason was, maybe I wanted to have an easy class, maybe I was genuinely interested in learning? Honestly, that couldn’t have been it. I was allowed to skip a year of Spanish, which made me feel very cocky and proud of myself. That didn’t last long.

The very first day of classes, we had a verb quiz, 10 lines of tenses to fill in for a verb. I had taken German most of my life and French for three years, but apparently, verb tenses don’t always translate how you think they would. I stared blankly at the page, filling in only “presente” and “condicional,” not knowing what “pretérito” meant, and writing my best guess for the rest of them. We had a verb quiz almost every single day of classes, and the highest I ever got was probably an 8 out of 10, and only because I looked at a previous quiz beforehand and memorized the verb endings for each tense. 

I couldn’t believe it. I was completely at a loss for words over how bad I was at Spanish. High school Spanish classes taught me a lot I didn’t consciously know. I started to learn why we said certain things and what the grammatical rules were, why and when we used “para” vs. “por.” I became more intrigued with Spanish, loved it more and more each day, and, most importantly, I learned a lot about teaching Spanish. 

I realized that none of the Spanish teachers at my school were native speakers (except for one, but no one seemed to take him seriously, himself least of all), and saw first hand how that impacted my peer’s learning. Ironically enough, this realization stemmed from me beginning to take German classes at the high school instead of through an external source. There was only one German teacher, and she was a native speaker, born and raised in Germany. She made mistakes, forgot words, and was a great example of what it meant to be truly bilingual. She also understood the historical, regional, and cultural context of words, because she had that experienced learning.

I’m not saying the Spanish teachers were bad at Spanish, or that they weren’t passionate about the language, because that’s not even close to the truth. They were all great teachers, but what they were missing was in large part the context that comes with being a native speaker. They couldn’t always give that deeper insight into a language that came with being a native speaker, the same that I saw with my German teacher.

Realizing that, and having both really earned a strong love for Spanish (as well as languages in general) and seen how important teachers are to our development, particularly in high school, I decided to pursue becoming a Spanish teacher. I want to be able to provide that context to my students some day, to encourage mistakes and help them understand that there’s nothing wrong with Spanglish (although the AP tests would say otherwise). I want to teach them what I’ve learned about my own language through having to learn it as if from scratch, but also what I’ve learned from seeing my sister learn it, and from seeing other students do the same. I hope that going forward, we will be able to see more native teachers in classrooms.