Special Ed

I’m taking four classes that meet Monday and Tuesday. They’re not incredibly challenging, but are perfect for me and my less-than-perfect Spanish. I’ve got this one professor who’s a blatant side-talker. He always speaks out of one side of his mouth. I can only assume that half of what he wants to say is caught in the other side of his jaw. It’s like he’s kidnapped the important syllables for ransom. The whole time I’m thinking, “Set them free. Let those poor syllables frolic happily with the others.”

The professor loves picking on me. I think it’s because he asked me where I was from on the first day, and I swore up and down I was Panamanian. “I’m from the coast, it’s such a remote village that the only language we learned was English from the satellite feed of Good Times – Panama is Dy-no-mite!” I got a good laugh out of it, but am paying for it now.

I admitted to a classmate under the strictest of confidentiality that I couldn’t understand a damn word the professor said – and he confided that he couldn’t either! I can tell this is a grade I won’t be able to show mom.

In another class, I had to deliver a speech in my second week off the cuff. Man, the nervousness butchered my grammar even more that usual. I felt like Borat – You like!

Anybody who knows me really well, knows that I talk with my hands when giving a presentation. Sometimes it’s not so bad – others it’s like I’m chopping onions mid-air. Well, arms-a-flailing like I was kung-fu fighting, I wrapped up a well-intentioned presentation on what I thought was the tourism industry in Panama.

Either they didn’t want to bruise my fragile ego or they felt bad for me, but they clapped when I was all done. Because I’m practically the only pasty white foreigner in the school, I felt like such a novelty act. I should have passed around a hat for tips.