Day 1-Spanish with Blaine

This was my first time meeting Blaine or seeing him teach. AMAZING! I also have to say that Sunday night, when we were checking in, I saw this adorable blonde woman catch sight of Blaine, say hi, and then beam like she had just met the president. I certainly understand her state of mind. It is pretty cool to be in a room with the creator of something so magical.

Here are some gems I got from the mouth of the guru:

• As he was setting up the class, he said to all of us "I can't feel that this is hard. To me, speaking Spanish is as easy as speaking English. You have to help me. If you stop me, I appreciate it." He really created a climate of encouragement for all students, in my opinion. I feel like I ask students to stop me, but I don't make them understand how important it is or how much I want them to do it.
• He also said that when he asked a question where he wanted us to guess, it had to be a proper noun or in Spanish, because this story is a Spanish story and it doesn't have any English in it. I really liked that. I have a hard time keeping my classes in French...but he does it in such a way that is really magical.
• Finally (for today), we had a student who wanted to know why there are two ways to say "was." His answer, instead of going into rules and long explanations, was that there are two ways, he knows how to use them correctly, and we are just supposed to listen and try to absorb until we get the feeling for which one we're supposed to use. Brilliant! It's an easy way to explain our methodology to students without going into long pedagogy discussions.

More tomorrow (hopefully if my husband doesn't keep me out too long at the Cubs game!)