Hola!!

The middle schooler has to learn Spanish as an optional and I wasn't paying too much attention to it,considering that it is an optional.I paid and am still paying for it!!
Turns out,he got a 3,a THREE in Spanish and even then I let him go because he is in seventh grade and all the other kids have a leg up over him because they started learning in sixth grade itself.....
But he comes home the other day going,"Oh, I have a test coming up and need help". It was no big deal until I found out that in the five months he has been in school he has not done a single worksheet and while the teacher promptly marked him with zero credit,he never thought of informing the parents or even asking the kid if he needed extra help......
So,there we are in the last week of January with a Spanish textbook in hand going,"Hola! Me llamo blah blah blah....como estas?"
And the conjugations!!Lord help me!!
I did a wee bit of French in school and it just about killed me. The whole idea of a table or chair having gender sounds preposterous to me and then to conjugate verbs was torture. Two years of servitude  and I was able to jump ship. The  irony is ,I am married to a guy from the Union Territory of Pondicherry,the French stronghold in India where pretty much everyone knows atleast a smattering of French,but this guy? Not a word! Not that it would have been of any help to me considering we didn't even meet until after a few months after my release from the French prison......you know what I mean.
Part of the reason I took French,(that is 'tomo -I take'- in Spanish) ,was because you could score more and that would push your overall score up.In my case it did help,but there is an interesting anecdote behind the whole thing.I did Thamizh for ten years and when I decided to sign up for French,it was not my parents who objected,but my Thamizh teacher!!The analogy she gave me was what did her in.She asked me if anybody would prefer their maidservant over their mother,and that Thamizh was my mother and French,the maidservant!!Wrong analogy!! I was brought up almost entirely by my maidservant who was my de facto grandmother and I was very very devoted to her and so relegating French to a mere maidservant was,in my book,actually elevating its desirability!!

Back to the Espanol classes-I had picked up a Spanish textbook at Goodwill and he had his stuff,so I have combined the two and am feeling my way through the intricacies of the language.Luckily knowing some Latin and being able to identify root words is helping,but there is always the Spanish-English dictionary online,so we are doing a decent job for now.though my kid is muy perezoso,I am muy intelectual,so we balance each other out and el Profesora Josefina is very trabajadora,so she will see to it that el muchacha gets decent grade in el espanol or will end up muerto!! Did I mention? There is as Spanish-English dictionary online!!