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1st grade
My school in South Carolina has someone come in once a week to teach us words in Spanish like days of the week, months, colors, and numbers. This knowledge is not incorporated into other parts of the curriculum. -
6th grade
I took Spanish 1 at my Oregon middle school, where we focused on basic grammar like present tense verb endings and vocabulary. We were graded mainly on written tests/quizzes. -
7th grade
I lived in south Florida and was exposed to spoken Spanish on a daily basis, but didn't take a class or further my understanding of the language. -
9th grade
Back in Oregon, I took high school Spanish 1. We did some projects like making a menu and I remember us working together to translate Me Gustas Tú by Manu Chao. We didn't spend much time speaking Spanish other than in verbal assessments. We were again mostly graded on tests. -
10th grade part 1
For the first two trimesters of my sophomore year, I took Spanish 2a through an online program due to a lack of space in my schedule. That class was extremely ineffective at teaching me anything. They just threw the preterit at me and had me fill out big worksheets of conjugations. It took me much longer than expected to finish the class due to the massive amount of busywork they had me do while still not learning much of anything. -
10th grade part 2
I took Spanish 2b in person spring term and had to play catch up from the first half, essentially relearning the preterit and having to pick up informal commands on the fly because the online program didn't teach them while the in person class did. We did a project to end the term where we created children's' books in Spanish and presented them to the class. We were still graded mostly on tests and vocabulary, but there were a few more projects involved. -
Sophomore in College
I switched to a liberal arts major and decided to do Spanish for my language requirement. I remembered a lot more than I thought I would going in (starting in Spanish 2) and had a much easier time than some of my classmates. We are graded much more on understanding than on grammar, and speaking and listening are a much bigger part of the curriculum than they were in my previous experiences. We are supposed to speak Spanish in class but are allowed to speak English for harder conversation topics.