Lydia Schoch

The high school I attended was small and rural, but it was large enough to have two options for students who wanted to study a second language. I chose Spanish over German without a moment of hesitation. It seemed far more useful given how many people there were in that area who spoke Spanish as their first language.

Getting to know our new teacher was exciting at first. She seemed to love the Spanish language, and she spent a lot of time showing us why she felt that way. We spent one class period picking out psuedonyms for ourselves from a long list that she’d given us. I chose Lucia because it was the closest approximation to Lydia I could find.

The cracks were whispers at first. There were rumours of our teacher having health problems, although no one knew exactly what was ailing her. One day she disappeared without warning. I thought it might be a temporary absence at first, but she never came back. As an adult, I completely understand why the school administration protected her privacy so completely. At the time, though, it felt like they were ignoring us and stonewalling all of our reasonable questions about what happened and why we weren’t learning anything anymore.

None of our substitutes spoke Spanish. Most of them were only around for a few days before the next one showed up, so everything ground to a halt as the months flew by. We studied the same sections over and over again. When we did move onto a new section, the temporary teachers didn’t know how to pronounce any of the words we’d already learned, much less the new and unfamiliar ones. Eventually a longterm substitute was found just before the year ran out, but she didn’t speak the language either.

We had a fluent teacher the next year. She was nice, but she didn’t seem to understand how fragmented and disorganized our first year of study had been. Her lessons sometimes included words and grammar rules that we had never been taught. This would have been totally fine if the lesson had been about showing us how to use them, but they often assumed we already knew all of that information. That made it difficult to understand what she was asking us to do.

More and more classmates dropped the class as the semesters rolled by. I stayed until the end of my Junior year, but I only ended up retaining a few words and phrases.

I’ve been studying Spanish lately, so these memories are coming back. It’s never too late to start again. Maybe this time I’ll actually learn how to read and write the language!

I wish this video would have been longer. It touched on so many different issues that humanity will face in the near future.

It will be interesting to see how we cope with them.

Silence can be a good thing. All is well with me, but I have nothing to say today.

I hope and plan to be back on Wednesday with something interesting.

In the meantime, enjoy your Monday.

Here is this week’s list of poems, essays, and tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

What Literacy Can Do for Children in Institutions:

But can we, in our developed world of medical and social care, begin to imagine their anguish when doctors advised them that the only way they could ensure the twins would be cared for and properly educated was to give them up to an institution for children designated “irecuperabil”(impossible to recuperate)?

Somewhere Between A-three and A-four via JAHesch. Like Joe, I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately. One of the towns I grew up in had a few different rivers that met in the middle of it. I used to love walking past them and seeing how high the water levels had risen when I went to the library. There were some times in the summer when so much water had evaporated that you could actually climb down onto the side of the riverbed and walk on dry ground beside the temporarily smaller stream.  I never actually did that, but it sure was tempting during the mugginess of July and August. This poem reminded me of those experiences.

Hobo Cat or Super Tramp? via catsstories. Posts like this make me wish that I wasn’t so allergic to  cats. They seem like they’d be great companions.

Bisexual Doesn’t Mean Polyamorous via Living_Queer. It amazes me that people are still so quick to assume that these terms are synonyms. While some people do identify as both, they’re two completely different identities.

A Positive Life: How a Son Survived Being Injected with HIV by His Father. This story brought tears to my eyes.

I Am Becky With the Good Hair.  I still wonder if the whole thing isn’t a publicity stunt, although the music itself on Lemonade is great.

What have you been reading?

This is the story of a young girl who finds a dead frog and decides to bring it back to life. It’s one of the strangest and most creative short films I’ve seen in a long time. To be honest, I still don’t know what to make of it, although I did love the ending.

What did you think of it?

Here is this week’s list of tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel. Someone needs to make a movie out of this story.

Devil’s Food Cake and White Lies via LindaKSienkwicz. I’ve never had this dilemma. Have any of my readers?

When a Fear Demands to be Faced via MaryannePope. I have had moments like this, though.

Why It’s Important to Filter What We See, Read, and Accept Into Our Lives via happy seriously. One of the reasons why I avoid advertisements as much as I possibly can is so that I don’t have these kinds of thoughts.

In a Perpetual Present. What an interesting case.

From I Was an Men’s Right’s Activist:

Later, I discovered I suffer from clinical depression. There’s lot of literature on how socially extremist groups — such as men’s rights or white supremacy — exploit young men whose lives are in turmoil, their beliefs in conflict. Spreading Misandry was a recruitment piece and I was an easy target.

From What Happened to Wildlife When Chernobyl Drove Humans Out? It Thrived:

In fact, this study demonstrates that, regardless of potential radiation effects on individual animals, the Chernobyl exclusion zone supports a thriving and abundant mammal community despite nearly three decades of chronic radiation exposure.

What have you been reading?

I almost never blog on Fridays, but I wanted to share this short film with my readers in honour of Earth Day.

It follows the adventures of a few sentient rocks who watch the Earth change over many millennia. I absolutely loved the storytelling in it, especially once humans began showing up.