Aero: Kyle Hubble – Costa Rica 2013 – Life at School
Aero: Kyle Hubble – Costa Rica 2013 – Life at School
Aero: Kyle Hubble – Costa Rica 2013 – Life at School
Since one of the key objectives of this course was to learn Spanish it’s best I mention my experiences at the Centro Cultural de Idiomas (CCI). The school itself is a concrete building sandwiched between a restaurant and an Alajuelan take on a Kinkos. The school office is on the first floor and all the classrooms are up the stairs on the second floor and all sport the school colors red, white, and blue, coincidentally are the colors of the Costa Rican flag excluding the seal.
Our class consisted of us eight students and our teacher, Ana. Class was always a four-hour block with a break included. Ana always kept class interesting with different games and activities for us. Sometimes it was describing vocabulary words or famous people. Other times we needed to create a collage from newspapers and describe a make believe city. One of my favorite activities was watching several award-wining short films and then describing the events and the meanings behind them.
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One activity that I remember that probably scared all of us the most was when Ana gave us some questions about Alajuela and asked us to go out to the central park and find someone and ask them. My partner, Megan, and I ended up asking a police officer in the park for our answers. It was kind of difficult since he was very quite and mumbled. So what was our back up plan? We went back to my house and asked Mama Tita.
All the activities in class made us describe objects, places, and events in Spanish, which of course was the objective. However, it did it in a way that everyone was able to learn more about each other as a person, what they like, how they communicate and make jokes. We learned that Ana has another job as a sort of agent for actors and actresses so it tied into the time she showed us the short films one day. Sometimes when Ana was trying to describe a word in Spanish we would have to give her the word in English so there was definitely sharing of languages going on. The whole time in class we were people learning about ourselves and other people, while doing it with the Spanish language.
– Kyle Hubble
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