L is for Language

Today is Alphabee-Thursday.
That means this blog is brought to you by the letter L.

is for

Languages

Mrs. Jenny's post about learning French yesterday sparked many memories for me.
When I was in high school....25+ years ago, we were offered 2 foreign languages to take if we were on the "honors track". We could sign up for French or Spanish.
My friends and I decided we wanted to learn French.
It sounded way more "sophisticated" than Spanish, at least to 9th graders, so that's what we did.
And it was hard!

Oh...don't get me wrong. I loved it!! Not so much the conjugating and vocabulary lessons, but the whole idea of it.
Speaking a language noone else knew! (at least noone else in Arkansas, I thought!)

The teacher was Mrs. Heck. Yep...you read that right. Heck.
She was that one teacher that you either loved her or you hated her. There was no inbetween thinking she was just OK. She was tough. She was strict. She had eccentric rules like.."don't crumple paper". ooh..she HATED to hear paper being crumpled up.
And she was young.
I didn't realize it then...being all of 14 years old, but she was in her early 30s.

I continued on in my pursuit of the language from French I to French II my sophomore year. My friends did, too, and we had lots of fun at French Club parties.
Then came my junior year and as my best friend, Micci (pronounced Mickey), and I glanced over our schedules at registration, we realized we had not been placed in French III.
WHAT?
QUEL HORREUR!

come to find out...there were not enough students signed up for a third year that year, so we were out of luck. We had to pick another elective.
Oh my..what to do, what to do...
Shop was out of the question for two girly girls like us...we were already in the choir and select singing groups....what could we do. Art was out...I couldn't (and still can't) draw a straight line with a ruler...so, we did what any 2 lovers of language would do.....we signed up for Spanish I. I mean..how hard could it be? We'd just finished 2 years of French, Spanish should be a breeze.

And...for the most part, it was. Both are latin languages. There were many many similarities between words. I realized that year how much I loved words. The history of words, the baseroot words or words...how to decipher what words mean just by breaking them apart.

I also learned that year how much fun underclassman boys were.
Here we were, 2 junior girls in a Freshman level class.
And we were SMART!
Those boys were lining up for us to tutor them! And of course we obliged them!
Ah yes.fun times....but I digress.

So..junior year went on famously...2 years of French under our belts, a year of Spanish...and then it came time to sign up for our Senior year classes. Imagine our dilemma when we discovered that French III would be offered (since there now a group of younger students (those sophs that had taken French 2 that year when I was taking Spanish I) ready to move up another level. Micci and I knew for certain we wanted to continue on in French....but we loved Spanish nearly as much. Not so much the language, but the kids we had been with that year in class!

So...being the equal opportunity learners that we were..we signed up for French III AND Spanish II! And as luck would have it...they were offered back to back on our schedule, with a lunch break inbetween. French III 4th period, lunch, then Spanish II 5th period.
I won't lie and say taking both at the same time was super easy or anything. There were times I had to stop and think, "now how do I say it in THIS class??" But also, being the only 2 students in the high school in multi-languages gave us the opportunity to write notes to each other incorporating both foreign languages, so that noone could decode them! (well...noone but Mrs. Heck, the French teacher, who had just os happened to have majored in Spanish in college! LOL) THAT was cool!!
Plus...it looked good on college applications, too!

I wish I could say that I learned a lot of French, having had 3 years of the language...and I guess, at the time, I did. I've often wished that I'd kept up with it...and often times think about picking it back up. But I never have. And I was never the conversationalist either. I could read it and write it, back in the day, but just never really could speak it well. But I still loved the class.
And I gained the respect of Madame Heck...which was not an easy thing to do. She was my favorite teacher in high school. I wound up having her for 4 classes...a year of English as well in 10th grade. She made a big impression on me, and I find myself referring back to her in my mind in my own classroom sometimes.
I was deeply saddened to hear of her passing just 2 years after I graduated. She got cancer my senior year, and never regained her health. At her death, she was just 35, with 2 small children and a husband that worked a blue collar job.

This iconic teacher was not the looming foreboding presence I had up on a pedastal all those years. She was *just* a mom, a wife, a teacher...much like I am. She dealt with the same things I've had to deal with. I'm much older now than she ever was, and yet, she is still there for me..up on that pedestal, an example to all who knew her, and especially to all of us who became teachers. Je vous salue, Madame Heck!

*WOW*....this entry kinda took on a life of it's own.
That story is not at all where I intended to go when I started this post.
I was gonna talk about all the different languages, and include sign language, computer language, texting language...
I was gonna share lyrics from a song...........which I think I will still do.

Words that hold meaning to me...from a song I sang in church when I was a teenager.
I leave you with Love in Any Language

Je t'aime
Te amo
Ya ti-bya lyu blyu
Ani o hev ot cha
I love you

The sounds are all as different
As the lands from which they came
And though the words are all unique
Our hearts are still the same

Love in any language
Straight from the heart
Pulls us all together
Never apart
And once we learn to speak it
All the world will hear
Love in any language
Fluently spoken here