Sunday, June 5, 2011

time to change.

when i left for alma, i had this fantastic vision of what i was going to do with my life.

that's right, i was going to be a chemistry teacher.

i thought about all the awesome chemistry classes i was going to take, the fun four hour labs. all the awesome stoichiometry that i would do, all the sweet colored chemicals, all the esthers that smelled like fruit.

then i actually got into these chemistry classes. and something in the back of my brain, in a really thin whine, said, "helllll nah, you ain't doing this."

that whine got bigger. it turned into a voice that said, "emily hollenberg, you might have wanted to be a chemistry teacher, but this just isn't working out because you don't like it NEARLY as much as you thought you did back when were you a senior in high school."

so then i was an english major with a chemistry minor. that sounded absolutely spiffy, because english has always been something i'm good at. i've never had to work hard in an english class a single day in my life. my intro to lit analysis (revising fairy tales) reaffirmed my love of english, even though i did work extremely hard writing a paper about a pedophile which got a ninety percent. dr. von wallmenich doesn't hand out nineties every day and i skipped the entire way back to my door room, clutching that paper in absolutely ecstasy.

halfway into my second chemistry class, organic chem, and about the first day into my four hour chemistry lab, i realized i just needed to ditch chemistry and move on with my life.

so now i'm a spanish minor. i can say "yo hablo espanol" and ask where the bathroom is. so this will work, right?

this decision seems quite practical to me. once i graduate, i plan on moving my butt to phoenix and getting a teaching job there, and arizona has a lot of spanish speakers. i've ALWAYS been good at foreign languages. i took three years of french, slept through the second and third years and managed to scrape an A+ in all three years. i can't speak a word of it now, except maybe to tell you my name and that i'm american. i then took one year of spanish my junior year and managed to get a 107% in that class without doing a single piece of homework.

i'm good at foreign languages. maybe it's because i'm good at english and i'm a grammar nazi.

i've always wanted to be bilingual, and if i can speak and TEACH spanish, that's almost a sure way for me to get hired as teacher. and getting hired as a teacher, especially right now, is ridiculously difficult. sooooo switching to spanish seems like a pretty good option.

this blog was originally intended to be about my summer spanish class, but i've spent more time talking about my decision process, which involved me sitting in the hallway outside of my dorm room crying for my father's forgiveness for dropping chemistry and alerting him that i had a passionate relationship with poetry. i guess this just proves that i'm really terrible at blogging.

hopefully, by the time i've written the thirty blogs for the thirty days of my favorite month, i'll be decent.

i'll save the blog for my actual college summer spanish class for later. maybe after my midterm. which is tomorrow.

No comments:

Post a Comment