!Mucho Gusto! Me llama Jessica . . .

Well reader, my abysmal Spanish skills and ascetic financial discipline have conspired to find me enrolled in a "Community Education" Spanish 2 class. It meets for two hours at Prospect High School on Tuesday nights from now until mid-April. 10 weeks for $62, and it's less than five miles from my apartment. So, for the first time in nearly a decade, I found myself last night a student in a high school classroom. This time, however, there were more people aged 60 than 16.

The immediate initial response I had to walking into the overly-lit building was that I was in trouble. I imagined that someone had audited my permanent record and found out I had filched on a detention in March 1994. This is, of course, entirely plausible and actually likely. Now, though, I had been mercifully summoned to a local high school, rather than having to return to Rhode Island to serve the detention at my actual alma mater. What is it about public high schools that automatically make me feel punished? Or like I will be punished? Or COULD be punished at any second? I mean, it's been 10 years since I graduated. Was high school really such a prison that after all this time, the neon baby-blue lockers, fluorescent lights, and hand-painted posters advertising the Psychology Fair should have been so disquieting?

Adding to the phantasmagoria was the school's one-time tradition of immortalizing past luminaries in a chain of framed 8x10 senior portraits, crammed between the endless symmetry of the rows of lockers and the low ceiling. It was like a film strip of all the kids who were better than you, even though now they are old enough to be your parents. Unless you are me, of course, and you find that you are old enough to have actually been a part of that tradition (apparently suspended in the mid-90's), had you been a high school luminary and had you attended PHS. The Wall of Fame highlighted a range of acheivements, all labeled by the deft and uneven hand of a secretary with a Dymo label maker and yards of red plastic tape. Past Valedictorians, Russian Award winners, and Foreign Exchange Students all grinned down from their identical frames, a parade of 17 year-old faces that never get old, never get acne, and never get to lose the feathered bangs.

I think I'm going to take advantage of my Tuesday night access to the garish and empty building for a little photo work . . . .

The class itself seems like it will be good. There was enough that I already knew to make me feel like a top student (some habits and needs just never DO die), while there was also enough that I didn't know (especially vocabulary) to make me feel like I'm not wasting my time. La profesora is a sweet and energetic Puerto Rican woman named Mayra, who teaches a bilingual kindergarten class in the district. She is young and petite, so as not to be intimidating to the kindergarteners (or us, I suppose) and when she wants the class to pay attention she says "1-2-3 Eyes on me!" It's actually very charming. And trust me, if it weren't, I'm snarky enough to say so.

The more I think of it, the more fun I think it is that I will be back in a high school weekly for the next 10 weeks