Conversational Spanish - It's Best

I'm fortunate to be able to take an ongoing Spanish class once a week (www.spanishinmarin.com)- it's two hours every Thursday evening and I've been going for about 18 months now. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to switch the brain on after having worked all day and I generally commute by bicycle (15 miles each way). But no matter, we have a core group of 8 people and an entertaining and engaging teacher, Patricio Tapia. We usually spend the first hour engaged in conversation - almost entirely in Spanish. Typically, each of us describes what we did that day (week) or we pair up and discuss some topic then relate to the rest of the class what our compañero said: "Mi amiga Brenda me dijo...". Sometimes we do some fast drill, maybe reciting verbs in the preterit, each of us getting a turn on the "silla caliente" or hot seat.

The second hour is usually reading from an ongoing story in Spanish, detective stories starring Lola Lago. We just finished "Vaccaciones Al Sol" and we're now im the midst of "Una Nota Falsa". We take turns reading out loud and finish by having to pose (our homework or La tarea") 4 to 6 questions about the previous pages to our maestro.

Prior to finding Spanish in Marin, I had been taking adult education classes at the local junior college - they weren't doing much for progress - we were tied to an expensive college text book - better suited to a student taking a 4-5 unit class. Patricio's conversational approach definitely pushed my Spanish to a higher level and I feel moderate fluency is only a month's stay in Mexico away.