Intro/ Summary: The book “La Llorona” takes place in Oklahoma, starring Laney, a high school girl working in an ice cream shop. The story follows Laney’s journey of fulfilling her dream to play Soccer in a camp in Mexico. After training and practicing diligently, she is accepted into a soccer camp in Mazatlan Mexico which initially seems dangerous and questionable. She makes it to the city however, and meets new friends and explores the camp and area around it. Unlike Oklahoma which is flat, boring and ugly, Mazatlan is beautiful and abundant with wildlife and plants and looks over the ocean. While living there with her teammate Desi, Laney meets Luis, a cute boy on the team. She has strange dreams about a woman at the beach crying for her children at night. She learns the value of friendship and romantic relationships and which is more important in her life.
Reflection: Spanish 4 went surprisingly well for me this year despite being online in the midst of a global pandemic. One of my biggest takeaways from this class is that I love Spanish. I love the culture and the language and the activities and food. It really wasn’t until this year that I realized that. I think that while I was living in “quarantine”, I was tired of our country and the repetitive life I was living, and learning about the Hispanic culture was my escape from it. It’s so unique and different that it’s difficult not to be fascinated by it all. One of my greatest challenges was staying focused. I have a tendency to get distracted very easily in person- so online class was a much bigger issue for me. I learned that in all of my classes, if I keep my camera on I am able to stay more focused and able to participate. I was struggling in the first semester to turn in all my assignments on time, but as the year progressed, I really buckled down and forced myself to turn in everything on time regardless of how high quality work it was. I tend to be a perfectionist, and I had to let go of that in order to be up to speed on the classwork. I would like to work on my use of the different tenses and conjugation. I would also like to broaden my vocabulary. I would love to travel to a few Spanish speaking countries and continue to learn more about the culture and language there. As for languages in general, I would like to learn Russian and travel there sometime in my life.