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When you wake up in the morning… Well, not really. This is the language I taught Technology in,  I taught Biology in English too. This was the language.

I used short sentences.

Every now and again I would employ a longer one, just because I needed to express myself.

I translated the beautiful notes that somebody else wrote in Galician, somebody who taught before me.

I did not transcribe all of them, it was too much text for a younger mind to understand, in a foreign language.

I taught in English because I could. It was a great oportunity for me. It was (is) something valued by the law and the families.

English is a good language.

Shakespeare wrote in English.

There was no Shakespeare in my lessons, in English. There is some in my lessons in not-English. There is Pedro Feijoo, Otero Pedrayo, Marilar Aleixandre, Antía Yáñez, and Francisco Castro in my lessons in not-English (and the Oxford coma).

Yes, when I read the notes I created I thought about robots. They were too simple. They were too… straight to the point. How can you trigger (I would never dream to use that verb in my lessons) a thought with those notes?

I remember I tried to explain how to solve a basic problem (about energies) in English. Derive is the word they use for “despexar” (sorry, in case you do not understand the language my grandmother used to speak up her mind and the one I use to love an live I would add the term in Spanish, despejar). Derive is very similar to “derivar”. However, a student in 2nd ESO or 3rd ESO doesn´t know what derivar is, so… it is not a problem for the present, it´s a handicap for the future.

I remember using senteces as “then you have the mass times half the speed to the square…”, or “then you derive the mass obtaining that mass equals potential energy over g times h”. I remember their faces…

I remember my face the first time somebody, in a foreing university, derived (derivou) the sin function obtaining a beautiful cosin. It was not a challenge. My Maths were strong and although I did not recognize most of the spoken words I could read the international symbols this discipline is bond to (I would never use such a sentence in a classroom).  I am a quick learner.

It´s not my fault, being a quick learner, that is. I´m a quick learner, as Manuel Nuñez Singala once told me, because my brain can learn new languages, it is used to link concepts to different words, it doesn´t mind, it knows about patterns and goes faster that the brain of somebody who can only read/think/speak/study/dream in one language.

I was lucky.

The very same year I heard a sin(x) being derived into cos(x) I was presented with a paper in French. I had no idea of that language. It took me a couple of days to get the grip of it. It was easy.



I´m a quick learner.

And a lucky one.