My Favorite Subject Maria Scanlan

When my Spanish teacher introduced conjugation, most of my peers could not comprehend the concept. For me, however, having been raised bilingual in Russian and having studied its verbs, conjugation made perfect sense. While explaining to baffled students that “I am” and “you are” come from the same verb, I realized that Spanish was more than a class-- it was a whole new world of comprehension and understanding.

As a socially awkward freshman, I was placed into a Spanish class of juniors, and though I was intimidated, I accepted the academic challenge. Soon, my bedroom was littered with Spanish to English dictionaries, and the bookmarks on my computers were stuffed with language learning sites, grammar explanation pages, and Spanish videos.

My junior year, when I began volunteering at Safe Home, I found myself speaking to the bilingual children in Spanish. Though sometimes I was lost as they flew through their sentences, with every new word they taught me, “hojita” and “agujetas,” my Spanish class gained dimension. I realized that what I learned in the classroom was more than something to be applied to a test. It was knowledge that would expand my world of communication and understanding.

Inspired by that realization, in...