In my few interactions with professionals with whom I will be working side by side come January, it’s come glaringly to my attention how deficient I am in professional tools—most of all, in language.
In terms of the European framework of judging language level, I’m swimming somewhere in B1. Basically, this means that I have survival-level Spanish. I can also converse to some degree of theory on topics I am somewhat familiar with. With my teachers here, who are accustomed to my “special brand” of Spanish, I can usually get along decently well, as long as they’re willing to talk fairly slowly and/or repeat themselves, occasionally pause to explain new vocab, and sometimes explain in different ways. However, talking Spanish on my own in a school setting is a whole new ballpark.
Well, duh. None of this is surprising. That Spanish is more difficult out of the classroom is a given. It doesn’t help that there are those whose costeño accent is so thick that Colombians from other parts of the country have difficulty understanding (my principal happens to be endowed with this sort of accent…although everyone from the coast speaks in an altered accent to some degree).
And yet, I didn’t take into account how much more difficult it is to speak Spanish in a formal setting when nervous. At my school, we held our first meeting in Spanish since la rectora was there and she doesn’t speak English. At the end, I spoke a little. I’d prepared some in my head, but the words, sentence structure, and what felt like rational thought absconded from my mind as soon as I opened my mouth. I stuttered over words I knew, through in some fake words, blushed away, and apologized profusely as I muttered my way to a close.
Of course, being language teachers, the English teachers were awesome about understanding my predicament. And yet, they already see me as a “joven”—a youth—since I’m the same age or younger (23) as many of their children. The fact that I’m short and appear young otherwise doesn’t help my cause, either. Of course, I’ve been through this transition of others’ perceptions from youth to professional at my job at Epic, when I worked with CEOs and surgeons alike in an “advisor” capacity. However, getting to wear professional clothing and speak academic English helped my case quite a bit. Here, where skin-tight jeans and blouses are the norm (my skirts and shirts in their varied degrees of formality, in contrast, appear somewhat outlandish)…and I speak a broken, child-like version of the language…well, this transition of perception may take a while.
Ultimately, until losing it, I hadn’t realized how tightly I clung to my language usage and abilities as a tool to shape others’ perceptions. I can’t even begin to explain how much more empathetic I feel towards non-native speaking professionals I’ve met in the US, whose communication ability so often shapes others’ perceptions of not only their competency but their intelligence. And in some ways, the perceptions reflect a degree of truth—without the ability to effectively communicate, some aspects of competency are certainly lowered. Yet intelligence isn’t! And too often we let those assumptions go hand in hand. Not that it’s a new goal, but I need to settle, take a deep breath, think, study, and hopefully use this next month prior to my official start of work to gain a little more solidity in the language, thus hopefully gaining in tandem the ability to establish myself as a professional and forge needed connections within my school. Just one more Peace Corps challenge…good thing I have two years to overcome it!
