Who wants to sit in a 90 minute Spanish III class and listen to their teacher give a lecture on conjugating verbs? Didn’t think so.

Spanish teacher Virginia Leskowski thinks field trips are a better way for students to absorb information. She brought her Spanish III class on a field trip to a senior center in the Fruitvale district to serve seniors lunch and then interview them in Spanish.

They did the field trip through an organization called the Unity Council. Leskowski had volunteered for their Dia de los Muertos celebration so she already knew a little about them.

The field trip was a good opportunity for the students to get to speak Spanish outside of the classroom, Leskowski said.

“The good parts of it were they got to speak Spanish,” she said. “They made some new friends. They got some life advice from the seniors. People got an opportunity to see that neighborhood. A lot of people hadn’t been in that neighborhood before.”

Leskowski said she particularly appreciated the fact that they were able to gather a whole group of Spanish speaking people all in one place.

“That’s not an easy thing to do. You can always find a friend or something, but to have a whole group of people is hard,” she said. Plus the project had to do with the older generation, sort of a bridge between the two generations, and so the unity council’s organization allowed us to have that all in one place whereas you might not always get that anywhere else.”

Sophomore Tess Olcott said she enjoyed the field trip.

“They asked us questions, rather than [only us] asking them questions, so they cared about us too,” she said.

Sophomore Rebecca Harris said the liked the field trip because she didn’t realize how much Spanish they knew.

“One of the ladies held my hand and said I had to come back,” she said.

Leskowski got great feedback about the fieldtrip. The one negative is that it may have gone on too long. However, she thought the fieldtrip was a good experience overall for the students.

“[My favorite part] was just watching people talk in Spanish, and then we had our little debriefing session in class, and it was just really exciting to hear everybody’s story, and how excited they were to speak Spanish,” she said.