These two weeks were quite the whirlwind. It seemed as though professors, students, families, the world was (and still is) unsure of how to handle life. For the majority of the the past couple of weeks, I have just been reorganizing my life in many different ways. I returned to campus to pick up majority of my belongings on campus. I picked my sister up on the way home from Washington, DC before the outbreak became worse.
In terms of schoolwork, I found myself slightly lost. I felt as though I was going through the motions of school, not necessarily putting my best effort into any thing. To be honest, the first week of being home when the school postponed classes for a week, I decided to take a complete school break. I redid my bedroom by painting, cleaning, reorganizing, and relaxing. These tasks allowed me to reset my mind and thinking from apathetic and slightly bleak, to a more motivated mind and positive thinking.
I contacted Gabi to see how she and her family were doing. She lives in São Paulo, so I was not sure if she would be able to go home or not, and whether or not she would be able to continue working with me. After a bit of communicating, she said she returned home to Brazil and would be willing to continue helping me with any questions I had. Before our transition to online learning, Gabi and I met once a week to discuss cultural aspects of Brazil, as well as talk and read in Portuguese. After transitioning to online learning, we did not continue our set weekly meetings. Instead, I would reach out to her with any questions or just to see how she and her family were dealing with the pandemic.
Dixon, my other language partner, and I decided to continue meeting every Friday at 1:30 over Zoom. Originally in person, Dixon helped me with grammar and worksheets, as well as reading and pronunciation. Over Zoom, our meetings became more conversational. Instead of going over grammar or reading paragraphs together, he would talk to me in Portuguese. Typically, I could understand what he was saying or what he was asking. However, when it came to replying, I struggled a bit. I definitely took a while to form sentences, and Dixon had to help me with the vocabulary and tenses. He is an extremely encouraging professor, and although I felt slightly bad at how painfully slow I was talking, I knew he was happy I was trying.
On my own time, I started writing poems about personal experiences over the past year in English. To challenge myself, I tried to translate some of the poems into Portuguese. Through doing this, I learned some more vocabulary such as emotions and feelings, activities, and foods. These weeks I sort of tried to relax my mind as much as possible, so I did not stress myself about writing a paragraph about this, or memorizing this many vocabulary words, or listening and writing down song lyrics. Instead, I took a more artistic, free approach to my learning with Portuguese, and I am glad that I did. I think by not stressing myself out, and getting down on myself, I set myself up for a more productive future in my language journey.
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