To Dream the Impossible Dream...

quixotic: (adjective) hopeful or romantic in a way that is not practical (To dream the impossible dream,  right?)

                Mr. Anson still holds to his quixotic dream that all students will learn to love writing.

Several days ago, a few students in my Honors English class asked me if I had ever read any adventures of Don Quixote. Apparently they had been discussing it in their advanced Spanish class, and had even read a few abbreviated selections from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s magnum opus. They were confused about a few things and wanted some clarification.

Alas, I have never read the classic work in its entirety, only an abridged version, but I had seen the musical The Man of La Mancha both on screen and on stage. I knew all the songs at one point. (“Little Bird, Little Bird” is floating through my mind as I type.) I even saw some of La Mancha’s famous windmills as I drove across the landscape of the novel’s bleak setting. So I was able to help my young acolytes with their questions, and they being honors students inquired further about my experiences in Spain and with Don Quixote de La Mancha.

Serving as an LDS missionary in southern Spain, my last proselytizing area was the city of Granada, a center for mixed cultures. The Alhambra, resting atop the hills overlooking the city, was the last Moorish stronghold before Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain. Good ol’ Chris Columbus sought audience with them in a small pueblo called Santa Fe, which lay just outside the main city. I became intrigued by the history of the cultural mush pot, and asked permission to do some reading regarding the surrounding area. I started with Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, which he wrote while staying on the palace grounds a few hundred feet up the mountain above my little apartment. They contained wonderful fictional tales set in the palace, beautiful descriptions of the actual grounds I had walked; they also contained a few essays about the peoples of the area: native Spaniards, Moors, French, gypsies, merchants, and other sundry travelers.

http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/rutas/grandes-rutas/rutas/ruta_del_califato.html

One day, while perusing an open-air book market for more history, I came across a hardbound volume of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha on a clearance sale: the whole thing, unabridged, untranslated, for around fourteen bucks! It was written in Old Spanish, a semi-equivalent of reading Old English. I viewed the tome as an instant challenge intellectually, linguistically, and educationally. However, I only read about 70 pages or so before my brain coerced me to abandon the text posthaste. It literally made my head ache after reading for 10 minutes each day. I didn’t remember the condensed edition being so dense (bad pun). I never finished, although it still resides on a shelf in my basement.

And so the day after I shared my experiences with Don Quixote, the Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day email was delivered to my phone with the day’s entry: quixotic. “Cool,” I thought. Fate was throwing in a teaching moment. The word wasn’t necessarily new to me, though; I knew what it meant. However, I had always pronounced it “key-ho-tick,” like it would be in Spanish, and I felt awkward trying to fit it into conversation. Masters Merriam and Webster saw to it to correct my misguided ways with its cool little pronunciation key, and I now know it’s pronounced “quick-saw-tick. Since then I’ve been able to roll it into a plethora of formal and informal discussions.

I shared that coincidence with my honors class, bringing the book for show and tell. Many of them marveled at the manuscript while others thought the coincidence was creepy. But since then, I’ve had many of these students share cool words they have discovered in their outside reading with me and with each other. They’re creating meaningful uses of new words. That’s how you build vocabulary. They’ve started using “quixotic” as well, especially when I talk about helping them improve their writing. Go figure.

Helping students to improve their vocabularies should not be such a quixotic quest. It’s almost easier than reaching the unreachable star.