Senior Advocate, Environmental Health
Dr. Castro uses an effective mix of teaching methods. We start every class with a free-flowing conversation about our lives and current events. He then turns to a combination of short video or audio clips, exercises from his books, and supplemental reading to build my grammar knowledge and to improve my pronunciation and vocabulary.
One of the most useful—albeit challenging—things we do in our sessions is to read and then discuss U.S. and international news stories. It is complicated enough to talk about political, science, and health developments in my native tongue. Doing the same thing in Spanish forces me to figure out how to respectfully express abstract ideas and complicated opinions with my still limited vocabulary. Dr. Castro goes well beyond teaching tourism or business Spanish; he teaches Spanish for full and informed engagement in the world.