I am an assistant professor at a small, Catholic university. My sister and brother-in-law are adopting a 7-year-old, monolingual Spanish girl from Colombia, and our whole family has been scrambling to pick up Spanish as quickly as possible. I have never studied Spanish. Rather than go to a community school or try my luck with tapes and videos, I decided to take a beginning-level Spanish course on my own campus. The students in the class had no idea who I was, and believe me, my facility with new language did not reveal my real identify.