The Condorito cartoon illustrates another project that Pérez is continuing to work on. Through his contacts in Chile, permission was obtained from cartoonist René Ríos (Pepo) and Publisher Zig-Zag to adapt an entire cartoon book for the teaching of Spanish. The final package includes vocabulary, written and oral exercises and eight hours of dramatized recordings of the dialogs, complete with sound effects and background music recorded by professional Chilean recording artists. To sample some of these Condorito adaptations, click here.

Unfortunately many teachers back then felt that cartoons had no place in the classroom and the project was only partially successful. Also, states have textbook selection committees. Hoffentlich this has changed somewhat and is continuing to change, but back then if a book had not been approved, teachers were not allowed to use it. Pérez himself served on a state textbook committee for several years. He felt that if a book contained no inaccuracies or improper material and offered a promising innovative or novel approach, the committee should be all for it. Moreover, he felt that properly qualified, competent teachers should be given a chance to decide and that parents should be allowed to voice their approval or raise objections to what is taught and how. All of this, in Pérez's view was commendably enlightened and liberal.

Liberal? Not to those who call themselves liberal today. Take power away from government and give it to teachers and parents? A downright risky extreme right-wing conservative threat to our children, from which they must be protected at all costs!

Basically, the cartoon package was a great idea.

1) As very effective visual aids, the cartoons made comprehension of the dialogs much easier and a variety of oral and written exercises could be based on them.

2) Perhaps most important of all, learners of all ages loved the cartoons and didn't have to be forced to study and do their homework.

3) The cartoons reflected the actual speech of the people, not some bookish, ivory tower idea of what it's like.

4) At a time when the young have so many distractions, from TV to movies, computer games, the internet and so on, ways to sweeten the pill so the medicine will go down are extremely important.

5) Foreign language study is not as popular as it absolutely, necessarily must be. The use of media in Foreign Language instruction can accomplish much toward making it one of the most popular of all subjects.

6) Discipline problems disappear. The attention of learners is riveted on the subject matter, which they discover is not at all impossible to learn and is important, valuable, and fun.

7) The cartoons reflect many aspects of the foreign culture, often of the "silent language" type, a part of our lives on earth that is so important to the understanding of others that it should not be neglected.

8) Another type of silent language which is part of the foreign culture— gestures, facial expressions, body language in general—is frequently present in cartoons.

Often when colleagues of Dr. Pérez were away—on sabbatical leave, for example—it would fall to him to take over the responsibility of visiting and evaluating student teachers. One day this assignment took him to the rowdiest high school in town. Infamous for it. As he walked down the hall to the Spanish room, he passed by the Typing room ("Keyboarding" now, he believes). The door to the classroom was open and only the clack-clack of the keys could be heard. Pérez looked inside. The teacher was circulating around the room, observing, assisting, complimenting, encouraging—one on one. There was not one tiny evidence of inattention, goofing off, or disorder.

Pérez continued on down the hallway. The racket from the Spanish classroom assaulted his ears at the greatest distance he could have thrown a Colt 45. Total uproar. The poor student teacher was almost in tears. Not a young lady. It would not have been unmanly for him to weep.

Dr. Pérez was so impressed by the contrast that he returned to campus and began experimenting with the use of typewriters for FL instruction, finally coming up with a technique that could be employed in courses emphasizing reading. He selected the most interesting Spanish short stories available for the purpose and typed them up as follows: first a line of Spanish and immediately below it a translation of the words a student at that level couldn't be expected to know. (Sometimes there was enough space for a grammatical or cultural note also.) Then he purchased 12 typewriters at his own expense and the department was cooperative enough to provide a room with typing desks.

Though the "grammar-translation" method had long been out of fashion, Pérez felt nonetheless that it had value. He believed strongly in multi-sensorial learning. Through the eye, the ear, and in this instance, the fingers, as students typed. So he left the third line blank, allowing the student to type in a translation. The process was repeated until the page was full. For aural/oral practice, the students typed on a blank sheet of paper as Pérez dictated to them and they repeated aloud each segment of speech.

Back then, the common means of duplicating was either by mimeograph or ditto. The origin of the expression "purple people eater," most likely could be attributed to the latter process. Anyone who employed it was apt to get purple all over himself. (Notice, himself. Doesn't happen to herselves). Pérez has never understood whether the eater himself was purple or whether his diet consisted exclusively of purple people. Pérez used the ditto process. His students liked the system. They read a lot more stories than required for the course and read them rapidly, without having to thumb through a dictionary or a glossary or even glance at a footnote. There was total concentration on the lessons. A continuous clack-clack. When tested, they did extremely well. They liked the grades they got.

Encouraged by this success, Pérez approached the Typing Department chairman. (At the university level, it could not be called Typing, of course. Pérez forgets the impressively effete, high-level academic name that was employed.) How did he like the idea of according dual credit for Typing and Spanish? Students could simultaneously acquire skill in both. Eduardo had anticipated a positive response. The chairman knew Spanish. But Pérez had forgotten how sacred academic turf is. The idea didn't get past the door.

The following summer, though, Pérez was the first professor on campus with an Apple computer, which made his "typing" method obsolete. The microcomputer was much better than a typewriter, of course. One of the basic techniques of teaching is to provide prompts, hints and so-called reinforcement (the correct answers and encouragement). The computer is perfect for this. Now you see it, now you don't. Now you do.

Eduardo quickly converted his "typing method" readers to the computer format, combining the "cloze test" technique (in which words are left out) and a system of variable prompts. A student could select at the beginning of a story the degree of prompting shu thought best for shu at shuz level of progress. (A splendid solution for she/he and her/his, don't you think?) You don't like it? Then accept the challenge to come up with something better! But first try it in a context. Suppose that Dr. Pérez has asked a student what she/he thought of this technique and he/she said it was awesome. Then roll this smoothly off your tongue as you inquire, "Did you ask shuz opinion before or after giving shu an A?" Pronounce it as in shook.

An example of the foregoing. The students have already read the story once with full prompts and now are reviewing to check their retention:

"Arme——-. Bit— weiterg——-!" sag—- d— beid— Dien—. "Da- is- nu- fü- d— fein— Leu—."

Either orally, or typing in the whole word, the students practice their retention not only of vocabulary but also of declensions and conjugations. This is what they should have said or typed:

"Armenball. Bitte weitergehen!" sagten die beiden Diener. "Das ist nur für die feinen Leute."

If typed, the computer corrected and scored their effort automatically. The same procedure can be used with respect to meaning, with the student selecting few prompts or more prompts. Of course the student may try and retry the exercise, choosing lots of prompts to begin with, then fewer and fewer until no prompts are necessary at all.

Armenball. Bitte, weitergehen!" sagten die beiden Diener. "Das ist nur für die feinen Leute."
   poor      please    move on       said         both servants              only             fine  people

One reason Pérez is so eager to get back to his work at this again (updating all the programs to a platform-independent format accessible on Macs, PCs, Unix, or whatever and programming new ones) is because he himself wants to learn a number of languages better plus some totally new ones. He had programmed on his own many vocabulary drills, reading-translation exercises, "conversation stations, " conversacciones, etc. in Spanish, German, French and English as a Second Language. Now he hoped to find skilled linguists to do this in many additional languages. Wherever possible, he programmed prompts for two to four students at a time, so the computer could help learners to converse with each other rather than with a machine.

Conversacciones were conversación + acción (conversation + action) in which learners demonstrated, as one example, how to make chocolate chip cookies—practicing first on the computer and then actually doing it before a class. Pérez recalls that one student simulated a TV weather report with weather map and pointer. As a joke he announced fair, 80º sunny weather for the day and the coming week (it was the dead of winter) and had a fellow student throw a snowball at him in protest. Conversacciones were beyond doubt the most popular learning activity.

A colleague chided him for giving learners so much help. In his view, looking things up in the back of the book or in a separate dictionary aided them enormously! Don Federico Sánchez y Escribano would scoff and laugh uproariously at such an idea. This is not giving learners everything ready-made on una bandeja de oro. Why should they spend so much laborious, totally wasted time this way when in the meantime they could read five more stories?

Why is Pérez mentioning all this? He is getting old. He wants to get this information out to a broad public so that others can follow up on his spadework. He is humble. He knows that there are many others who can program better and do an over-all better job. He doesn't want to end up like poor old Hobart Hallstein. Were all of Onkel Hobart's strenuous efforts in vain? But let's not get ahead of the story. Please read on.

Some years back Pérez obtained permission from Editions Casterman, Tournai, Belgium and Paris, to adapt Hergé's world-famous Tintin series in the same manner as Condorito. Regrettably, right after that Pérez had to head off on another path, more or less of the gritty-nitty type, and the project was suspended. A super, super opportunity! Tintin is printed in the following languages (perhaps even more): Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Arabic, Spanish, Catalonian, Danish, Finnish, French, Greek, Swedish, Hebrew, Indonesian, English, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Basque.

Tintin could scarcely be more wholesome. Virtue always triumphs but only after Tintin has to overcome more challenges than "a pit bull in the teeth of a hurricane," if Pérez is accurately quoting one of his favorite congresspersons. And the Tintin series is inimitably humorous and captivating always. Tintin exists not only in paperback and hardback form but also in the movies. In this connection, Eduardo mentions the following:

One day he was going down a couple of floors on an elevator on campus when a colleague mentioned that a newly arrived visiting professor had been directly involved in the creation of laser disks with Philips of Holland. Through this chance encounter, Pérez and a few others learned that the first laser disks in the U.S. were already being made in San Pedro, California. Pérez immediately took off for there and had this new marvel demonstrated to him.

On returning to campus he was able to participate in one of two projects implementing the new technology in an instructional way. Eduardo's project involved the adpation of an excellent Mexican film, Macario, for which permission was obtained. Compared with present-day computer and CD technology, the first version of the laser disk equipment was large, heavy and cumbersome. Two screens had to be employed. One for the laser disk plus the computer monitor. But a very capable team completed the program shortly before Pérez was off on another somewhat gritty-nitty path to Argentina. The possibility of adapting Tintin and other films in the latest hi-tech way couldn't be more exciting. The Macario adaptation was demonstrated by Pérez's brilliant colleague Gloria Menéndez at a convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in New Orleans.

Pérez would apologize for all this gritty-nitty but, hey, never let the grit and the nits wear you down! (Pérez, a nit?) Well, yes, you're right. The latter part of this discussion was supposed to deal with abstract, "high level" service, not the gritty-nitty. In any event, it's a fact that all of us need both the "high" and the "low" in our lives. And, yes, effective, rewarding service can be rendered on "the peaks" as well as in "the pits." Our aspirations can be high at any and every level.

Americans think that they are riding high today, at a period of unprecedented technological progress and material prosperity. But are they any happier than people who lived back in the horse and buggy days or the stone age? Not necessarily. In many ways people had it better in olden times. The Pérez's cabin is out in the country—in "Horse Town, U.S.A." he jokingly calls it. There are more horses than people. Lots of cows, too. In their dumb-beast minds, these animals must figure they're served by two-legged slaves. Their water and fodder is either brought to them regularly or else the slaves provide green pastures for them. They are given shelter. They are groomed. A neighbor's business involves caring for cows' cloven hooves, a specialty that makes him a slave to cows in several states. He enjoys his profitable slavery.

Few, if any, of these horse people are working cowboys. Their horses are for recreation, not work. For pleasure riding and for hunting, to bring out the deer and elk. Exception: One neighbor sometimes pulls a fertilizer spreader with horse power.

Canadian Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man should be read by everyone. He is several notches more demanding than don Federico Sánchez y Escribano. No bandeja de oro for anyone! He sadistically forces us to think! Oh, the pain, the uncertainty, the insecurity! You could turn his famous statement "The Medium is the Message" around and around in your head till it reels, till you're dizzy. As Pérez sort of understands it, this basically means that the "content" of the TV soap opera, for example, is not the real message, not the significant one. You may watch the History channel, the Discovery channel and such, but it's still not the "content" but the medium itself that is "the message."

The medium alters our lives drastically, basically. With respect to TV, it causes us to sit goggle- or googledy-eyed in front of a screen, possibly for hours at a stretch, not once getting up to stretch our saggy couch potato bods. What would a neutral, non-opinionated horse think of such a curious sight? This medium affects our physical being, our posture, our brains and nervous systems in ergometric and other ways not yet clearly understood.

Many individuals are actually slaves to these gadgets. Others are slaves to stock tickers. Mammon is their master. Why don't they get a life! Anneliese, for one, would much rather be a slave to Mutter Grün, the great outdoors. No one likes the idea of being a slave. Being a slave to a beautiful horse may not be all that bad. Being a slave to a computer is not necessarily all that beautiful. Or to a garbage truck. But any slave at any job can find contentment and satisfaction in work well done.

What about "the extensions of man"? Lots of food for thought there. What kind of an extension is a wrench? Right! Paste a gold star on that little girl's forehead! An extension of the hand. The telephone? Of the ear. The telescope? Of the eye. The computer? Of the brain. Think about it.

What can happen if we rely too exclusively on these extensions? Can our hand lose its cunning? Our brain its ability to do simple math? Can atrophy set in? The wrench extension causes our hand to acquire new skills and maybe lose others. If we have another human or a robot perform all our work for us, what will happen to our muscles? Well, we can work out in the gym, become a slave of the gym. Rewarding, eh? Pérez's dad had muscles of steel. To get them, he performed necessary, vital work. Is it exhilarating to dig a ditch with a shovel and see water flow to a garden as a result? You bet! Eduardo did this more than once in his youth. Is it a better, a happier, more satisfying thing to sit on the seat of a backhoe and do this much more rapidly with all that POWER? Ruff, ruff!

Well, there are tools and tools. Choose the one that will enslave you. What part of you do you want to atrophy, to lose its cunning? This Marshall McLuhan can sure make life difficult for us! Many young people of today dream of becoming slaves to a spherical object once made of leather but of plastic now. To run up and down a court, putting the sphere through a hoop. To wild applause. To the clink of moola. Are many of these slaves truly happy? Some are, no doubt. What of their life off court? Is Mammon their ultimate master? Is lust? Is popular acclaim? Notoriety? Adulation?

Things to think about. Try burning your brain out over McLuhan. Keep it from atrophying. Pérez is not knocking sports. He just means, get a life along with or beyond them.

Once he made an intensive study of play, games, and sports around the world, attempting to find ways to incorporate them into foreign language learning. One of the things he implemented was miniature golf. He took some students to play it, took notes on what was said and prepared some conversation practice for them in Spanish. After practicing with each other in class, the students showed up with him at the same course and played miniature golf in Spanish. It was one of his most popular conversacciones. The university had a miniature golf course in its student activity center, which made the logistics of it easy. He reserved the course ahead of time and they went there instead of to class.

Impractical, you say? They're not going to play miniature golf all that much in Spanish in real life? The patterns are the important thing. Learn the patterns, add to your vocabulary in any area of special interest, and you can express an infinite number of things. Learning the patterns should be made interesting and impactful, enabling the learners to retain them. Minigolf, however, was rare and not typical.

Slave is Pérez's terminology, not McLuhan's. Ed employs it in the sense of Spanish S + clavo: a strong attraction. Nailed. We're nailed. McLuhan's book has 365 pages in paperback. Eduardo hasn't even scratched the surface here. There is plenty to scratch your head over on every page.

If Eduardo had his druthers, he would druther be an S clavo to a little baby than anything else. Is there a greater pleasure in life than to be with a tiny child? Mothers have all the joy. It's wonderful that fathers can join in in it. But a symbolic couche is nothing at all like child-bearing, giving birth. Whom do we love most on earth? The ones for whom we have suffered the most. Pain, caring, worry, concern, inconveniences, sorrow, the changing of diapers, the cleaning up of messes, the cooking, the washing, the nurturing, the sleepless nights, the caring for the sick.... Mother love is obviously the greatest there is among mortals.

That is what makes abortion so tragic. The aborters are missing out on love, the greatest love that can be experienced. Self-love and selfishness do not produce joy.... Not even true contentment and satisfaction.

Who loves most of all? God the Father, who gave his beloved Son to us as a Savior, a Redeemer. Our Master. (Pérez loves Spanish maestro, which combines master and teacher in one.) Yeshua Messiah spent his earthly life mainly among the poor and downtrodden, teaching, healing, suffering affronts and indignities, scorned, reviled, persecuted, giving at last his life for us on the cross—a terrible, excruciating way to die.... Whose love should we reciprocate with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Note: Excruciating derives from Latin ex (from, out) and crux (cross; genitive crucis). Crucify comes from Latin crucis and figere (fix, fasten); to place on a cross, to put to death by nailing or binding on a cross.

Love comes through service at any level. Based on his experience, Eduardo believes that the greatest love comes on a personal level, one on one—in the pits, so to speak—gritty love, facing all challenges. Love can be expressed up on the peaks, too, so to speak—loving humanity in general, striving to serve in what might be deemed a more abstract way. But we must always come down from the "peaks" to see, adjudge, experience and evaluate the results in the "pits."

The generals should come down and fight with Sergeant Coulter, see how their lofty abstract plans and strategies actually work at the front—in the foxholes, the pits. We read that in olden times the leader, the great one, was right there at the forefront of battle, a champion, an example to all. Impossible, perhaps, in the modern world. Yet there are all kinds of battles and no lack of opportunities to be in the pits—with the dogfaces at the front, as it were, leading out.

Everyone can be a leader at something. There are great little things and great big things. Who but God, taking into account every circumstance, can judge which or what or who is greater than another? Dear Gabriela Mistral's words bear repeating now:

Serving is not a labor just for inferior beings. God, who gives fruit and light, serves. His name could be rendered thus:  He Who Serves. And he has his eyes on our hands, And he asks us at the close of day: "Did you render service today? To whom? To a tree, to your friend, to your mother?"