On the subjunctive

 So I teach a lot of grammar. Shoot me, but they need to hear or they won't get any better.  The subjunctive in Spanish as a verbal mood is really about nothing at all: the unknown, the future, the ephemeral, non-existence, desires, emotion, requests, wishes, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's about the hypothetical, everything that is contrary to fact, and reality has absolutely nothing to do with the subjunctive. It's about joining a couple of ideas into a new idea: I wanted you to help me make dinner.  It couldn't be clearer. Yet, they stumble, they forget, they get lost along the way because English is of no help at all. English, except for a couple of very specific cases, abandoned most of the subjunctive long ago. The students are obliged, then, to learn a new thing, create a new concept in their heads, build a new bridge within a new identity that is their second language. This a very hard thing to do: become someone else when they hardly know who they are now. Learning a second language is complex process of tearing down and rebuilding, about forgetting and learning, about forging a new person out of the ashes of the old one, to embrace the inner Phoenix, to become someone new.  Quiero que me ayudes a preparar la cena. Era posible que tu novia volviera pronto.  El pollo cruzó la calle sin que nadie se diera cuenta. They are afraid to be a new person. They are afraid someone will understand their second language and talk back to them. They are afraid that they will never be able to recover the monolingual that they were. Perhaps there comes a time when the subjunctive must show you a new way of being, free from bigotry and bias, free from the fears you were taught as a child. Acceptance of the other is maybe the most important thing that a person might ever learn, that identity is constructed through language and words, and that the more you know, the more complex you are, rejecting intolerance, embracing difference. Live and let live. Por mucho que quieras, no volverás a ser lo mismo que cuando empezaste este viaje.