By Alexa Grill
Every month, Spanish Club and Spanish Honor Society try to make their meetings fun and exciting, while still incorporating the Spanish language. The March meeting was no different! Spanish Club came up with the idea to recreate the popular game from New York City’s Escape the Room, and bring it inside the walls of High School East. Soon enough, Escape La Clase was formed! In case you are unfamiliar with Escape the Room, the objective is to get out of a locked room in under an hour using the clues provided. Escape La Clase was basically identical to a typical Escape the Room in New York City, except for one huge factor… all clues were in Spanish!
This meeting was unlike any ordinary meeting where all members participate in an activity together. Instead, everyone was split between four classrooms in the language hallway to create a friendly competition between each group to see who could escape la clase the fastest. Each classroom was run by three executive board members from either the Spanish Club or Spanish Honor Society, and each had a nearly identical setup with the same clues. The clues were very intricate and truly took the help of every single member in each room to figure out. From solving riddles to opening combination locks to cracking codes, the race to escape la clase was definitely no walk in the park. Although the game was definitely a challenge, there was eventually a winner. After just 12 minutes and 6 seconds, the first group of students found the last clue, which encompassed the “key” to escape!
As a member of the executive board of the Spanish Club, I am very proud of the way the game turned out. Every student that participated got very involved, whether they were trying to find the next clue or busy cracking a code. In my opinion, this was one of our most successful meetings this year and definitely got great feedback as well. Treasurer of the club Alix Rosenberg said, “Escape La Clase was such a fun way to help students practice their Spanish outside of the 40 minutes of class time they get each day.” Public relations officer Maya Zakarin agreed with Alix, and also mentioned that this was her favorite meeting yet! All in all, it was very cool to see a full scavenger hunt activity in another language executed successfully by high school students. This meeting proved the devotion that the Hills East foreign language students have to learning Spanish. Knowing a different language is useful in many ways, and Escape La Clase was a great way for these students to put their knowledge to the test. We are the future, and after the success of this activity, it is easy to say that the future is bright!
