On a recent Tuesday evening, seven students gathered at the Dance Palace for their weekly Spanish class. During the two-hour session, not a word of English was spoken by their teacher, Laura Alderdice. Instead, Ms. Alderdice guided the class entirely in Spanish, embracing the full-immersion approach that helped her become fluent decades ago.
Following her lead, the beginner students searched for words and puzzled through verb tenses while describing what they did that day. One student furrowed her brow before declaring, “Voy a el mercado”—“I go to the store.”
With a smile, Ms. Alderdice gently quipped, “You’re going to the store right now?” The room paused in collective confusion before Ms. Alderdice explained the joke. Good-natured laughter rippled through a Dance Palace classroom where the ceiling is painted with egrets and clouds.
Moments like those are a familiar part of the learning process in the classes taught by Ms. Alderdice and her husband, Mark Alderdice, who helms a Thursday night class. They help advanced beginner and intermediate students build vocabulary, strengthen conversational skills, and wade into the treacherous waters of Spanish grammar.
The couple previously taught a combined class but now teach separate courses. They say their students are often motivated by travel and a desire to converse with Spanish-speaking community members.
“We decided to have separate classes to not quibble in front of the students,” Ms. Alderdice said with a chuckle.
Dr. Alderdice added, “Her method of teaching is very different from mine.”
The 10-week courses draw from the pair’s extensive knowledge accrued from years of travel, weaving together song and regional expressions and extending beyond the terrain of any textbook. Dr. Alderdice, a retired doctor and medical director who built a career in family medicine and emergency care, said that living and traveling in Latin America was formative to their teaching style.
The couple fell in love with South American music and artists like Mercedes Sosa, the late folk singer who once played with Joan Baez. “I think both of our classes, through somewhat different methods, try to instill that same love for culture and music and literature into our students,” Mr. Alderdice said.
In the early 1970s, before they met, the Alderdices embarked on separate journeys in Latin America.
Ms. Alderdice, a trained flutist who spent childhood summers in Inverness, travelled to Mexico and, later, to South America, to deepen her knowledge of regional music. She first lived in Puerto Vallarta with a family that frequently hosted gatherings with artists, intellectuals, and philosophers.
“It was incredible, and I wanted to participate in their conversations,” she said.
Ms. Alderdice looked to neighborhood kids to teach her the basics. “A woman from Guatemala, a sculptor, later told me, ‘Good, you are speaking in Spanish now, but you speak like a child.”
Ms. Alderdice began poring over the works of literary masters like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Marquez. Soon, she avidly partook in the artist gatherings.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alderdice, who plays the bass and sings, fell in love with Nueva Trova, a type of folkloric and revolutionary music that emerged in the ’60s. Along the way, he got a crash course in Spanish idioms and the words that do or don’t transcend borders. “Donde puedo coger el tren?”—“Where can I take the train?”—is one such idiom. The meaning of that question depends on whom you ask.
Around 1976, he and his traveling partner came down with a serious case of intestinal parasites. “I saw this doctor who scolded us and told us that we should go home, that our parents were worried about us,” he said.
Though he didn’t heed the doctor’s core advice, he did take up his second suggestion: to seek medical aid outside the Andes.
He traveled to Chile, where he got work as a medical translator for an employee of the Catholic University of Santiago who was preparing to present a scientific paper in Europe. “Because of that, I decided to dedicate myself to medicine,” he said.
The Alderdices briefly crossed paths while teaching at the same language school in Ecuador, but they did not reconnect until a chance encounter at a bar in Berkeley in the early ’80s. Their meeting would spark 42 years of marriage, half of which they have spent in Inverness with their chihuahua, Shakira, a Mexico native.
They spend six months of the year in Lo de Marcos, Mexico, where Ms. Alderdice plays for the Orquesta Sinfónica Vallarta and the pair can be found singing duets at a local restaurant.
On a recent Thursday, Dr. Alderdice stood before his students with a grin. “Today we’re going to do something that will cause you all to groan,” he said. He then distributed a placement quiz to his eight students, who sank into a focused silence. Later, he led the class through a trabalenguas, a tongue twister, before tackling one of the most perplexing concepts for Spanish learners: “ser” versus “estar,” both meaning “to be” but used differently.
“Next to ‘por’ and ‘para,’ this will cause you endless frustration,” Dr. Alderdice said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Alderdice led her class in a round-robin conversation in which they outlined how to make a recipe of choice and discussed what they had eaten that day. One student began, “Yo como ensalada para mi desayuno.” The class blinked in bewilderment, but she confirmed in English that she indeed likes to eat a spinach salad—with raspberries and a lemon vinaigrette—for breakfast.
Another student paused before sharing, “Yo compré helado para mi gato”—“I bought ice cream for my cat.” This writer asked, “¿Para tu gato?” and the woman insisted, “Yes, my cat likes vanilla ice cream.”
The class ended with the students singing “Todos Los Días Un Poco,” a ’90s classic by the Argentine singer León Gieco.
Both classes conclude in mid-September with a potluck that will bring together students from both sessions. But the end of the classes will, the Alderdices hope, only mark the beginning of their journeys.
“Neither of us have the illusion that people are going to come out of this 10- to 12-week course with fluency,” Dr. Alderdice said. “But we hope to give them enough tools so that they can carry forward.”