Posted by Carlos Menendez
November 25, 2025
I still remember the smell: old popcorn, cracked vinyl seats, and the faint cigarette smoke that drifted in from the lobby of the Orpheum Theater on Seventh and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. It was a Saturday in the fall of 1961, and I was eleven years old, three months off the plane from El Salvador, understanding exactly zero English.
My mother had given me a quarter—enough for the matinee and a small popcorn. The movie was *House on Haunted Hill* with Vincent Price (terrifying), followed by a Superman cartoon and the latest chapter of a Flash Gordon serial. I sat through the double feature twice. By the time I walked out at dusk, I had learned three new words I would never forget: “spooky,” “faster than a speeding bullet,” and “Look! Up in the sky!”
That was my ESL program. No worksheets. No flashcards. No welcome class. Just stories big enough to make a frightened kid forget he was supposed to be confused.
Fast-forward twenty-five years. I was teaching a fifth-grade classroom here in South Central L.A. A girl named Brandy—newly arrived, same wide eyes I once had—was struggling with the past tense of “fly.” The textbook wanted him to chant “fly-flew-flown” twenty times. Kevin’s face said what all of us feel about that method: I’d rather eat dirt.
So I pulled out my phone, opened Disney+, and we watched the scene in* Coco* where Miguel dives off the roof with his guitar. Then, the moment Spider-Man swings across Queens for the first time in the 2018 animated movie. Ten minutes, subtitles on. I paused exactly twice:
“Yesterday, he FLEW.”
“Last summer, he FLEW.”
Brandy repeated the lines, laughing because superheroes are cool at any age. By the end of the period, she was using “flew” correctly in original sentences—and teaching it to two classmates who asked what we were watching. Who says that comics are just for boys?
Same brain, same trick, twenty-five years apart.
Same pattern. Make it a story, add pictures, let people laugh or gasp, and the brain does the rest.
So here’s the 2025 prescription, straight from a 76-year-old who has now taught the same lesson to Central American immigrants, skeptical warehouse workers, and impatient venture capitalists:
1. Pick something your learner already loves—Marvel, Minecraft, K-pop, anime, soccer highlights, whatever.
2. Serve it with subtitles in the target language (YouTube and Netflix make this stupid-easy now; we had to wait for closed-caption decoders in the 80s).
3. Watch together once for fun. Watch a second time and pause only when the emotion peaks—“He jumped!” “She cried!” “They won!”
4. Never, ever drill. The brain hates drills and loves heroes.
Brandy is now binge-watching *Spider-Verse* at home (his mom texted me a photo of her wearing a dollar-store Spider-Man mask while doing homework). Her English is exploding the same way mine did in 1961.
And every time a new kid walked into my class room looking terrified, I smiled and thought: Don’t worry. Somewhere tonight, a superhero is waiting to teach you everything you need to know.
Keep the capes on and the flashcards off,
Carlos
