In a stunning announcement following this year’s awards season, the Lakeside Spanish department announced the Emilia Perez-ification of its pedagogical approach to the language. This comes after the film, directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, won four of the 10 Golden Globes for which it was nominated as well as received the most nominations at the 2025 Academy Awards (13), outcompeting other favorites such as “The Brutalist” or even the Best Picture winner, “Anora.”
“Clearly, there is a mandate for Emilia Perez-style Spanish,” one member of the department said. “Especially when we have just made English the official language of the United States, it’s imperative that students take on a form of Spanish that appeals to the audiences with which they will be surrounding themselves daily.”
Starting next fall, students will be encouraged to speak Spanish “without studying much,” to quote Perez director Jacques Audiard, as they will, naturally, “already know what [they] have to understand.” Exams on dialects and grammar, including the notorious IPAs, will become less important. Rather, students will be assessed on the musicality with which they speak, assuming of course that this musicality is disjointed and painfully flat at all times, like in the movie. Additionally, vocab quizzes will evolve: gone are the days of learning irrelevant words like “caminar” or even “biblioteca.” With the new system, students will transition to learning more useful phrases such as “narcotraficante” and “corrupción.”
On that topic, tests themselves will no longer be scored by the Spanish teachers, but instead will be reviewed by an enigmatic panel of judges — named the High school Federation for Pupil Assessment or HFPA — who hold all the authority on these types of things because they do.
Not everything is changing, however. Under this new model, students will still marry their Spanish with themes and communities outside the classroom. For example, in an effort to realize Competencies and Mindsets like “Collaboration” and “Global,” students will be encouraged to blend different Spanish-speaking countries’ slang and mannerisms together, demonstrating a commitment to the entire Spanish speaking world all at once. Not just that, but as Spanish students embark on GSL trips, they will unabashedly assert the superiority of their own style: after all, the Emilia Perez model is a winner.
The French teachers and students seem to be the biggest proponents of the coming changes. “It all makes good sense to me,” said Louis Baguette, a member of French IV.
