Last year, when my 13 year-old son, Sam, staked his claim in adolescence and announced he wasn’t going to attend summer camp anymore, I panicked. As a single mom living in New York City, I couldn’t afford to send him to sleep away camp, nor could I leave my job as an administrator in one of the local colleges, pack the SUV (even if we had one), and head for Maine or Cape Cod for a month. Sam was too old for day camp and too young to work. What kind of TV addled X-box blurry-eyed puddle of sludge would I come home to find if I left him in the apartment all day?

Then I had an idea. Although Sam had put the kibosh on summer camp, why not take the opportunity to do something I’d always dreamed of doing myself: enroll us in a Spanish language immersion program, somewhere far away from the hot and sticky city? I’d always wanted to improve my embarrassing tourist Spanish, and Sam was already studying Spanish in middle school. What could be better than giving him a leg up before 9th grade?