career?

I’m starting to get into the swing of teaching. I’m learning how to draw responses out of the shyest students and how to keep the attention of twenty twelve-year-olds for fifty minutes, and I’m increasingly able to recognize what’s working and what’s not and improve on the lesson as I go. I’ve developed a slow, deliberate, half-British way of speaking that most of the students can understand but that doesn’t admit of any Spanish-accented mispronunciations; my goal is to be comprehensible while demonstrating a correct accent, and I seem to have found the balance. I’m learning how to make a classroom fun without completely losing control of it (although this one is still a bit of a challenge).

The only real problem I’m still running into is with my two fourth-year classes. The teacher is just impossible—this week she spent the duration of both my lessons socializing with the students, who obviously ceased to listen to anything I was saying, focusing instead on her all-Spanish conversations about the drunken weekend escapades of the too-cool-for-this crowd. I discovered this week that until a few years ago, English classes here were, as a rule, taught entirely in Spanish. Students didn’t study it as a foreign language, but as a science; it was something to take classes in so that you could say later that you took classes in it, but there was never any intention of actually speaking it. This teacher is clearly a remnant of this ridiculous system and these kids are happy to play along with this lazy method. They can’t even construct sentences; I spent twenty minutes explaining that a sentence needs a verb to be a sentence (obviously true in Spanish as well), and discovered that they had no idea what I was talking about (even after I broke down and explained it in Spanish).

Each of these classes also has the obligatory back corner of smartasses, a group of spiky-haired boys and heavily made-up girls rolling their eyes at everything I say and talking and laughing through all my lessons. Frankly, and maybe I’m terrible for this, but I’ve mostly given up on trying to help these kids. It’s more important to them to show off than to learn English, and most of their questions are intended to just fuck with me and eat up class time. I only have fifty minutes a week with these kids, and I think it’s unfair to the hard-working ones to waste any of that time helping a jock stroke his ego.

In future teaching jobs, I think I’ll be avoiding teenagers.

But my first years are amazing, even the ones in the larger, non-bilingual classes. They’re happy to put forth some effort, which is so encouraging. I’ve only been at work six weeks and I’m already hearing American English from these kids! They’ve stopped saying “jes” and “joo” and I’m hearing “yes” and “you,” something I can’t even say for most of the English teachers here. I mention a new word off-hand at the beginning of a lesson and they’re using it in sentences at the end. They remember pronunciations of strange words like “cupboard” and “Greenwich” after just one repetition. I accused my bilingual group of “giggling” too much in Art the other day, and five hours later they were (between giggles, of course) telling their Social Studies teacher about this funny new word they learned. They actually enjoy this.

The second-years are great too, despite the fact that they are entering their teen years and developing little attitudes. They took bilingual classes last year too, so they’ve had practice in this, and I’m constantly amazed by their abilities (especially when comparing them to students two years older than them who can’t form sentences). Their first-year math class has left them able to rattle off long numbers easily (as anyone whose learned a foreign language can attest, this is quite a challenge) and they speak beautifully about biology and art.

Last week we had a meeting with all of the teachers and parents of the bilingual program (first and second year) to explain to the families what’s going on in these strange half-English classes. Predictably, this was a group of parents highly interested in their kids’ educations and eager that they should learn English. I had to speak a bit (in Spanish, eeee), just introducing myself and talking about what I’m doing with the kids. Afterward a bunch of the parents were telling me that their kids like me and are enjoying my classes, which was really great to hear.

I didn’t think I’d like teaching so much—I was sort of looking at it as a means to the end of living abroad. But I’ve been surprised every day by how much fun I’m having with this. I think it’s something I could do for quite a while.

La Chaquetía

Monday was All Saint’s Day (Día de Todos los Santos), naturally a national holiday here. Everyone visits family members’ tombs to lay flowers and then goes out to the country for the Chaquetía. Levi and I had no idea where we were going or what we were doing, but we accepted an invitation from Antonio Juan, a teacher at my school, to tag along with his family. He and his wife Monica both speak good English and use both languages with their children, two boys of four and seven and a little girl of less than two. The kids don’t understand much English but they speak it fairly well, and we had a good time on our drive out of town listening to a bilingual treatise on the wonders of Playstation and Pokemon.

We drove about fifteen minutes out of Zafra through the lovely Extremaduran countryside and parked in a field between two farms, both marked by ancient stone walls, from behind which horses and cows observed us curiously. We unloaded folding tables and chairs, soccer balls, frying pans, and a feast of roast chicken and fries. After a good long while and an impressive quantity of matches (and quite a lot of help from Levi), the little boys finally got a fire started and we all sat down for a really absurdly large meal, washed down with plenty of wine. Later on, Monica’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law joined us. The frying pans, it turned out, were for roasting chestnuts over the campfire until they puffed up and burst open enough to be shelled and stuffed into dried figs to make casamientos, a regional snack. I ate approximately 893789 of these. We passed the afternoon kicking a soccer ball around, petting the horses, and enjoying the last of the summer sun.

Later in the afternoon, Levi and I went on a little hike with Antonio Juan and the kids through one of the farms. This is the kind of farming you don’t see much in the United Stated anymore. Cows, sheep, and goats roam open pastures and enormous Iberian pigs are given free run of large pen and sty complexes. No factory farming here; free-range is the norm, and these animals are afforded comfortable and open-air (albeit ill-fated) lives. The whole tranquil scene is ornamented with Spain’s ubiquitous stone walls and grayish-green olive trees and set against the backdrop of the low, misty extremeño mountains. It’s a truly beautiful place, this strange, lost-in-time corner of Europe we’ve found ourselves in.