Teachers deserve more respect....

The first day of my "real job" started less than ideal but was most certainly memorable. I commute about 15mins on bike to the train station where I take the train for about 20mins to a small city south of Seville called Dos Hermanas where I then walk another 15 mins to get to the school. This commute isn't that hard to figure out yet for some reason, most likely due to nerves, I took the train going the OPPOSITE direction and arrived nearly an hour late to my first day at school. I felt horrible yet luckily the Spanish are very forgiving, laid back people so it was a "no pasa nada" (don't worry bout it), moment. Phew, they didn't fire me.

I am working 12 hours a week at a bilingual high school (which in Spain is ages 12-18) and my main job is to facilitate conversation among students in the class, correct misspoken or miswritten (is that a English word?) English, and let everyone there hear my native tongue (It's highly prized here!). I work in many different types of classes: chemistry, mathematics, social studies, ethics, music (ahhh noooo) and my favorite, PE!!!! Some of the classes have teachers that speak decent English, some speak very little and same goes for the students. Even though this school is bilingual not all the kids speak English, which as one might imagine this makes it very hard to conduct a class 100% in English so it takes lots of patience and observation to make sure your students are learning something, even if they don't speak English. Within my first three weeks, I have come to enjoy my PE classes the most, I'm sure that is not a surprise to most of you. Rosa, the PE teacher, is a beginner with her English so I mostly run the class on days that I'm there. She tells me what to do and I just do it all in English. I lead the kids in warm-up, make them run, and then instruct them on whatever training circuit or game they are playing that day. It's amazing how pathetic some of them are. One day the task was to run for 2mins, walk for 30sec and repeat for maybe a total of 10mins. By the 4th minute the kids were complaining saying "Teacher, estoy muriendo! No puedo hacer mas!" (I'm dying and can't continue). Give me a break! But it really fired me up and that's when I decided I would start wearing athletics clothes to class so I could actively participate. However, that simple idea came back to get me this week.

There's one class that really loves me. On Monday I had a group of girls come running up to me, "Mandy, Mandy!!!" (the Spanish don't make the Ma sound, so my names has a mon-day fell, like in Jamaica) and then in very broken English and all at once they were trying to explain to me what that guy Felix who jumped from space to Earth had done. Unfortunately, I had not heard the news yet and therefore it took about 13mins for them to explain about 5 sentences to me. But it made my day they had decided to be brave and speak to me. In that same class we were doing fitness testing where they had to sprint various distances. I was in charge of saying "Ready, set, GO!" and noticed there was definitely some fast chicos in the class. I was certainly happy I wasn't sprinting, its not exactly my specialty. JINX! Once everyone was finished, there was suddenly a mob of students around me speaking all in once in English and Spanish that I should race this one girl. I instantly thought NO WAY JOSE, I am NOT fast and that girl was hauling down the track. But then I thought about how much I could improved my likability and why not, no regrets 2012. Plus this girl was 11 and probably weighed about 80lbs. Before I knew it I heard, GO! And before I knew it I was staring at her back. She beat me pretty good. The students had been cheering for me and I think they respected me for doing it. Afterwards her classmates told me she had won 18 (!!!!) medals for track and is the 2nd fastest runner for her age in Southern Spain. Holy guacamole. I told her see would be famous one day and she nodded and smiled with the "ya, i know look". I tried to tell her classmates they should get her autograph now cause she's going to be famous...I think they understood.

The dynamic at the school is interesting this year. Due to the economic crisis in Spain, the teachers are having to work more, there is no toilet paper or hand soap provided in the student bathrooms, and there's no paper to just use freely for homework etc. Perhaps the most shocking change to me, is that the government of Andalucia (the southern region of Spain) has made it ILLEGAL that the schools make the purchases of books for classes mandatory. And the government will not provide the books. I'm not sure what is worse, no hand soap or no books. At my school, there is a very diverse socio-economic scene with anything from gitanos (gypsies) to middle class. The gitanos are very free spirits and the kids have no discipline at home. The come and go to school as they please, talk back to teachers, run a muck, don't know a word of English and just disrupt everything possible. The worst part is, there's reallly nothing the administration does or can do to make them stop or be better people. Also, I realize I'm far beyond the high school level for education, but the kids are not challenged and the classes are so simple and uncreative. In chemistry for example the teacher, Pedro, put up a description of the scientific method on the overhead projector and we spent an hour just reading it and translating it. There's never any homework assigned. The kids talk among each other whenever. It's kinda appalling. And they never get homework. Life of a Spanish high schooler, wow.

 I.E.S Gonzalo Nazareno, the high school

 ]The sunrise on my morning commute

 The train stop "canta el gallo", the rooster sings...yep here the roosters sing

 Just a causal view of my walk to school in Dos Hermanas

My second job:

As the 700euro stipend from the government is greatly appreciated and is enough to cover living, food, gym, phone and commuting expenses, I would like to travel while I'm here. So I picked up 3 under the table tutoring jobs. As I had mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts, I made a friend on the airplane to Seville named Araceli, her family was just returning from a year in Alabama. I ended up getting a job "tutoring" their 8 year old daughter, Rosa. She speaks beautiful English, that she learned all in one year from living in Alabama and as you can imagine she learned it in the south, so her accent is adorable. I basically get paid to play and interact with her in English twice a week for an hour. Easiest money I've ever made, although she's getting rather sassy and bossy with me. She loves dancing so we spend most of our time choreographing HER dance. She always tells me I'm doing it wrong, don't worry I put her in her place. Her family has friends who have been seeking a native English speaker to "tutor" their kids as well. So I also work with Sela and Chloe, 8 and 6 years old who speak decent English and are BEAUTIFUL children. I love them and their mom. The mom speaks English as her first husband was American and she lived in America (OREGON) for 8 years. Luckily her and I get to meet for coffee and practice both languages. The last tutoring group is what I like to call the lil devils. They are a group of 4 kids, 3 six year olds and one 8 year old. Two boys, two girls. The oldest one speaks and understands English (not that well but better than the others), the others speak and understand "hello" and that's about it. Therefore as an Exercise Science major I have spent hours online looking for help and how, what, when to teach these kids. The second session we had was a disaster. My plan lasted for about half and hour and with 30 mins remaining they were all yelling in Spanish that I was boring them. I appreciate the honesty, cause I certainly tried harder after that, but I didn't know what to do. Head, shoulders, knees and toes (the song) didn't even work. They already knew it. Damn it. Luckily, I'm getting smarter and better at this. It's like a game. We spent a full hour learning numbers 1 thru 12. Yep, a whole hour. Luckily, if you act excited and include games with balls you're good to go. AND I've learned making things competitive increases attentiveness, at least for this group. I think they are going to teach me about as much as I'm teaching them. All I know is that after 3 weeks of being involved in the school system and being a "teacher" I already greatly appreciate any teacher who ever tried to make an effort to engage a class and really to pursue a very challenging career. Good teacher's are special people.