Before Christmas, Bryant, Sara and I all decided to go out for kebabs. The only problem was that Sara only had a one hour break, and that really wasn’t enough time to go out and eat them in a restaurant. Since Bryant and I had two hours, we decided to go get the kebabs and bring them back to eat in the Bilingual room at school. At this point, we still didn’t know each other that well. I thought they were both content with the job, and nice people, but we hadn’t really connected yet. The day we got kebabs that all changed. I don’t remember if we discussed the job, but we all said that we would show no shame in the face of the kebab, and we all ate the kebabs in any fashion we could. Perhaps I should also mention that kebabs are a bit difficult to eat, and the only way to even consume them in a fashion where you don’t end up with food all over yourself is to first eat as much of the filling as you can before picking it up to eat as a sandwich. However, this first day, we just went all in, using both hands and ending up with sauce all over our hands, the table, the entire room! This day was the day when we say that we became kindred spirits. I think that they would say that the feeling is mutual.
After the kebab adventure, we were able to open up to each other a little more about teaching. We were all discontent with the lack of help we found at the school. In the science classes I taught, many days I was handed the book as I walked in the door and told to ‘teach this, this, and this’ which I suppose gave me good practice at improvisation. In my primary conversation classes, I was given lesson plans most of the year that revolved around science, and that just bored the kids. I know that they needed to understand their science lessons better, but the way they told us to teach was not fun for the kids, and as a result, they were terribly unresponsive. By the time I was told to start coming up with my own lessons (which I had more or less been doing anyway, just using the science vocabulary), the kids were still a bit put off with trying anything in English.
Then, there is what I had to do the majority of the time: infantile. I understand that these kids are young and crazy, but it just felt impossible to do anything with them in a classroom setting. I was told at the beginning of the year to not single one child out because then I will lose the attention of the rest of the class and not regain it. I somehow feel that I lost control of the class anyway just because I was not allowed to use any Spanish with them. There were a few times that I would try to do a simple game with them, but because they didn’t understand it was disastrous. I also did research at the beginning of the year on teaching this age group, and the majority of what I found said to use repetition, repetition, repetition. By Christmas the kids were doing well with the repetition of the routine, but after this there was a point where they became bored with it. When I tried to change the routine they didn’t like that either. It was also very difficult due to the fact that I had only had one resource to teach them with: flashcards. We were told at the beginning of the year to not use any kind of worksheet/coloring sheet or crafts with them unless it was a holiday, and I assumed that because of this restriction that I should also not use videos, which I found out the last week was true since Sara was told not to do video for her final class with them. I did anyway, and they absolutely loved the episode of The Little Mermaid that I showed them. One little 4-year-old boy looked at me and asked conspiratorially whether the movie was in English too. I thought that it was cute that he put the two ideas together. And in every class I showed this video, the kids said the same things at the same time in the video, so I know that they understood the general concept due to the animation even if they didn’t understand all of the dialogue. And on top of all of this, we had no books to read to these kids. Closer to the end of the year, I found a website that had simple books in flash format. I screen captured the books, printed them, and read them. When the children realized I was reading them a story, it was amazing how much silence fell over the classroom. We had asked our director for books all year, and she kept telling us that some were coming, but they never did. At one point, she even asked us if children would even like books, and that question came form the mother of a 3 and 5 year old, so it just seemed ridiculous.
My middle/high school classes were pretty inconsequential. They were cancelled probably over half of the time, and then when I was there I was supposed to be teaching them out of the Cambridge book for the KET exam. This was also difficult because most of these days I came directly from teaching 3 year olds, so I wrongly assumed that the kids would understand a lot more than the younger kids. While it was true that they understood more, I would forget that I couldn’t talk to them normally. My high school classes were similar to my primary science classes since I would walk into the class and be told what to teach. Without the materials beforehand, it was extremely difficult to teach grammar points that I know since I’m a native speaker, but I had never heard of them before, such as countable nouns.
All year I have disliked the nickname Winnie the Pooh. However, it was terribly cute that a 5 year old ran up to me on the last day and said, “Winnie the Pooh, te quiero mucho.” So while at times it felt like the kids didn’t like me teaching them, it appears that some of them did. I also saw a marked improvement in some of them with communication in English, and I wonder if that also had anything to do with me being with them once a week.
Outside of teaching, I tried to experience Madrid a bit more once my master’s classes finished. I went to some of the touristic sites, and I went to an exhibition about King Tut’s tomb.
I will just say that this year has been an experience. While I don’t want to be a teacher, I have accepted another teaching job in France that stats in October, and I know that my time in this school and my time in the masters program has probably better prepared me for what to expect in France.
The last week of teaching, Sara, Bryant and I went for our last kebab. Before this, we also looked up job burnout symptoms and realized we were all suffering from over 75% of them, including self-medicating through food. So, we decided to revel in it. We were a bit neater eating our kebabs in the restaurant, and we were able to pick out some of the filling with a fork before picking it up (well, Sara and I used this tactic, but I don’t think Bryant did). We had come to the end of the year, and we knew that we had made it through teaching together. In addition to this self-medication, we also went to the hard rock Café for a special black tie Toma Ya dinner. We sang along to the songs, and stuffed ourselves until we couldn’t move. Unsurprisingly, Bryant was the only one who ate the entire meal – Sara and I only made it half way through.
That dinner was a great way to end the year, and I’ll miss working with those two. All I can say now is that we did it!
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