Teaching Tales: Edition 1

The Mystery of the Missing Class

Today I went to class to find a completely empty room. Okay, there were backpacks and books... but no students. No teacher either. Odd.

Confused, I found the hall monitor (yes, there are multiple people who are pai to sit in the hallway all day) and we both triple checked my schedule to confirm that I was, in fact, in the right place at the right time. Then we began to wander the hallway, thinking that maybe my teacher had moved across the hall since the room we are normally in doesn't have a working computer or projector.

Finally, after peering through the windows of the classrooms and talking to a few wandering students, the hall monitor turned to me and said, "Well maybe they are on strike. There is a student strike today."
Whaaaaaaat? I looked at him and inquired, "An entire class just decided to go on strike? Is this normal?"
"Well... no. A whole class normally doesn't go on strike. And they were here this morning."
"Okay, so did they all just decide to go on strike after the break time?"
"Hmmm, well there is no teacher either. This is strange. Stay here and I'll go look for them."
Vale...

 Surely if they went on strike they would have taken their backpacks...

20 minutes after class had started, he came back with news that they had switched to a room in the other building. I made my way over and when I walked in, the teacher showered apologies upon me. She told me that she completely forgot that I came to that class twice weekly and so she had switched the room without telling me. No big deal... but suddenly I was confused. AGAIN. I hadn't been to that class yet that week. After another 5 minutes of looking at my schedule and whispering with a nearby student, I finally interrupted the teacher to let her know that I had yet to give my lesson to the class.

Soooooooo, I ended up with 25 minutes to teach a 60 minute lesson. And I thought Upward Bound was the learn-to-be-flexible experience of my life.

However, it's amazing to see how the general calmness and flexibility of the culture here has rubbed off on me. I'm sure many of you can attest to my normal desires to have control and to get things done efficiently. Yet today as I was sitting in a classroom alone, I was not anxious in the slightest. Que será, será, right?

Also this episode had a nice fringe benefit: she promised me coffee next week :)

The Land of Happy

In my 1°ESO (7th grade) English classes this week, we read "The Land of Happy" by Shel Silverstein.

Have you been to The Land of Happy,

Where everyone’s happy all day,

Where they joke and they sing

Of the happiest things,

And everything’s jolly and gay?

There’s no one unhappy in Happy,

There’s laughter and smiles galore.

I have been to The Land of Happy –

What a bore!

I then challenged the students to write a paragraph describing what they think The Land of Happy would be like. After hearing students describe streets lined with lollipops, islands that rained chocolate, schools where you only learned about sports, and excessive amounts of trampolines and swimming pools, I found myself extremely impressed by the students who understood the final line: "What a bore!" It was fun to see 11 and 12 year olds write that The Land of Happy was a trap; they told me that changes in emotion was necessary to understand happiness. Later, when asked whether people were happy in Spain despite the crisis, many argued yes, saying that people could find happiness by the simple experience of being with friends and family. What smart kids!

Death and Dying

 I used these Story Cubes (thanks, Mom!) for the first time this week. By the time I got to the last class, they all started chatting eagerly when I mentioned the story. Apparently word had gotten out that I had really cool dice and they were way more excited about them than I expected. Simple pleasures...

My 3°ESO (9th grade) English students were a little less positive than the 1°ESO students. When writing a story using the Story Cubes to practice using parallel students, many students revealed rather dark creative souls. Here are just a few excerpts (w/o corrections) from all different stories:

• "But instead of living a rich life he died."
•  "One day Marta get angry and she set fire over all the village. All the people was killed and Marta has a bigger garden now."
• "And he slipped on the banana peel and died." Note: He was standing next to an open elevator shaft.

And that doesn't even include the story about the friends who went into the forest looking for a magical mushroom that they could commit suicide with. That story didn't actually include death because they misidentified the mushroom and instead of getting out of a world that was filled with horrible things, they were doomed to see it as happy.

I guess they are in what you would call an "emo" stage?

The Self-sufficient Teacher

Fulbright had warned us that teacher strikes are possible and the previous Fulbrighter at my school had advised me not to listen to the teachers' sob stories. But as an educator myself, I can't help but take note of the trying conditions of the education system here.

First off, students have to buy their own books. This isn't the end of the world, though I'm sure it is not something parents look forward to spending their money on. But for the teachers, it puts an extra challenge on getting the school year started. They are almost five weeks into the school year and there are still students who do not have their books. Yet because Spain is in crisis and the families are responsible for buying them, there is not much the teachers can do.

Also, as I mentioned in my story about the Mystery of the Missing Class, the classrooms are very low on technology. In fact, I have only used handouts and chalkboards in my three weeks of lessons. (I remember the days when I thought a projector was out of date. It would be AWESOME to have projectors in every class.) There are working computers/computer projectors in a few rooms but since every section is in a different room, I can't plan a lesson around technology that I will only have a third(ish) of the time.

But my history teacher has taken it upon herself to remedy the situation. Every day she brings her own laptop, computer projector, and iPhone (which she uses to hotspot the internet to the laptop). Oh wait, and she has 0 minutes in between classes to take it all down, pack it up, switch classrooms (sometimes buildings), and set it up in the next class. I am not jealous in the least.

The Shot Heard 'Round the World

No, I'm not referring to the battle of Lexington and Concord. I'm referring to the $2,500 electrical stapler that I had to use to staple 31 copies of a two-page article together. I'm pretty sure this thing was meant to bind books, not staple two pages together.

It doesn't look that big, but this sucker is only slightly smaller than a shoebox.

(Most) every time I stuck in my mere two sheets of paper, it sensed the presence and emitted a boom that echoed throughout the entire marble first floor of offices. AWESOME. But since I was putting only two papers in, it didn't always go off immediately. So it took at least twice as long and made 80 billion times the noise. Oh well, it was around siesta time so maybe I helped keep one of the secretaries from dozing off at his/her desk.

Alright, that's all folks! Stay tuned for the Flat Who Saw a Cockroach But Then Cleaned the Floor with Ammonium, Plugged Every Tiny Hole in the Wall, and Bought a Cockroach Trap So That It Never Saw A Cockroach Again (long title, I know) and stories from my puente! (Yes, since Columbus was funded by a Spanish king and queen, we celebrate Columbus Day too!)

Much love,
Amber

P.S. I have my first bruise from a dance class in a long time. So happy.
P.P.S. I'm in love with the view from my window.

 Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said: "Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?"

2 Samuel 7:18