Yes, my school is the Colegio Esclavas Sagrado Corazon de Jesus. It is attached to a magnificent church and the school is infested with crucifixes. One of the teachers sometimes starts his lessons with the Lord's Prayer (in English). I haven't admitted to my atheist convictions at school - yet.
This is my first contribution - sorry it has been so long coming. Nearly at the end of our second week in Spain. I can hardly believe it.
The teachers at my school are all very friendly. Even the ones who don't speak English make an effort to communicate. Oddly they apologise for speaking Valencian rather than Spanish, although I don't recognise which is which and can't understand either.
I have done quite a bit of teaching and some classes have been successful, others less so. There is limited opportunity to put into practice much of what we learned on the Celta and in Chester as most of the classrooms are just big enough to hold all the students and their desks, and there is no coloured chalk (yes - chalk and blackboards, not whiteboards and marker pens) and printing is only black and white. For about half of my timetabled classes I have to spend 10 minutes or so with the PE teacher explaining the activity his class is about to do before going to my "main" class which I don't think works very well, though I have learned some activities for introducing rugby and athletics. Tomorrow it's triple jump with one class followed by a lesson centred on tourist attractions with another.
The teachers usually ask me to focus on a page of the coursebook or a grammar point or some vocabulary. I think that the books are quite good. The teachers' guides that accompany the students' books have some good ideas. On one occasion I had been given the wrong information and the students had already done what I had prepared so I had to improvise, which actually worked out well. The students seem to have no experience of listening to English in class or speaking it even when they can do the grammar exercises, and there is a lot of Spanish being spoken. And the students mess around most of the time. This seems to be accepted as normal in Spain. Sometimes the teachers, who are in the room with me, try to "help out" which can be very frustrating if I am trying to get a student to explain something in English. If a teacher just translates a word into Spanish that does't help me when my real aim is not to ensure that they know a word but to speak in English. At first I was trying to include far too much content in a 50 or 55 minute lesson (reduced to 40 minutes or less if I have PE first or the teacher wants to go through something else to start the lesson) but I am now getting more used to gauging the right amount of material better.
It's all useful experience (I hope)
My overriding impression of Gandia, however, is the cold. I couldn't believe that there was no central heating in the flat when I arrived, just a rather ineffectual radiator. We now have some more heaters, but the flat is cold. I have spent a lot of time in a much poorer country than Spain (Serbia) but everywhere is heated well there in the winter even though it is very hot in the summer. The first week was sunny and cold but now it is wet and cold. There were tremendous thunderstorms today followed by hail. Our balcony was covered in huge hailstones. Were they deliberately trying to prepare us when the heating didn't work in Chester? Surely instead of suggesting that we should bring swimming trunks and sun cream UKLC should have told us to bring thermal underwear and thick jumpers. It is cold in school, too. Students tend to wear coats, scarves and gloves in class. This can't be conducive to good learning. I tend to wear a T shirt, a shirt, a jumper and a jacket, plus a coat for walking to and from school.
Anyway, time to eat now and then prepare another lesson for next week so that I don't have to spend all weekend at it. Mondays and Tuesdays are my busiest days so I don't want to leave everything to Sunday.
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