Thoughts on Spain and teaching

Now there's just one week left I thought I'd make a few observations on Spain and teaching, in no particular order.

• Can an economist tell me why electricity is expensive in Spain? It doesn't seem to make sense that they are so concerned about not using heating etc. because of the cost.
• Is it just our flat, or is it normal that you can't use, for example, the heater, the oven and the kettle at the same time without the electricity tripping out?
• How do noisy, ill-disciplined Spanish teenagers turn into the friendliest, most helpful people you could wish to meet (if the teachers in my school are anything to go by)? Is there a magical transformation at the age of 20?
• I have had a few lessons cancelled because students have been doing exams. If we are in exam season would our placements be better at a different time of year?
• People with much more TEFL experience than us have put a lot of effort into producing coursebooks. Most (but not all) of my ESO classes follow the Mosaic books which seem to me to be really good. The teacher's guides in particular give useful ideas as to how to use the material. My own ideas rarely come up to these standards and I have found myself more and more sticking to the coursebooks. It saves preparation time too.
• It seems that the teachers have to get though a lot of material in a given number of weeks including specific grammar and vocabulary as set out in the coursebook. I wonder whether my presence sometimes makes life more difficult for them as I am trying to use a different approach.
• If the life of a teacher at school is teaching at school and preparing lessons all evening and weekend, just squeezing in time for food and rest, I'm not sure that it is for me.
• It seems to me that a lot of  the techniques we learned on our CELTA courses and in Chester are not practical in a packed Spanish classroom. Just getting a class to stand up, sit down and turn round creates mayhem. As soon as they moved the students started yelling to their friends (in Spanish of course) as if it was the end of the lesson.
• Often the Spanish teachers try to "help out" a lot by translating things into Spanish which is sometimes helpful but not if I am trying to get students to ask questions to work out what something means.
• Pinning down the teachers to discuss what I am to do next week (or a few days later) can be frustratingly difficult. I appreciate that they are busy / tired/ have to pick up their children but planning ahead doesn't seem to come into it. I have had a couple of occasions when I have started a lesson on an agreed topic or section of the coursebook only to find that the class has already done with their teacher a day or two before. We had to improvise.
• For 8 of my timetabled hours I start with 10 to 15 minutes with the PE teacher explaining what the students are going to do in their lesson, then I go to an English teacher to take over the lesson. This doesn't seem a very satisfactory arrangement to me. I can't tell how long I will have for my English lesson, and the Spanish English teacher can't really get going with anything else. I am happy to help the PE teacher, though, and he is keen to have more English in his classes. I now know much more about long jump, high jump and triple jump than before! He found it particularly helpful when I went though his questions for a Kahoot game and put some of them into better English.
• There are only two classes that I have twice a week. All the others I see just once a week. This means that I don't get much of a rapport with the students and I certainly haven't learned names. I asked teachers for lists of the names of students in some of my classes but I never got them. 
• I am very glad that I had experience in a summer school last year, where I had the same class all week, got to know the students and was able to do some CELTA style games and activities. If teaching here in my school in Gandia had been my very first experience of teaching I would have been feeling very dispirited by now.
• It is interesting to see how students who have been taught in a different way can do grammar exercises but not put together a sentence in English. It shows the strengths of the CELTA methods.
• I am just hopeful that this month in Spain will look good on my CV. Otherwise I feel that the negatives outweigh the positives.