Lying, Stereotypes and Cardinal Sins (week 1)

I was once given some great advice that you shouldn’t worry about the future; just trust ‘future you’ because you’ll always deal with whatever’s thrown at you. Easier said than done though! As we were leaving UKLC and heading to Spain via mini buses, a Premier Inn, pancakes, a flight and a further mini bus, my nervous excitement was riding pretty high. It needn’t of reared its ugly head though, as ‘future me’ was fine and the school was great.

All of the teachers were and still are LOVELY! It’s only when you go to other countries that you realise that the stereotypes of British people, which you normally dismiss so quickly, are actually quite accurate. Spanish people are so warm and friendly. They open up to you straight away. Don’t get me wrong, British people are obviously amazing, they’re just varied. Imagine the most friendly ‘people-person’ you know in Britain…that’s all Spanish people! (In my experience anyway).

Despite thinking that I wouldn’t want to start teaching until the second week I actually started on the second day and got a hell of a lot of mileage out of lying. I milked ‘two truths one lie’ for the whole week adapting it to talk about likes and dislikes and using the past simple to talk about things that did (or didn’t) happen to you. It was great fun and a good way to exploit the students’ interest in me as an alien life form from England.

The funniest moment had to be when I committed a cardinal sin and accidently made a room full of Spanish kids chant “I don’t like paella”! It was one of my lies from the game, which I had to think up on the spot to adapt a lesson I didn’t know I’d be teaching. We were on our second or third drill before my tutor burst out laughing and pointed out how sacrilegious it was. We all had a good laugh about it and I drilled “I like paella” just so they could all sleep at night.

One thing worth noting is that the friendly chatty Spanish stereotype described earlier does extend to the children so you can forget about having everyone sit in silence whilst you calmly work through your lesson plan. Class rules, or no class rules, you’re not going to change Spanish culture in an hour. Maybe if you had a permanent job in Spain you might stand a chance, but realistically you’ve just got to work with it!

No school tomorrow

All schools in Gardia are closed tomorrow because of the weather. Slightly awkward as I was due to have a meeting with one of the English teachers about what I should do with her classes next week, including two on Monday morning. I'll have to be creative! I was also due to pick up a book from the other English teacher so that I could use it to prepare for a lesson on Monday. He needed it this afternoon. At least I know the general subject it is on (business meetings for one of the vocational classes).

Better late than never! - What I remember from the training week!

After avoiding my family coughing and spluttering in my face all over Christmas, my body finally decided to give in and develop ‘that thing that’s been going round’ in the car on the way to Chester. What a great way to start a training week. I was already a mixture of nervous and excited and the lurgy felt right at home in that cocktail brewing in my stomach. But true to Carolyn’s word, all bar the lurgy dissolved pretty instantly as we got straight into the training.

The style adopted by the trainers of putting you in the position of a language student worked really well for me. It seemed easy to work out what would be fun and what would work with your own classes, if all went according to plan. Emile and Jen have different styles but both seemed to have entertainment at the core of what they did, which carried on from what the CELTA taught me quite nicely. It was nice to find out that there wasn’t such a heavy focus on grammar with younger learners.

Everyone at the training was great and the fact that everyone was from different walks of life made for some rich discussion and a great learning environment. The others being so nice did however make me feel pretty guilty when my cold started doing the rounds. I’d only just managed to survive the training with a menu of pills, lozenges, coffee and steamy showers (boiler permitting!) and whilst I was glad that the EFL gods had relieved me of my burden in time for Spain, I hoped they hadn’t cursed the others. Fingers crossed they’d also blessed me with a good school. As soon as I received my placement a fresh batch of nerves was on its way. Eep.

Slave of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

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.

Hi from very wet Los Naranjos Gandia.  The teachers are all complaining here about the weather.  They say they have never seen anything like it. Sitting in the staff room with my coat on!  Some of the students from the school went to Andorra on Tuesday for a ski-ing trip.  I hope they are ok and are not having to stay in their rooms due to the weather.

All is well here the teachers are all under pressure due to exams coming up and there is a lot of revision going on and tons of teacher talking time!  The school here has a pre - school and goes all the way up to Bach students.  So we get to work with a huge age range, which is very interesting.  Today I started with a 6 primary class doing natural science in English and we did an experiment with celery and dye to observe the way plants take up nutrients. We managed to get to the end of the class without spilling any water.  I was very impressed.  Then I got to work with the Bach students , speaking practice for the mock papers for their Level 3 exam.  After that  I went to the pre-school for a double lesson where Claire does activities using English.  There the children did some colouring, cutting circles and covering them with some foil as part of a winter mural they are doing.  After lunch I am going to do a lesson with 3 Eso and then finally back to 5 primary for the end of the day.  Must go end of lunch break.

It´s nearly the weekend!

Coming to the end of my first full week of teaching and I´m not gonna lie it hasn´t all been plain sailing.

I had a good Monday - I was feeling a bit nervous because I had six back to back lessons which I´ve obviously never expereienced before. I was a bit shakey and stressed to begin with but all the lessons went pretty well. Some better than others but I was happy at the end of the day. Had to go home for a serious nap afterwards but I felt pretty positive.

Unfortunately Tuesday was a bit of a nightmare. There was a mix up meaning that the teacher who was supposed to be supporting me with my Primero B group never showed so I was on my own. Unfortunately this resulted in the students going absolutely loco and we got through roughly 5 mins of my lesson plan. The Primero students are particularly challenging and I had approx zero control over them - not a situation I have ever been in before so I didn´t really know what to do. I was pretty close to just leaving the classroom and I had to take a calming walk around the school after the lesson. I think it is really hard not to take it personally when a class goes badly and it is not a nice a feeling when you feel like students are taking the piss and you can´t understand or communicate with them at all. They are used to being discplined in lengthy Spanish rants (and they have no problem ranting back) so me standing there looking stern doesn´t really have any sort of effect.

But what doesn´t kill you... Today was a completely different story. I had three great lessons today and I´m really pleased. With the lesson on Tues my worst fears about teaching at Sagrada Familia were realised but I got over it and at least it probably can´t get any worse (fingers crossed).

I feel like as I get to know the classes and the students I am relaxing and the more relaxed I am, the better they respond. But it could all change next week...who knows!

Also if I ever see another peice of chalk after this month it´ll be too soon.

Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat in Torrent 1st and 2nd week-19th January

My time here at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat in Torrent has been a mixed bag-some lessons that went absolutely great and some that went so badly I actually considered whether or not I had made the right decision to be a EFL teacher. I have had the longest journey to my school as it takes 55 minutes plus 16 minutes’ walk to get to my school. This has meant I have had to get up at 5am in order to get the metro at 6:41 so I can be in my school for 8:00 (so I have time to do photocopying before class starts at 8:15). Getting up early and then being back so late (usually after 5:00pm because there are not that many metros to where my stop is) and having to do lesson planning while being so tired has been really difficult and I feel despite giving my all I have not been able to perform at my best. I also feel despite how friendly and welcoming everyone was at the school that they were unable to provide me with all the support that I really needed. This is why I will be changing schools after this week-to a school which is in Moncada (the same one as Mandy is at) and is only 2 metro stops from where I am living which will be much better for me. This Friday I will be meeting Oana at the school in Moncada where I will be moving to-which I am looking forward to.

However I had a mix of both good and bad experiences at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat which I want to tell you about-so that you know that amongst the bad I did have some small successes in my time at Colegio Santa Teresa de Jesús de Vedat.

My first week was very confusing and disorganised as I had to work with lots of different teachers and trying to coordinate my lessons around what they were doing was hard. None of my classes I see more than once a week and have a very wide age group in the classes that I teach- but I was able to recycle at least some of the lessons I had prepared. Last week I was able to try some fun games related to the present and present continuous as well as do the 'shake up wake up', a game of What's the time Mr Wolf and a game of Simon says (or as I did it Rebecca says) with my small groups of primary students. I thought I was doing ok on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday until I had my last class on a Friday-which they had forgotten to put on my timetable so I was unable to prepare anything more than an introduction. That 1st ESO class on a Friday were the noisiest class ever and did not listen to anything me or the teacher who was with me said-I have since found this week thoguh that the other 1st ESO groups are lovely and well-behaved so I think it may have just been either the activities or the fact that they are a badly-behaved group in general. I thought that they would enjoy standing up and not having to use the textbook-but that class seemed to prepare to be sat down doing things. I have found I work better when I have a lesson plan for the lesson already done and I am not good at improvising as I had to do on that lesson on Friday and earlier on in the week with one of my 4 ESO groups.

However, even with the best preparation, sometimes a lesson will go badly due to other things. I have found that some of the lessons that worked so well with one group, then fell on their face and did not work with another group who were at the same age group. I did a lesson on the future tense 3 times-one of which was for my observation which I thought did not go as well as it had done the previous 2 times I did the lesson with the other two groups who were at the same age. I did though get through the most important part of the lesson and I left feeling comfortable that the class understood the difference between will and going to now. This will hopefully help them to practise it more in the next lesson with their normal teacher.

I also did a successful reading lesson today which mainly focused on learning new vocabulary related to travel. It worked very well-the students were all engaged and interested and I feel they learnt a lot of new vocabulary they can use in future lessons. I also got to work with my favourite teacher Ernesto-who like me is new to the school and he is a pleasure to work with. A good example of this was the way in which he introduced me to the students which stopped them from asking any awkward personal questions at the start. Ernesto did however make one of the students apologise to me for a making the inappropriate remark of ‘You’re pretty’. He was more than half my age so it was a very inappropriate thing to say to me.

 I managed to do a successful lesson on can and adverbs as well with Maria on Tuesday that worked very well and students were able to practise using adverbs-I also adapted some of those materials to teach the other group (who had not done adverbs) about adverbs for the first time which they really seemed to enjoy. I plan on giving Ernesto the rest of the lesson I had for that 1st ESO group who I introduced to adverbs so they can have further practise using adverbs next week as I will not be there to give them that lesson. I know that lesson went well as one of the students that 1st ESO class yesterday said to me 'You are a good teacher'. Last week as well I had one student say she 'loved me' when I was on my way home after a busy day teaching. I also tried the bean dance that Amy showed us (jumping bean, mexican bean, french bean, and beans on toast) on Tuesday which the primary students seemed to prefer to the wake up shake up.
 Another success was my introduction to the 1st Bachillerato group (who were in Rome last week) which went well and I managed to get through all the material I had prepared (for the first time ever). My lesson was very personal as I told the students about where I was from and showed them a video about Cambridge. Most of the students seemed interested in going to Cambridge. I then asked them about their trip to Rome, which was very interesting to hear about-but I did have a moment where a student asked me what the word was for something and I culd not remember what it was in English. I have since realised the word I needed was hail/hailing as she wanted to know what the mixture of rain/ice is in English. I also found out some good suggestions of places I should visit in Valencia which I can now use as a guide when I explore Valencia at the weekend.

Yesterday though was bad-in two of my classes I could not get the projector to work so I had to get help which delayed the lesson-it was impossible to set up the projector before because there was another teacher in there (as in Spain oddly it is the teachers and not the students who have to move). My last class that I had yesterday was a disaster. For starters, Luisa the teacher whose class I was supposed to be teaching had forgot that I was teaching (as it was Wednesday) and thought it was one of her days. Then the projector would not work initially so I had to get one of the students to help. Thirdly I tried to install rules as Carolyn had told me-I set rules at the beginning that I wrote on the board and I checked the students had understood the rules-by asking questions like do you speak while I am speaking? (no), do you speak while a classmate is speaking? (no), and if you want to answer what do you do? (raise your hand), and do we speak in spanish? (no-we speak in english), and if you don't understand what do you say? (Sorry but could you repeat that please?).
However despite that they continually broke the rules and at several times during the lesson I had to sit and wait about 5 or 6 times before going through anything. Then when I started to go through things they would start talking again and would not listen to me. Moreover, none of this was helped by the fact Luisa the teacher who was teaching with me-was busy giving out exam results individually to each student during my lesson at the back of the classroom (even though I had asked her at the start if she could do this at the end of the lesson so as not to disrupt my class). This meant that when I was having difficulties with the students not listening Luisa was distracted and could not really do much to help me. At the end of that lesson I cried because I really did try to teach it and I spoke slowly so they could understand-but what could I have done? They didn't want to listen and so we only got through 1 activity.