Teachers like Botox, too

And so year one teaching in Madrid has ended.  I covered some topics that were important to me on here, although I didn’t write about my experiences in the school nearly as much as I’d planned.  Luckily I’ll be there next year, too!

Below are some rambling thoughts about this year, and some things I’m looking forward to or thinking about regarding the year to come.  You’ll find that most are complaints, and I’m afraid that simply reflects the reality that I’ve found to be the Spanish public education system and especially my own school, but I will try to include good things, too:

I can say that I ended up blown away by the differences between the Spanish public school system, especially my school in particular, and the American school system in which I was raised.  But whenever I talk to people about this I always preface what I’m saying by acknowledging that there are plenty of terrible schools in the U.S., and there are plenty of districts, particularly in inner cities and areas with large numbers of immigrants, that do not handle public education very well.  Of course I can only speak from my own experiences, but lots of people I know come from education systems similar, at least in their structure, to my own.

I recall many of my teachers in the States spending long hours at home planning activities, making things, grading things.  I recall many of my teachers in the States getting to school well before the kids, and it was normal to drive by my school in the evening and still see some cars in the parking lot or some lights on while a teacher was still working on something.  There are always exceptions, but I can’t say the same for Madrid.  Generally, teachers seem to arrive with the kids and leave with them whenever possible, unless they have a meeting with parents (and if the parents decide to show up).  Most lesson planning seems to be done during the rare free hour during the day, which doesn’t allow for much in the way of long-term activity planning or larger-scale, more complex projects.

I haven’t come across an elementary school that does a yearbook!

My school in particular has more (pointless) meetings than any business or organization I’ve ever seen.  My teacher once asked me, “Do you think Obama has as many meetings as we do?”  And yet, no one ever has any idea what’s going on, and there is zero communication between the government people and the school administrators and the teachers.  No decisions seem to be made, no resolutions are found, no terms are met, and there is lots of mindless blabber and bickering.  (This is what I can piece together from teacher accounts of meetings and from the fact that they go into meetings to solve a problem and the problem never gets solved; We language assistants are never included in the staff meetings, and this past year were never even included in bilingual meetings, despite being an integral and government-appointed piece of the bilingual program.)

While my school has nothing of the sort, my boyfriend’s school (and therefore, I assume, some other ones) had a class specifically for immigrant students to help them learn the language, culture, and to adjust, and it was mandatory to stay in the class for several months.  Something like this is essential, especially when these kids are plopped into bilingual schools and are having to deal with a whole set of problems in addition to adjusting to the country’s native language and culture.

My school has the most ridiculous, the laziest, the most good-for-nothing social workers/counselors/whatever I’ve ever encountered.  Not only was one of them far too old to so much as eat without getting half of her food all over her face (which was filled with Botox or some other filler), and the other liked to bop around the school in sheer white pants and a black thong, but I’ve never seen people in their field seem so wholly uninterested in what they were supposed to be doing.  Support for our special-needs students or students having problems at home was sporadic if existent at all, incomplete, half-hearted, and a total failure.

While still not the healthiest thing out there, lunchroom food served to the kids is a lot better than the processed pancakes, sausages, corndogs, and strange square pizza that didn’t even taste like pizza that I remember from my childhood cafeteria.  At this school, kids have seats, tablecloths, and plates and silverware at the table, and are served their food, rather than going through a line to get it.  Also, they don’t choose what they eat.  They are served a whole meal and are urged by the monitors to finish it (sometimes with threats of punishment).

Some kids are naturally really awesome, some are naturally pretty boring, and some are naturally really shitty.

A lot of people at my school –Spanish colleagues included– get very frustrated by the misuse of resources (like us assistants).  As far as I know my school has more money than my boyfriend’s, and we had a substantial library of English resources, tons and tons of new reading material and science books all the time, and three capable assistants, but none of these things were used very wisely.  Conversations with Spanish teachers affirmed that our school has lots of great things or at least access to great things that other schools don’t, but just has no idea how to use them.

One resource that’s lacking is technology.  It’s probable that there are schools in Madrid with few to no computers at all, but for a school that has computers, has the ability to upgrade them, and has no problem buying a new laminating machine TWICE when people can’t figure out how to work the one we have, the state of operating systems and Internet in our school is sad.  They toot the computer lab so that classes come down to use it, but then you pair up sixteen kids on computers and set them up to use the Internet for what should be a fun, educational activity, and the Internet won’t work on most of them, and half of the computers will barely even run, and the entire hour is a bust.

As there are very few Spanish kids in a lot of these inner-city schools, some of those Spanish students have Spanish parents that get all hoity-toity about being Spanish.  I’m not supposed to meet with the parents at parent-teacher conferences, which is unfortunate because I would love to let them know that most of the immigrant kids who already had to learn a second language are way better at English than their pure-blooded child.

I suspected and then was told by other Spanish teachers that the public school system doesn’t care much about the arts.  Art classes, as I’ve mentioned a few times in various posts, are pretty pathetic, and supplies don’t amount to much more than popsicle sticks and construction paper.  Many schools have their art classes taught by teachers that teach other things and for whatever reason are teaching one or two hours of art.

There’s much more affection between teachers and kids than what we’re used to.  There are lots of hugs, which is nothing new to us (twenty kids wrapping themselves around your legs… or torso, in my case, since they’re almost as tall as I am), but as Spain is a kissing culture, it’s normal on a birthday or after receiving a present from a student to give a kiss on each cheek.  (I heard my coordinator saying that you even have to be careful about that, as you would expect to hear in the States, but she’s the only person I’ve ever heard express that opinion.)

There are a lot of teachers, particularly the older ones, who are not fans of the bilingual program.  For one thing, those that didn’t study English –and as more and more schools are made bilingual every year–  are increasingly unqualified to teach classes or teach in schools, and it would be difficult for them to learn English at their age.  What’s more, while in theory I think the bilingual program is a great idea, I find that in some schools, like mine, there is so much importance placed on it that other important things are neglected (such as being proficient in Spanish, since we’re in Spain, or telling time).

Generally in Madrid’s bilingual schools, English language, science, music, and art are all taught entirely in English.  Teachers and assistants are not supposed to speak any Spanish with the kids in any of these classes, and we assistants are actually supposed to pretend we don’t speak any Spanish.  But this can cause problems.  They’re using actual textbooks for science.  Sometimes the language is difficult.  Sometimes the kids know what something is in Spanish, and kind of know what something is in English, but don’t realize that they’re the same thing.  If it’s a bilingual school, shouldn’t the goal be to understand the subjects in both languages?

We’ll be getting a new administration next year, so I’m anxious to see what’s to come.  It’s possible that the new people will be coming from elsewhere, in which case we won’t really know what to expect, but it would be pretty difficult to be worse than this year.  For the moment, I expect next year to have an entirely different feel.