Just like that, I’ve been an English teacher here in Spain for an entire month. Although the days can feel long, the weeks are flying by. Especially with my three-day weekends, I feel like I’m always either fighting the Sunday Scaries or triumphantly leaving school on a Thursday afternoon.
The Sunday Scaries… a concept I’d never truly experienced until now. As I’ve grown more comfortable at work, my nerves each Sunday night have eased. Nonetheless, I still find myself getting anxious when there’s a new week on the horizon. It’s always been my instinct to completely lay low on Sunday afternoons and evenings, giving myself time to prepare for the week and get to bed early. However, this routine has not been as enjoyable and effective here in Madrid. If anything, giving myself an entire half day to decompress just means more time in my head.
In an attempt to combat this, I did a hot yoga class this past Sunday night. The class was from 6:00 to 7:30 PM, so I still had time to get my lesson plans in order and do a bit of meal-prepping earlier in the day, but I also had an activity to look forward to while doing those necessary tasks. The class itself was a great reset before starting a new week. I literally sweat it all out, so when I returned home around 8:00, I was excited to make dinner, take a shower, and read & journal in bed. Who knows if it’ll be hot yoga every Sunday, but I’ve made it a new goal to make some sort of plan with myself or friends each Sunday evening. Just because the work week starts the next day doesn’t mean I have to confine myself to my apartment to worry about work when it’s still the freaking weekend!
Something that’s relatively unique to my teaching experience is that I am with a wide age range of students. In addition to working with pre-school students (about 250 kids ages 1-5!), I also teach the American equivalents of 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th, and 10th grades. I really appreciate the variety this adds to my schedule. While the littles are absolutely adorable, I find myself getting bored on the days when I teach only three- and four-year olds. The older students are more stimulating, but they also pose issues of teenage cliquiness and more resistance to learning English in general. In one of my 7th grade classes, there is a gaggle of girls that actually sits on their desks and brushes their hair while looking at themselves in little hand mirrors. Because of such dynamics and the bigger gap between English levels in these classes, I feel less confident as their teacher.
A key contributor to my uncertainty in these classrooms is the lack of clear expectations of me as the language assistant. In fact, all but one of the upper level English teachers expect me to be head teacher whenever I’m in the room. This is fine, except no one tells me much about what level of English my students have or what topics they have or have not covered, and they certainly don’t share what activities work or don’t work. In response to this, my mindset has been a mix of “fake it till you make it” and “I don’t get paid enough to care.” Of course, I care greatly about my students and want them to enjoy learning English, but if one of my lessons is a complete flop, no pasa nada (it’s no big deal).
One of my biggest takeaways from this first month is that all of my students have a much lower level of English than I initially thought. I now think back to when I did my “About Me” presentation the first week, and I wonder what was going through their heads in the moment as I rambled on and on about studying neuroscience at Carleton, eating lobster in Maine, and making granola with my grandmother. I still speak only English with the older students, but I often use a bit of Spanish with the preschoolers, whose English vocabulary hardly includes “hello” and “goodbye”.
With the littles in particular, I felt pretty useless in the early weeks. My students looked at me like I had three heads whenever I spoke to them in Spanish, and it was clear they weren’t grasping any of the content I was trying to teach them. (Let’s be real though, learning the colors is tough!). However, this past week, the most adorable thing happened: after finishing the coloring activity, some of my four-year-olds took turns pretending to be me by sitting in my chair and leading their classmates in the “Hello Song” that I wrote. They did the hand motions and everything. I was so proud to see that they’d actually learned the song and wanted to practice it in their free time.
Another mini-win was in my 4th grade class when I introduced a skit activity. At first, they were very confused—“¿Tenemos que hacer qué? (“We have to do what?”). Much of the confusion was a byproduct of the language barrier, but eventually they got it by helping each other understand the directions. Their skits were uber duper creative and silly, plus they were a great way to assess their grasp of the vocabulary and unit lessons. I returned the following week to many requests to “hacer las historias otra vez!” (”do the stories again!”). My co-teacher even told me he was planning to repeat the activity in his other classes.
To wrap up, I must reflect on my time with the babies, my one- and two-year-olds. I get just 15 minutes with each group every week, and up until now I think I’d been approaching their lessons all wrong. While reading and singing have been successful activities when I’ve babysat one- and two-year olds in the past, with a group of 13 kiddos, I need to use more visuals. Stuffed animals, videos on YouTube to dance along with, and simply any toy seem to do the trick. I was extremely grateful when the head teacher (who is typically busy changing diapers or cleaning up the classroom when I’m there) offered this advice. Stay tuned to see if I can find a way to engage all of my littles at once… without at least one child pushing others to the ground or spending the entire 15 minutes dumping water on the table.
One month down, eight to go, and I’m finally finding my groove. Sure, the days can get messy, and sometimes my ears are literally ringing at the end of the day from the constant screams and squeals. But more frequently than not now, I’ve been heading home at the end of the day feeling grateful and appreciated. That’s all for now, see you next week for some travel stories!
