First month in Spain

After one month and 13 days in Spain, I can say with certainty that coming to Spain is one of the best decisions I have made in my life.  It has been quite an experience and the people here have welcomed me with open arms.  My days consist of being a language assistant at my school throughout the morning and in the afternoon I have my private classes.  Actually let me rephrase that, my days consist of being a language assistant in the morning, visiting a teashop and gorging myself on lovely Moroccan food, taking a siesta, and then having my private classes in the afternoon/evening. 

 

My school is wonderful.  I have been there for a month and the folks there are fantastic and courteous.   I help with the art lessons and on occasion with the English lessons.   Every morning I check in with the principal and then become a linguistic English sounding board in the classroom.  The way it works at my school is that the kids learn English grammar and theory in one class, and then they have to use this theory and grammar in their art class.  In my opinion, this is genius.   The kids, unbeknownst to them, are learning English grammar and are then required to apply it in a real-world situation.  The result is that the kids end up building up vocabulary in art that is only accessible to them in English and not in Spanish or Galician.  For the month of October, my students spent the month constructing monsters from recycling material and the end results are amazing.  To help inspire them, I read them a story called Under the Bed and showed them the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas.   The younger kids colored monsters, which were just as great; they got very creative with the colors and then decorated their monsters with all kinds of stickers.   For the month of November, I’m going to attempt to have my older kids make dream-catchers and my younger kids make Native American shields. 

After leaving school, I stroll on over to the Moroccan teashop and buy some delicious bocadillos and cookies.  It has become a regular thing where the shop-owner looks for me around the same time every day. This place has the most delicious cookies I have tasted thus far in Spain.   Some days I buy bocadillos, the name for Spanish subs, or other days I will buy empanadas or pizzas. The Moroccan tea there is fantastic as well. After enjoying some delicious food, I go home for my midday siesta.

My private classes are another favorite part of my day.  All the private students I have are fantastic.  They are witty and they force me to think about things that I may not have ever thought about in English before.  For example, why do we say “shower as /shau-wuhr/ and not as /sho-wuhr/ because it looks like shower would come from the word “show”.   I enjoy my private students because I can teach them standard English and some slang English and the environment is a bit more relaxed than a formal classroom. 

All in all, I am happy that I am in Spain.  I’ve gone traveling to other sites within Galicia but that’ll be another blogpost.  I have also realized that there are specific phonemes that one needs to be wary of when teaching English to Spaniards that doesn’t appear when teaching English to Hispanics but that’ll have to be a separate post.