Mapping

The internet was down at school yesterday, & so I had about a half hour to figure out how I’d illustrate the entire history of American music to my 3º de ESO on their handout. This is the map that I drew.

UPDATE: Track lists for my two-volume History of American Music.

History of American Music Vo: 1 – Folk

1. “No Headstone on My Grave,” Esther Phillips
2. “I Was Born,” Natalie Merchant
3. “Comin’ Round the Mountain” [sung]
4. “Run on for a Long Time,” The Blind Boys of Alabama
5. “Old Brown’s Daughter,” Great Big Sea
6. “Free & Easy,” Muireann NicAmhlaoibit
7. “Goin’ Down Slow,” Howlin’ Wolf
8. “Travellin’ Riverside Blues,” Robert Johnson
9.  “My Home Is the Delta,” Muddy Waters
10. “High On a Mountain,” Loretta Lynn
11. “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” Duke Ellington & Ivie Anderson
12. “Move,” Miles Davis
13. “You’ve Got to Move,” Two Gospel Keys

History of American Music Vo: 2 – Pop

 

1. “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” Big Joe Turner
2. “Hit the Road Jack,” Ray Charles
3. “I’m Gonna Hold On As Long As I Can,” The Marvelettes
4. “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” The Dells
5. “Rag Mama Rag,” The Band
6. “Shelter From the Storm,” Bob Dylan
7. “Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix
8. “Soul Power,” Derek Martin
9. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” The Beach Boys
10. “Search & Destroy,” Iggy Pop & the Stooges
11. “Don’t Feel Right,” The Roots
12. “Girl Wants Rock & Roll,” Christina Aguilera & The Velvet Underground [mash-up]

What is the what?

This is the second in a series of posts about what my job entails, teaching a foreign language, and the Spanish educational system in general. If you’ve seen Season 4 of The Wire, just picture me as Prez in the first episode. Part I here.

I.

One of the funny things about my job is that nobody can agree on what to call me. Kids call me “James” – they’re not confused. My first name is a self-explanatory category (there are teachers, there are students, and then there’s James.) Sometimes they’ll say “maestro,” or “teacher.” And generally that’s how I’ll introduce myself to people in Jaén – maestro de íngles. But my official title isn’t teacher – it’s some amalgam of ‘auxiliar de comunicación’ or ‘de conversación’, and ‘language & culture assistant,’ though few of the real teachers I work with could tell you which; the titles are all ungainly, lumpy with syllables. Often I’m just referred to as ‘giving’ (dar) clases de íngles, with the passive voice eliding just who exactly is doing the giving.

Because I both am and am not a “real teacher.” (This shades into methodology, as you’ll see shortly.) I teach full classes, plan lessons, & translate textbooks all by my lonesome, as I write about in part I, and I think of myself as a teacher to the extent that what I’m doing is teaching, which is hopefully often.

But on the other hand, I am not allowed to grade assignments or give tests. (Sensibly, given the implications of allowing foreigners to affect your country’s educational statistics). I am not allowed to write disciplinary reports. I only see each of my classrooms once a week, which means I don’t have control over the room itself, I don’t see my students respond to the curriculum on a daily basis, and I can’t, realistically, assign homework. No sticks, few carrots – I’ll talk about classroom management shortly.

And, of course, besides all of this, I have no professional certification, and no experience or qualifications beyond general intellectual curiosity & the happy accident of being a native speaker.

So am I a good teacher?

Well, actually, the question is first: am I a teacher at all? If not, what is my job – and am I good at it?

II.

“No me entera el íngles de nada.”

Table the question of whether I’m a teacher for a moment. In theory, an auxiliar – which is an animal as yet undescribed by science – is a supplement – unnecessary to the working of the school, not integral, as we’d have to be, given that some of us wash out or don’t show up at all, that our abilities & preparation are as varied as the ways that we’re used. Anything you do helps, even if it’s as minimal as being careful to round your vowels while you repeat orange.

As a native speaker and – let’s add, for kicks – humanities major, you can spot-edit English text, smooth out irregularities & unnatural constructions in speech, provide your accent, all without breaking much of a sweat. You can function as a breathing dictionary powered by coffee, and simply by your strange mannerisms, odd attire, your foreign-ness, you can introduce the idea to your kids that there is a big old world out there, and that people, actual people, non-Spanish & everything, live in it. This is, arguably, better than nothing.

Speak natural, native-accented English to someone for a month, though, & this does not teach them English. It won’t even magically correct their pronunciation. In fact, speaking “naturally” is impossible if you want to teach effectively – you have to use teacher-talk, slow down, pronounce your t’s, contrary to what I’ve heard some of my colleagues claim, which is (I may be creating a strawman) that by talking to themselves, essentially, in native-accented American English, they’re exposing the kids to real English, which the kids are expected to pick up by osmosis.

I harbor the suspicion to the contrary that native speakers may actually be less effective teachers, at least when plucked raw & untrained. They don’t have any feeling for what would be difficult for non-native speakers learning the language, & points of grammar that simply aren’t used except in foreign language pedagogy are constantly being pointed out to them.

[I remember when I found out what phrasal verbs were - verbs whose meanings are modified by the prepositions that follow them (pick up is not pick out is not pick on). The difference between take care of (cuidar) and take on (enfrentar) and take up (asumir) seems natural, instinctive. It isn't, of course, and it drives Spanish speakers crazy.]

And teachers who aren’t native speakers of the language used by their students are hobbled in another way – classroom management. I do not work in an academic environment where my students want to learn English (as in private classes, TEFL programs, or adult continuing-education schools). I don’t even work in an academic environment where the students are selected (presumably) for some kind of baseline interest in learning in general, like the small boarding school in Ojai, California where I was educated.

(In all of these cases, second language pedagogy remains difficult – even if you want to learn a language, even if you’re a good student, it’s still often frustrating, it can be scary, it requires memorization & feeling like you have much less mastery of simple, small things than you’re used to having in daily life.)

I work, instead, in a new-built government school in a pueblo; my kids are in class because they are required by law to be taught English, and the way that they are taught is almost exclusively through grammar recitations, direct translation, & fill-in-the-blank. Readings they don’t understand are read back to them in Spanish by the teacher. They do not speak English, and English is not spoken to them.

By the time I receive them in my 2º and 3º de ESO (8th and 9th grade, ages from 15 to 17 years old, depending on how many times they’ve repeated the year), about a third of them have given up on their education entirely, and their required foreign languages in particular, so that that the best-case scenario is that they sit, silent, their head out one of the windows, like Buddhist monks objecting to war, their backpacks unopened, without pencils or books, without touching the handouts to leave on their desks, letting the strange, foreign sounds become a squawking ambient buzz, nonsense, noise just loud enough to prevent them from sleeping.

This is the pedagogical environment I inherit in my 2º and 3º de ESO (8th & 9th grade) English classes, and it’s what, theoretically, the language & culture assistant program itself is supposed to modify, supplement, or reform. We are supposed to introduce communicative approaches, or comparative grammar, or games, or cultural specificity – but only one day a week, and without being able to use most of the tools that teachers use to maintain order in a classroom, or being able to speak Spanish well enough, especially at first, to control kids who cannot or will not admit to understanding what you are say to them in English if you ask, with hand motions, to sit down and stop hitting the other boy with his own pencil case.

At its worst (on the bad days) this means that, to these kids, I’m a rube. If they speak fast enough & with a thick enough accent & use enough rural slang, I won’t catch on to what they’re saying. My attempts to introduce games and activities that incorporate speaking & listening in English, or reading comprehension from context, are taken, because of their strange unfamiliarity, as cryptic & byzantine, and when it doesn’t work I’m ignored. The more studious kids work on homework for other classes; the otherwise take it as an opportunity to do whatever they’d like. If the game depends on the kids communicating to each other in English, it is particularly difficult to implement; why talk in English when they can clarify, amend, and repeat in Spanish? Why muddle through an imperfect & foreign tongue? I have had games of pictionary derailed because four boys in my 2º de ESO B wouldn’t stop mouthing the Spanish word for what they were drawing on the board to their team.

III.

I am arguing myself, as I do when I try to write about education here, into a kind of hall of mirrors. I either am or am not a teacher, teaching either effectively or ineffectively, and that effectiveness or ineffectiveness is either a result or has nothing to do with my status as a native speaker.

The question I’d like to pose for my readers (I’ve asked it before, I’ll actually try to answer it in the third part to this series of posts) is, Why is English taught at all? (What I’m getting at is, to what extent are those kids slouching in the back of my class rational actors?)

The standard answer to this question is, Because English is a valuable skill on the job market – that is, because it has market value. And obviously, because it is the current lingua franca.

But what market value, and how much utility, does a lingua franca have in a rural pueblo outside of Jaén, among students who in many cases have never left the province, who will not necessarily even get a baccalaureate education, much less go to the university? And to what extent does anybody get any use out of a language they learn in high school only?

Part three coming quicker than this part two did. I get lost in the rushes when I don’t write it all at once, because time allows me to second-guess & complicate – but to present it as an unbroken whole would be unreadable, given the medium I’m using. A puzzle.

Job description

Many of you have written to ask for a more complete picture of what my responsibilities entail, what the teaching is like, etc. This is the first in a series of posts attempting to answer those questions, to the extent that I have answers.

I.

This is how my weeks are: I’ll arrive in Bédmar on the Jódar bus at 9:30 a.m., run by powder-blue Muñoz Amezcua (3,55€) or share a ride with a teacher at half past 7; the bus station in Jaén closed for renovations last week, and buses now leave from an improvised lot alongside the highway outside the city. It takes me an hour and a half to get to school from my apartment.

The days I have early classes I’ll make myself a cup of coffee with a stovetop Italian moka & stand in my bathrobe with the lights off, watching the gas flame while the sunlight pools in the window & over the clotheslines– the sun rises now at around 7. Otherwise I’ll have my first coffee, a cortado, in the school cafeteria, with a tostada with olive oil & tomatillo or a flaky, chocolate-filled pastry called a neapolitano, & generally I’ll wait to have breakfast until there are teachers in the cafeteria to talk to, and one person always pays for everyone else.

II. Lunes a Jueves.

I am required by law to teach 12 hours per week. This is what that means:

I have the two sections of 1 de ESO (7th grade), in small groups of six to nine in the library downstairs – long tables, a few locked glass bookcases, broken chess sets, a projector. I’ll be asked weekly to introduce specific vocabulary or grammar – present continous, household objects, food, modal verbs, prepositions. We’ll draw a map of a town together on a big square of poster-board, with buildings labeled with symbols & a legend in English, or play human darts, in which one kid directs a blindfolded partner (turn . . . left! No! No! Left! Little right! Up!) towards a dartboard.

Later, some, but not all, of these kids will be in the school’s two bilingual classes – music & natural sciences. The others, the non-bilingual 1 de ESO, are mixed in, so I cannot integrate bilingual lesson plans with my English sections. 

In this hypothetical week I’ll spend an hour tutoring the natural science teacher so that he can take a higher level English exam, mainly to accumulate enough points to leave this school and get a better job outside of Granada, where his wife is getting her doctorate. Another hour tweaking the English in the lesson plan on atmospheric properties he’s downloaded from the internet. I’ll co-teach about half of the music class, and translate chapter 6, “The Symphony Orchestra,” from the Spanish textboook into English, because we have no bilingual teaching materials.

At some point in the week, I’ll find one fact each in music & natural sciences and print out a bilingual Did You Know? – this week’s pictures a hurricane, an atom bomb, & Lisa Simpson playing the saxophone, to tape onto the English Corner in the front stairwell, above the News of the Week, which this week is still my St. Patrick’s Day printout, featuring the Chicago River dyed green.

This, and my weekly bilingual project reunión (in practice, a 10:15 a.m. Tuesday coffee break), adds up to eight hours – 1 de ESO A & B, actividades en íngles, música, music &  natural sciences lesson planning, natual sciences tutoring. Four more hours in 2 and 3 de ESO A & B, where I prepare worksheets, try to do more reading & writing, and play games like 20 Questions, Pictionary, and hold spelling bees – and that’s the twelve.

My days are filled out with more coffee, the New York Times online, & occasional miscellaneous chores. I’ll help the Polish Erasmus student with her homework – an English translation of Juan Ramón Jimenez, troublesome because his figurative language, worked through word for word, transforms a horse into a “round, boneless ball of cotton” and its eyes into “jetblack mirrors as hard as the black crystal shells of scarab beetles” – and spend a quarter hour talking with the castellano & science teachers about the pronunciation difference between horse & whores (there is no phonetic distinction in Spanish).

III. “A standard to which the wise & honest  can repair.”

The degree to which I plan lessons or teach classes depends wholly on the teacher. The science teacher has shouldered me out of class in favor of personal tutoring; 1st year English teacher, also the bilingual coordinator for the whole project, asks me to prepare specific lessons but leaves me alone with the kids (which is, strictly speaking, against the law); the music teacher has me prepare her lessons, but in classes uses me mainly as an explicator, a kind of human English speaking machine; in 2nd and 3rd year, I can plan whatever I like, while the teacher sits at the desk, fielding questions in Spanish & interrupting occasionally into debates over discipline with the back row kids.

 

At some schools, bilingual classes consist of a native auxiliar gnomically adding a single word in English to the lecture, otherwise conducted entirely in Spanish, or repeating, over and over, the word orange, being sure to round the vowels. In others, experienced Americans with TEFL certificates & communicative methodology sprain their ankles running physical education classes. Belgians with Midwestern accents hold personal conversation practice. Auxiliares sponsor showcase projects with names like “World Village,” film their kids making fake Super Bowl commercials, or hold peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich competitions. Every school is a world unto itself.

My world: A new, spare building, linoleum-floored, with green desks and big, empty classrooms. The school itself new, ten years old – before this, they bussed the kids to Jódar. They still do, for the baccalaureate. Frayed palms outside, windows with steel shutters. A little more than one hundred and twenty students. Subjects – math, history, castellano, sciences, french, english, plástica (art), music, physical education, and religion (practically speaking, under a socialist government, a species of comparative ethics). The primary school is right up against the building; I can hear children playing recorders through the wall. Two English teachers, two bilingual subject teachers, me, and the Polish Erasmus student compose the department, here, in the foothill of the Sierra Máginas – there is still snow on the mountains, purple flowers on the trees outside.

Why do we teach, & how, & do we do it well or poorly? Questions, a continuación, for tomorrow’s part two, which will pick up where this section leaves off.

_

From last fall (some repetition, unavoidably):

“Olives, & Pedagogy.” [12 November 2008]

Writing samples

Sometimes, I make up teaching exercises almost purely to provide me with keepsakes & amusement. That was the case this week, which I devoted to storytelling in 2º and 3º de ESO – characters, description, madlibs.

(2º & 3º are equivalent to 8th and 9th grade, though the ages, because of kids who repeat, range from 13 to 17. Though I highlight my favorites here, it’s worth mentioning that a third to half of the kids in each section didn’t do the assignment at all.)

There’s no better feeling than when your kids surprise you. (The phrase I keep wanting to use in Spanish is Me hace gracia – literally, It gives me grace, but gracia here is a complicated word – something between amusement [a good joke at the right moment tiene gracia] and charm, a fittedness.)

Below, first, are two entries from the madlibs I gave to 3º B after the St. Patrick’s day lesson & before the slices of carrot cake with green frosting.

Francisco – I like this because he went out of his way to find the oddest words he knew in English, and because normally he’s not one of the better students, though engaged & willing & funny – writes:

It was a normal cold spring day, just like any other. The griffins were writing. Bruce had just eaten a breakfast of macarronis and watermelon and was taking a speedboat to his job as a neurologist. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a skeleton went out of London Tower. The monster was strong, sad, and black, with horrible happy feet. Bruce had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t know what to do. Then, the monster said, “James is horrible.“

Mágina, who sits with the three other smart girls in the back of my 3ºB classroom, blew me away by continuing the story, unprompted, and making into something that made sense. I have preserved minor grammatical errors (“to” in the last sentence is an artifact of the Spanish personal “a”):

It was a normal sunny spring day. The dogs were playing. James had just eaten a breakfast of toasts and oranges and was taking a motorbike to his job as a police. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a skeleton ran out of the bank. The monster was tall, thing, and white, with a horrible big nose. James had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t know what to do. Then the monster said, “I wan’t all your money.“

James started to think and what he thought about the “skeleton” was robber. James arrested to the skeleton. THE END.

In 3ºA, I asked the students to create a character for a story from scratch – what does the character look like, what are their emotions, their favorite things, what do they want? (This, I explained, was important – characters have to want something. Who knew fiction workshops would come in handy in an English lesson?) I’d done a little exercise previously on metaphor & simile, and told them that this could be used in personal description, too.

Enrique, also not one of the best students, but also still engaged & curious, writes:

My character is small, green, with one eye, he has no friends, he lives in a cave, he is a vegetarian. He wants to have friends. Is from Greece.

Isabel María writes:

A big English named Sam work in the sea with the animals. He is very nice and he’s a pink hair, a yelow legs and he always is smiling. When he is in the sea, playing with the animals, he is very crazy.

Cristina, who is better at French than English and rarely talks in class, writes:

She is friendly, her eyes are green like the grass, her hair is blonde and short. She likes riding a horse. She needs a new black horse for a race. She lives in a stable with her animals.

Maria Jóse, whose family runs the Paraiso, the bar-restaurant where I eat on Tuesday afternoons (I see her after school taking care of her little sisters & nieces, & working behind bar), is one of my smartest kids. She uses the opportunity to tell a story. Note the past simple:

She was a princess that lived in a scrappyard with wheels and chairs. One day, she woke and found a magic cat in(to) the car. She took it and went into the scrappyard. When she touched the cat softly it became a man. It’s incredible ! ! ! Then they got married.

Oodles

A little while back, I was made happy when a friend sent me a note signed, Miss you oodles.

Speak international lingua franca English long enough, and you begin to strip eccentricity & unusual construction from your speech. You learn to avoid folk sayings, dialect, obscure words, americanisms; the accent alone is hard enough for people to understand. Nobody but you cares about the difference between a picture hung & a man hanged, or that the collective noun for larks is an exaltation, for apes a shrewdness.

You lose too the semiprivate language we all develop with friends and family. I can’t remember the last time I said, Let’s blow this popsicle stand or See you later, alligator.

And so it becomes a rare kind of pleasure, finally, to speak or to hear or to read interesting English. Oodles — you smile. You’d forgotten you even knew the word at all.

“But what,” asks the Polish university student* at the high school, “does it mean?”

This is where things get tricky.

*(European students studying English philology at the University of Jaén through the Erasmus grant are offered three month stints, with shorter hours & reduced pay, doing essentially the same thing I’m doing: assisting in English classes, or tutoring bilingual subject teachers.)

One of the habits you also end up having, aside from avoiding nonstandard language, aside from learning to say sofa instead of couch, sweets rather than candy, chemist’s not pharmacy, is learning to think in terms of rules for usage – particularly with regards to words that are basically synonyms.

So what does it mean? I shrug. “Lots,” I say. But, of course, it doesn’t mean lots. Not quite. And why is it so funny? Oodles. It just sounds funny.

(As a native speaker, you are alone in this – in thinking words have this natural essence. And words that second language speakers like the sound of can be completely mundane or unremarkable to native speakers. A few weeks later, she & I will talk about an English-Spanish translation class she is taking, & she will tell me she’s frustrated – translating Spanish into Polish, she can tell when something is clumsy, or off – the taste of it. But even though she’s fluent in English, she still can’t tell just by the taste of a sentence if it’s right or not.)

So what is the rule for oodles? It means lots – it’s a collective noun, rarely used, a little quaint, used for humorous effect. Oodles of what? You can’t use it for just anything.

Sitting there, at the brasero in the teacher’s lounge, early afternoon – I’m stumped. Oodles of noodles. Of course. Nonce word, comes from noodles. Collective noun, used to describe . . . any noodle-y mass. Miss you . . . Or abstractions? Emotions? Hate you oodles. Impossible.

Is the difference countable/uncountable?, I’m asked. No – can’t be that. Noodles is uncountable, but so is, I don’t know, coal. And you just can’t say oodles of coal.

“Sounds right.” This is not a way to teach usage. And how many ways do we use oodles, anyway? It sounds strange no matter what word you add. The repetition alone begins to confuse me. Maybe it’s used more as a response? “Do you have any such-and-such?” “Yes, oodles of it.” There are no English dictionaries in the school – just English-Spanish references. None of them have the word “oodles.” We have no appeal to authority.

Oodles. It can’t be paired with serious things, except to deliberately undercut them. Emotions, yes, but positive ones. Silly things. In the end, I throw up my hands. Oodles. Nonce-word, from noodles. Means “lots.” Rarely used. Practically useless for a non-native speaker. An unusual word, but not anachronistic – just rare. (Spellcheck recognizes it.) Made me smile.

How odd, that there can be a word that any native speaker would recognize – not an obscure word, not difficult to understand, just rarely used – that, by virtue of being unteachable, without utility, uncommon, almost no non-native speaker would have ever heard or know to recognize. What a curiously unbridgeable gap.

I think of all the things that I will never know in Spanish.

A few weeks later, I realize another reason why I liked the note so much. Oodles, usually a collective noun, has been repurposed here as an adverb – How do I miss you? Oodles.

Words bent out of shape, plucked from obscurity & rearranged, parts of speech changed, nouns verbed – all of the things that you are taught makes good writing, that you enjoy reading. All of the things you don’t teach as a foreign language, things to be avoided, things that add nothing but unnecessary confusion, that do not serve tourism, nor the hospitality industry, nor international communications. Miss you oodles.

Paper trail

A partial list of handouts I have made for my students:

·  bilingual version of Barack Obama’s presidential victory speech in Chicago.
·  brass family of instruments
·  fake newspaper, The Boston Post, with banner headlines, editorial cartoons, the score of the Real Madrid game, & a weather report.
·  lyrics to Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.”
·  lyrics to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, “Silent Night”, and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
·  mix & match descriptions of people including John McCain, Veronica Mars, & James Bond.
·  New York Times weather reports for Boston, Michigan, Ojai, & Bedmar.
·  questionnaire (place travelled, favorite bands, career aspirations, preferred food for special occasions)
·  states of matter: “Is a chair liquid?”
·  story of first Thanksgiving (featuring: Mayflower etching, cartoon turkeys, graph of Pilgrim deaths during first winter)
·  the 8 planets. (match the picture to the description)
·  two mixed-up stories, “Charlie the Astronaut Goes to the Zoo” & “The Adventure of Charlie the Outdoorsman”
·  weekly English news headlines, such as: “Somali Pirates Continue Attacks.”

English four you

Writing a foreign language textbook can’t be an enviable job, or an easy one. Looking at the acknowledgements page in my Burlington English For You! [ESO 2] , I see that they even solicited the input of ten actual teachers in Spain for revisions & materials in the most recent edition (2006) —

— but that doesn’t mean I can’t hate them with a dull, stubborn intractability.

Today, preparing a worksheet for my 2º de ESO Íngles B (U.S. = 8th grade), I was confronted by the following, from Unit 4 (natural disasters, Past Simple, talking about the weather), reprinted here in its entirety. Imagine a photograph of a house reduced to rubble:

HURRICANES: Their names are Mitch, Floyd, Isabel, Ivan and Katrina. They are very powerful, and they are a serious problem in places near oceans. What are they? They are hurricanes.

In the USA, the hurricane season is from the beginning of June to the end of November and when a hurricane hits, it is very dangerous. People in hurricane areas always listen carefully to weather forecasts.

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Katrina destroyed thousands of homes and killed hundreds of people. The Williams family sat on the roof of a house for two days and they survived. But the hurricane destroyed their home, their furniture, and all their clothes.

The question I’m left with is, if, in trying to include topical & recent material in a textbook, you are forced, because of the level of the students’ English, to simplify complicated & horrific events into trivialities, and inevitably dated trivialities at that – so that “topical & recent material” becomes neither, three years down the line in a pueblo east of Jaén, is it even worth it to include topical & recent material?

In a textbook, I mean.

_

ps. Test your knowledge! [Courtesy of English For You!, which has this bad habit of putting its special tips in this format: English 4 U!]

Circle the correct word to complete the sentence:

1. Mitch, Floyd, Isabel, and Katrina are the names of . . .

a. animals
b. hurricanes

2. Hurricanes hit places near . . .

a. mountains
b. oceans

3. Weather forecasts . . . . important for people in hurricane areas.

a. are
b. aren’t

4. The Williams family . . .

a. survived.
b. didn’t survive.

Olives, & pedagogy

“If they don’t come to class,” a teacher said to me yesterday of my students, on the way back to Jaén, driving down a two-lane highway that winds through the hills & is choked by olive trees, “the older ones, at least – it’s because they’ve gone to the olives.”

Kids in Bédmar, my pueblo of three thousand or so, skip school to pick up partwork in the groves that surround the town and make up almost three quarters of the land area of the province, collect pay in cash and use it to buy what matters when you’re maybe 16: a car, a bottle, something to huff or pop or smoke.

“Here, in the pueblo,” the art teacher told me in a garden with lemon trees & two dogs while his painter friend showed me his workshop and we listened to 70s Afrofunk, “the kids have no cultura.” It wasn’t just that the area was poor & rural. “All they know is this,” he said, & gestured towards the olive trees carpeting every hillside around us.

i.

Andalucía does not have a narrative, as we do in the States (modified now by our own rural problems) of flight from blighted inner cities, of urban poverty. When I arrive back in Jaén at quarter to 3, the streets of the city throng with schoolchildren – public, private (this invariably means Catholic), the private school kids in a dozen different uniforms of every type, one of which incorporates boat shoes and powder blue sweaters. Families live in cities in droves. When the city ends, it ends directly – one moment you’re in the cathedral district, you pass through a wall of Franco-era housing developments, and five minutes later you’re on a road that looks like the mountain sections Highway 33 in Ojai Valley. No orange trees, though – this isn’t Valencia.

It’s not that there aren’t exurban developments – the ubanizaciones to the north of Jaén, the prefab district called Las Fuentezuelas to the west – but in Andalucía there is nothing comparable to the immense voting bloc & social construct that is suburbia in the United States, and none of the symptoms: immense Cold War interstate highways, front lawns, backyard grilling of hotdogs, fetishization of home ownership, baseball, an in-country population that was formerly enslaved & then kept out of the mainstream for another century.

The difference, instead, is seen as urbanized modernity vs. rural past, between having cultura and being, as I’ve heard said of pueblos more than once, cerrado. And the rural past is part of living, generational memory – I’ve seen the pictures. My kids know they’re not in the center of the world. What do you do when you know that? It eats away at you, drives you – or you stop caring.

I think. What do I know?

ii.

My instituto, like all Spanish secondary schools, covers the four years of obligatory public education (ESO, educación secondario obligatorio) – the equivalent, in the States, of 7th to 10th grade. After 16, my students take a test and are either bussed to a different instituto in Jódar that has the bachilerato(Baccalaureate) in which they take intensive college preparatory classes for two years before going to the university, or they go to vocational schools or to work. University is not the middle class socialization project it is in the States, common, taken for granted, and unspecialized. Courses begin to focus on major during the bachilerato, and you begin your principle field of study upon entering; because subsidized, tuition is also a fraction of what it is in the States.

When I ask my 2º or 3º de ESO kids what they want to be when they grow up, the boys almost invariably say mechanic – otherwise, rock star, footballer. The average of three or four whipsmart girls per section in the front row want to be doctors, lawyers, or English teachers. The other girls - hairdresser, PhysEd teacher, actress. By 2º de ESO the smart boys have learned, generally, not to show it.

My instituto, being a pueblo school, is small – two sections per grade, 15-20 students per class. The sections are listed A and B, and the Spanish educational system doesn’t seem to be shy about tracking. My A sections are generally better behaved, more attentive – and almost all girls. Part of this, of course, doesn’t have to be tracking – it’s enough to put people in a B section and treat them like they’re going to misbehave.

Because it’s a small school, and because of the newness of the bilingual initiative, my students vary in level from those who have had private tutors & understand every word I say to students who have been moved in from  French class this year and who have never spoken English before in their lives, who don’t want to learn English, and who are being made to take the class to satisfy a government requirement.

This is especially true in 2º y 3º, where there are always at least three or four kids who will sit in the back corner & expect to be left alone. If you talk to them – in Spanish – they’ll tell you No entiendo right back, say No hablo íngles, and then break off eye contact and stare into space. One kid in my 2ºB made a little gunpowder firecracker rolled up in paper in the back one day & got kicked out of class; there are also the folded papers that go bang when you push air through them by waving them in the air, balls of paper to throw, chairs to tip over, and best friends who get into little slapping fights when they invariably sit next to each other.

There are also undiagnosed learning disorders & disabilities that the school can’t otherwise serve. It’s tough to be precise about this because I have no formal training, but you can kind of sense when a kid’s being disruptive, talking uncontrollably, or can’t help but get up, and it’s something that the teacher has learned to ignore or to remind him gently about instead of get angry at him for.

As an auxiliar – an assistant who is not supposed to be in the classroom without a teacher, though in practice I teach for the full hour with the teacher sitting at the desk – they know I don’t grade them or have any real disciplinary authority. Depending on the kids, this can make the arrival of the tall, dark young foreigner with the strange accent & the bag of language games exciting – a holiday from homework – or exciting! – a holiday from having to behave!

The English teachers at my school generally can’t speak English – oral fluency was not stressed in Andalucían schools until very recently, which is part of the reason I’m here – and so classes are conducted largely in Spanish, assignments are written and corrected in writing, and both aural comprehension & the ability to speak are almost nonexistent – except where I act to change this.

This means both that classes are used to being taught in Spanish & can’t speak English out loud, or are embarrassed to do so. That said, the Andalucían public classroom is an almost constant hum of kids talking to each other and answering in Spanish questions posed to them in English. When I go online to look at the vast, infinite reservoirs of variable quality that exist for teachers and students of English as a second or foreign language, many of the notes, written for teachers in Japan, Korea, and China, address the problem of getting students to talk in cultures that have hierarchical modes of address & overdisciplined, silent pupils (a generalization, unavoidably).

This is not my major difficulty. To say Andalucía is a discursive culture would be to understate the case. That’s part of the problem – these kids know how to talk your ear off, they live in a culture that values being able to talk face to face, and when they encounter a language where they can’t do that & haven’t been taught how, the degree of difficulty is enough to make them give up all together.

As I can attest, if someone is talking to you in a foreign language, it requires real concentration to understand & parse; especially in my first couple of weeks here, if I was tired in the morning, or it was late at night & I’d had a few drinks, or if I hadn’t had my coffee yet, without trying hard the Spanish around me could become a kind of accented white noise. This happens to me with the Spanish talk radio my teacher puts on in the car at 7 in the morning or so when we’re driving the rural highway towards the rose-fingered dawn.

My kids deal with this too – more so, because the language they can understand is in the air alongside the English. My first couple days, I lied to them about speaking Spanish, said I only knew how to speak English – this was an attempt to force classroom immersion. The funny thing was, I could tell this to the kids, and then while explaining something, slip a Spanish word in, or answer a question in English that they asked me in Spanish, and they wouldn’t notice that I was speaking a different language – none except the really sharp ones, the bright ones. As far as they were concerned, someone was talking nonsense to them, until suddenly, out of the blue, a little voice whispered a word in their ear that made sense, that required no effort, that they knew.

iii.

It’s difficult to imagine secondary education in Spain for the American reader until you see, in black & white, the differences: High school does not exist in Andalucía. From 11 to 16, you attend secondary, and then maybe you go to the bachilerato, work your ass off, and go to the university to study one of the professions (doctor, lawyer, professor), or the conservatory to study the arts. Otherwise there are two-year vocational training schools. There are no sports in Spanish schools – no jocks, no lettermen, no cheerleaders, no raffles for new varsity uniforms, no college teams to have questionable scholarships & communications majors for. Sports in Andalucía are community-based – every town & pueblo has its local youth fútbol team, and it continues like that, club sports, up through the divisions. No high school car culture, no parking in parks overlooking the city to make out, and, with a drinking age of 16, no fake IDs or house parties.

These are my challenges: No pedagogical culture of spoken or aural English; classroom management, as symbolized by little firecrackers and maybe by the sullen kid near the window whose notebook is decorated with swastikas; my own lack of formal experience; - but maybe most important, a class full of kids, many of whom aren’t going to college, who will terminate their formal education at 16, pick up partwork in the olive groves, get jobs as mechanics, electricians, hairdressers, maybe half of whom have never traveled outside of Andalucía. Why should they think to care about English?

On the other hand, I have my compensations. Roughly half of my classroom hours each week are with 1º de ESO, the only year to be fully bilingual at the insituto, in its first year of bilingual education. I teach music & natural sciences for 50 minutes, once a week each; two sections of 1º Íngles (A & B), and a Thursday afternoon class called activadades en íngles, where, my Emerson readers will be happy to know, I usually put on WERS streamed online in the background.

Fully bilingual classes started only this week, so pedagogy is being worked out live on the ground. Last week, I acted like a zombie, a pirate, a princess, & a werewolf for my Halloween mime guessing game, and threw out my back on Thursday with my ninja impression. There are blocks of text recognition to match to the correct picture of the planets in natural sciences. Today I sang the “Do Re Mi” song from The Sound of Musicand tried to explain what a “pun” is. Every week, I make news headlines in 26 pt. Georgia Bold for the English corner posted on red construction paper at the top of the stairs.

My kids in 1º de ESO, despite everything I’ve written so far, are uniformly a pleasure, and well-behaved to an extraordinary degree, & better at English than anyone else in the school.

One month, un més

As of today I’ve been in Spain for a full month. Every day is the longest I’ve ever lived outside the country.

So it seems appropriate today to transcribe here my first day of school, on Monday, 5 October, that is scrawled right now in blue pen inside my notebook, artifact of the notes I took on the bus. As of that morning, I don’t know what classes I will be teaching, where my school is, what the countryside looks like, or where anything is. I haven’t changed a word.

8:15 a.m. My first day. Walked for almost an hour in the predawn, the sky blue & orange. A man clapped the birds out of the trees – in the morning they sing incessantly from the branches lining the Gran Eje. Writing in English might be a way to survive all of this.

So – first day. Walked a mile, two, sweating by the end, worried I wouldn’t make my bus. Spilled coffee all over the stainless steel counter of the bus station diner, & forgot to order chocolate for dipping with my churros. An old lady at the diner apologized for me: La mala mañana, she said, & shook her head as I gulped down hot the second consolation cup poured for me wordlessly by the sighing man in spectacles who worked the espresso machine. The churros were dry & fried & without chocolate they left me feeling queasy; I couldn’t finish them.

Next to me an old man came in for a morning glass of anis liquor & drank it in two sips & then took a glass of water.

I asked the bus driver twice to make sure it was the right one for Bédmar, walked out, checked the sign on the front, walked back in. The second time he gave me a look and said, “I took your ticket, right? I wouldn’t have let you on if this wasn’t the bus for Bédmar!”

Remember these moments. They don’t come again. This is a good thing.

8:41. The aútobus is playing “Bleeding Love” on the radio. A muddy, drought-emptied riverbed. Burning brush between the olive trees. Open fire in daylight always looks out of place. Geometric rows of olive trees, perfectly straight, stippling the hills. They cut right through the stone ruins of one ancient farmhouse, I cannot tell from which century. The walls here have been built & rebuilt. Corrugated iron on the roof of one, laid over ancient stone. They harvest olives between November & February largely by hand, laying out tarps underneath and beating the branches with sticks.

8:47. Olive trees & cut traverse roads only. The landscape is almost entirely given over.

8:56. I am the only one left on the bus. (Wait – two abuelas just boarded.)

[After the first stop, at Mancha Real - retrospect].

8:58. Broken glass bottles inset on the top of the concrete walls backing these houses.

9:07. From the ridge, looking down below, a dozen small brush fires dotting the olive wilderness, smoke pluming. Low hazy fog.

9:08. The ayuntamiento labels the centro & other sights of even the smallest pueblo. (Jímena, in this case). Cliffside pueblos blancos. There is another ancient castle, a tiny one, ruined, right up against the church, which abuts the fortifications, at the highest point. What a god-damned lookout. The entire valley is spread out below like a rumpled bedsheet.

- Cliffside garden paths.

- Bédmar a valley town, I think? I still don’t see it. The road winds. It is hidden behind hills.

- THERE it is. 9:18 a.m. Low elevation, but built into the side of the biggest mountain around. The castle is a little up the side of the slope – Scratch low elevation. It’s higher than I thought.

- Bédmar: Municipio de Olivio. So says a painted tile sign at the park at the foot of the hill. The driver honks and waves at a man in blue coveralls filling water in a bucket.

Después. Asked directions in succession, as in a fairytale, of a shambling pensioner, a man with a glass eye, & three grandmothers, who mumbled Buenos días together; each replied in an incomprehensible local dialect. The village is indifferently windswept & dilapidated & kind of beautiful. I eventually find my school. The chemistry teacher jokes heartily with me – I don’t understand him – & wears constantly a white labcoat.

First class: 1º de ESO. Sixteen students, mostly 11-12 yr. olds, with two repeating & disruptive 13s. Colors, numbers, “How are you?”, “What is your name?”, & lots, lots of Spanish. Helped two teachers in the lounge with music & natural sciences, which apparently are my bilingual classes. Was given the tour. Drove back with a teacher & talked Spanish for perhaps half an hour.

James Sligh, day one: Teacher of English, music, & natural sciences, & sometime auxiliar de communicación. What on earth have I gotten myself into?