Be prepared this is going to be a REALLY long one....

So I haven’t updated in awhile just because I started work this week. I had Orientation Monday and Tuesday and then today, Wednesday, I went to visit my school to meet everyone. Orientation was ummm….orientation. The first day Magdelena, the woman in charge of this entire program, spent the morning telling us about everything…..in Spanish! So I spent the entire morning trying to decipher how I was going to be paid, how I got my insurance, what I would be doing for the next year, all in Spanish. That was a mental workout to say the least. The only real comment I have about orientation is that either I am easily aggravated or Americans are just aggravating. All the other Americans were just asking useless questions. I am extremely happy I have already found my friends and surrogate family (Alissa, Erica, Jasmine, Tom, and Meagan). The funny thing is that my family here is just like family in general. Family is never chosen, it just happens…

Besides my aggravation with Americans, the orientation was overall really informative and made me excited about teaching this next year. The program I am doing is in its 6^th year. About 8 years ago the EU wanted each country to design a program in their schools that would make learning at least 2, preferably 3 languages mandatory. So now the way it works is that ½ of the curriculum in all schools is in English. One of which is science. So all their education in science is in English and never learn any science words in Spanish. They do this because it is one thing to have a foreign language class, but another to make English a necessity to learn science, which is a part of the standard curriculum. The other classes taught only in English are art, music, and PE. Something like teaching science in a foreign language would never happen in the states…..

So today I went to my school to meet the director and the other teachers in my school. Paula took us through the school to meet some of the other English teachers and they all gave us dos besos but what was funny is that one teacher said she is afraid that the fear of swine flu is going to force them to stop kissing as a greeting. She seemed really upset about the prospect of not greeting people with besos…….I digress, back to topic!

Let me first give some visuals about my school. It is in a not-so-good part of town with graffiti all over the building (there is a lot of graffiti in Madrid for some reason, but not artsy-graffiti, just pure vandalism). Just imagine Brooklyn. So after being buzzed through this huge gate, I go in and meet Paula, the bilingual coordinator at the school. Her English is decent, very broken, but considered great for Spain. So we sat down with her and she explains that the children in the school really need any assistance that is available to them because a lot of them are immigrants, of lower social economic class, have lots of family problems, etc. She said it is not rare for our equivalent of social services to have to become involved in many of the children’s lives because of things teachers report.

Now Paula is extremely laid back and would probably be considered borderline hippie in the States. She is a great person, kind of crazy, loves to laugh, and just really enjoys life. She then lets us know that we get to make our own schedule (crazy right!) as long as we get our hours in, she has no problem with it. So after talking with me and one of the other new assistants, (the other assistant is 27 and spent the past 5 years being a sign-language interpreter in New Mexico) Paula took us over to the school buildings. The way the school is set up it is an open campus situated in a compound, so the buildings aren’t all connected. So we walk in the buildings and the first thing I see is the teachers standing outside a bathroom handing the kids toilet paper before they go into the bathroom. Then there is another teaching standing outside the door so as the kids come out of the bathroom and she puts anti-bacterial on their hands. So I am assuming that A) there is not toilet paper in the stalls and B) there is not soap in the bathrooms…..

So after meeting all the teachers we went into Paula’s classroom and they were about to change classes. So as the kids rush in she points kids out as the gypsy kids, or the slow ones, or the ones that are lazy. But it was just something so different for a teacher to point to some to kids and say “they are gypsies!”

The kids were sooo cute though and soo excited to ask us questions in English. It made me smile. The kids I talked to today were between age 7-9 and went around saying “hello my name is ___. I’m ____ years old. I’m from_____.” Every kid was able to do it too! They definitely have limited exposure to English so its great to say stuff all the time. So when the kids were leaving I said to each one “I will see you tomorrow” and the first few had no clue what I was saying, but by the end of the line the kids were saying “I will see you tomorrow Daniela”. I am overall really excited about starting work J J

Quote of the day: “if you’re walking down the street and tomatoes starting falling out of the trees, hold on to your belongings and don’t look up” US Consular General (as part of our orientation that Americans that work at the US Consulate in Madrid came and gave a speech about staying safe in Madrid. For those that might not be aware, petty theft and pick-pocketing is a really big problem in Madrid. So the consular general was telling us about an experience she had in Greece when some kids hung out in the trees and threw tomatoes from the trees while having some buddies on the ground to grab the purses and valuables while the tourist were looking to find where the tomatoes were coming from. True story.....