You are not just an English teacher.

The worst class is always the “Three levels class”. I can handle two levels of English. I can handle a very naughty kid if the others have the same level. Last year I had this little kid who was horribly misbehaved, but since he was the only one in his class, it was quite easy to enlist the other as “teachers” to help him. His classmates felt proud of being “authority”, and he was piqued into working harder so he could catch up with them. I turned a class trouble into wonderful reviewing practice. I was pretty proud of that one.

But the horror is always the class with children of three different ages and three different levels of knowledge of the subject. If I follow the book, some get lost and others distracted. When I am trying to help the one who is one or two years younger, the others start chatting, standing up or moving through the room. When I try to advance a bit faster so the older ones don’t get bored and pay attention, the youngest gets lost.

It happened last year. This year, it’s happening again. You must have guessed at this point that this is the class which drove me to extreme lengths to get them motivated.

This year, the youngest one is a girl with crazy mood swings. I am quite the logical person, and I was taught to think logically from a young age. That is a problem because I am used to being surrounded with highly logical people. When this girl gets angry or sad or frustrated, there is nothing you can do with her: she will refuse to open her book, will refuse to participate, will voice her constant anger… If I try to reason with her, normally to no avail, her brother tells me: ‘Don’t bother, she’s like that’.

Unluckily, it is a rare class that does not see V suffering a severe disappointment about something, and therefore getting all moody, sulky, non-collaborative, defiant and proud of it all. As if the world owed her to stop just because she feels bad.

Her brother’s constant reminder whenever I try to reason with her, which apparently means “leave her alone, there’s nothing you can do about it and actually at home we have given up on that” makes me feel slightly less responsible, but not much. These are little kids: I know I must give them back with a higher knowledge of English than they had at the beginning of the year, but I guess their education as human beings is just as important.

Today I just had to tell her:

‘V, I just cannot go on interrupting the class whenever you feel sad or angry or annoyed. Nowadays people tolerate it from you because you are a child, but in the future you cannot do that. You cannot skip classes or exams because you feel bad. If you behave that way in a job, you will lose it, and a job is what allows you to eat.’ I didn’t know how to go on… this is an eight year old in a class with slightly older children. ‘Look, if you are mad and you just do this’ (I frown, look grumpy and cross my arms over my chest to illustrate the act of reinforcing the anger) ‘you just get madder and feel worse. I know it’s difficult, but maybe next time you are angry or sad you can try to … take a deep breath and do something. And at least not get even angrier. It’s hard, but you can try. Because in the end it’s going to be better for you. It doesn’t make you happy to stay two hours angry.’ And then I moved on, because it was too much for such a young girl… although at least she was listening to me intently, and looking and me with piercing eyes during the whole speech. But I had to go back to English (that speech had to be done in Spanish) and it was enough of an interruption.

When her brother said: ‘Teacher, you are not just an English teacher… You are… ‘ He didn’t find the words, but I felt stupidly grateful for the fact that he had noticed my efforts and acknowledged them. I tried to tone down the seriousness of the situation exclaiming: ‘Yay! I’m a philosopher! A philosopher is me!’

And then we went back to the map of Duke Vlad’s castle. Yes, I am letting them explore the castle, and I am drawing the place as they open doors and telling them what they find. So I can ask them where they are going to and what they do, and they can answer in English.

The poor things have found one hundred gold coins and and the castle armory, but haven’t ransacked the armory for all it’s worth.

Ah… the innocence of the first games…

My cat ate your homework.

That’s something I’ve had to say to some of my pupils once or twice, when they received their writings back with my annotations and some holes and bites. I’ve learned to not let the homework I’m correcting unsupervised on the table. Just as normally she drinks so little water that I fear she might suffer from dehydration, but she LOVES to drink from the glass where I clean my brushes (I don’t know what acrylics and watercolors have, but they must taste like cat’s cola), normally she doesn’t touch my sheets of paper, but she has a habit of biting my students’ homework. Maybe because I pay lots of attention to those? Do those pieces of paper contain some chemicals that remind her of stress or fear? I wonder if someone is investigating it somewhere…

Meet Celes, the homework-destroyer:

This photograph catches her personality perfectly. I wish I could think of some interesting meme with it.

This is from when I gave her the present of a cardboard box. I’m done with spending money on toys… she loves boxes.

Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to bigger projects. This one is taking far more time than I had foreseen, but it’s going to look great when it’s over (the longer side is more than a metre long). It’s acrylic on canvas, and this time it’s big. The photograph looks terrible because of the light and the mobile camera, but I’ll do a proper one once the piece is over. I bet it’s going to look great:

Offensive cultural differences, I

The last post I wrote about foul words has made me think a lot about cultural differences, what people find offensive and what people find honorable.

As I wrote before, in all my classes for people 14 or older, I always need to make a long speech warning the students against taking for granted that they can be as foul-mouthed in other countries as they are in Spain. I make the most of the lecture and also warn them about other cultural differences. For example, being gay and kissing their partners in a country where homosexuality might be forbidden. Or the story of the two idiots who went to Finland, of all places, and desecrated the Finnish flag, getting themselves fined and into detention. They usually find the discussion really funny, and some of the teens take the chance to ask information on English swear words. I satisfy their usually innocent curiosity, but warning them against swearing in English. If they need to swear, I recommend them to do it in Spanish. After all, when you are nervous, worried or scared, you revert naturally to your mother tongue. And in any case, I do not think they will ever find in the English language the vast amount of profanity you can find in Spanish. And when I write “profanity” in most cases it’s literally.

Spain has been a Catholic country during centuries. Except for those centuries in which it had been invaded by the Muslims and was a province of the Damascus caliphate, later the independent caliphate of Cordoba, later an assortment of tiny realms, and later… But I digress. The thing is, given the vast amount of power the catholic church has had in Spain, a good part of Spanish foul words are actually foul sentences against everything that is hold sacred by Christians, and specially catholicism. That is why, in Spain you can regularly hear curses such as “Me cago en Dios” (I shit on God), or any equivalent beginning with “me cago”… the victims can range from the Virgin, Jesus Christ, or “la leche” (milk). The ones about milk would need a longer explanation regarding mother’s milk.

Here, the tolerance towards what is politically incorrect is wide and vast. And there are widely accepted traditions that apparently count as something insulting or unbearable in the United States or the UK.

For example, apparently in the USA and the UK, a white man disguised as a black man with dark brown or black make-up is something really insulting that offends many people. Apparently, it has to do with “whitewashing”, or the tradition of never letting a non-white person get a starring role in movies or TV shows. That’s what I sort of understand, I can’t really admit I get it. And I can’t get it because a white man dressing up as a black person is something common… at least once a year.

Here in Spain, children do not get their Christmas presents the 25th of December, but the morning of the 6th of January. It is the “Día de Reyes” (Kings’ Day). The tradition comes from the Gospels, but it deviates from them, too.

According to one of the Gospels, Matthew if I remember correctly, a group of magi went to the place of Jesus’ birth, guided by a star. There, they made him gifts of gold, frakincense and myrrh.

This is clearly a case of syncretism, that is, influence between myths. The magi were priests of zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is another middle East religion that makes a clear distinction between good and evil, and also one which promises salvation after death. The three gifts are highly symbolic: gold, symbol of earthly ruling power; frankincense, which was burned in temples, as a symbol of divinity; myrrh, a healing ointment, as a symbol of humanity. Much as I like part of the message of the Gospels (and remember I specified the Gospels and did NOT include St. Paul or the Old Testament), Matthew seems to have been adorning the story a bit. But I digress.

Back on topic, that’s what the Bible says. The tradition made changes: of course, no mention about priests of another religion: the magi ended up being “Reyes Magos” or “Wizard Kings”. Tradition specified that the magi were three, and also gave them names: Melchor, Gaspar y Baltasar (Melchior, Casper and Balthazar). In the tradition, Baltasar happens to be black. I suppose it was a way of portraying the universalism of the Christian teachings. I wish it had something to do with the fact that the first Christian church (and I don’t mean the building, I mean the organization) was the Ethiopian, not the Roman one. Maybe it does, who knows?

When I asked my father if they were really wizards and where were their kingdoms, he told me “they weren’t wizards, but wise men. Almost no one could read back then, remember. And they weren’t kings, but they were dressed so richly that they were mistaken for kings”. I don’t know if that’s what the catholic tradition explained: it is the oral tradition as it got to me, from my father who was told by his parents.

In any case, since the Tres Reyes Magos spend all night from the 5th to the 6th of January delivering gifts (coal to naughty children), there is a parade in their honor the afternoon-evening of the 5th. I think the parade takes place in almost every town in Spain. A village would need to be really, really small to not have their parade, and then people would go to the nearest one to see it.

People pay to participate in these parades. They are organized mostly by private associations, and getting into the float for the honor of being looked at, wearing a nice dress or costume, and throwing vast amounts of candy at the crowd, doesn’t come cheap. I never got to be in a parade.

Among the floats, there can be many special ones, but the ones that people expect the most are the ones of the three wise kings. Normally they throw much more candy, in bigger handfuls. In some towns, the kings also launch toys, like balls, fake plastic cameras, toy windmills and such. Melchor’s float comes after the first third of the parade, Gaspar’s after the second third, more or less, and Baltasar’s normally closes it. In a sense, Baltasar’s is a place of honor. It’s normally the last one, the king has to launch lots of candy.

And most of the time (I’ve never seen it differently), Baltasar is portrayed by a typical Spaniard (white) painted black. In one big city, the cost for playing the role was 5 million pesetas, plus 30.000 in candy. That’s 30.000 euros and 1800 in candy, and that was more than ten years ago. It must be more expensive now. Maybe in a big city like Madrid or Barcelona there are black men well-off enough to participate and claim the role, and if I remember correctly, some rich footballer has done it some time.

However, it’s not normal. In places like Villanueva del Ariscal or Castilblanco de los Arroyos, Baltasar is going to be a white man in blackface.

I was wondering if Americans would find this offensive.

I have read about the culture of “whitewashing”… about how it was very hard in hollywood for black or Asian performers to get starring roles. I never understood it until an American friend recommended the excellent animation series “Avatar, the Last Airbender” (thank you, Tiffany!) and I then saw what they had done with the movie casting.

Oh, well… whenever Americans come to Spain and see Baltasar in the parade, I hope they understand that it’s a place of honor, and that people pay to get there.

It makes me wonder about what people might think about the penitents in la Semana Santa de Sevilla.

Seville’s Holy Week:

 

Source: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c82tiueakgwysm7/Captura%20de%20pantalla%202014-12-08%2021.05.40.png?dl=0

 

Source: https://espanglis.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/semana-santa-sevilla-seeing-is-believing/

Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/441402

 

I’ll talk about this one some other day…

Easy past simple exercise… and a story of failure.

(((The exercise is the images at the end, you can download it for free.)))

I try to motivate my students. I try to tell them why learning English is so important. I try to make them participate. I try to adapt the course materials to whatever their interests are. I try to get them involved.

I sometimes fail.

I had two very bad students last year. Not ignorant, but badly behaved. Luckily, since I work for a private school teaching English as an extracurricular, I work with classes that can range from 3 to 14 students. I’ve had 2 students sometimes. So if I have a very bad student, it is my duty to be able to manage and teach him despite himself. If I can’t manage one rowdy kid out of six, what kind of teacher am I? I am inexperienced (this is my second year teaching), but with the numbers I work with, failure should not be an option, and in case it is, it’s a dishonorable one.

This year I have a full class who is… noisy. The word is noisy. I have 6 kids in a 3 year range (eight to eleven). At least five of them had been going to extracurricular classes previously, so their level of English is sort of similar… only they brought a second eight year old with no experience in English whatsoever. Save for the classes at the state school. Which is more than no experience whatsoever, but by an extremely narrow margin.

Trying to maintain discipline is difficult because most of the time they really aren’t doing anything wrong. They just love to talk and tell stories. They want to tell everything they find interesting. They want to hear themselves speak, each others’ attention, my attention… and they don’t have enough level to do it in English.

I tried to catch their attention practising with songs. Not even the powerful “We are the champions” got the expected results (and it’s a song that all my previous students loved to sing out loud, catchy, great to practice with “to be”). But these students preferred to talk rather than listen to the music.

OK, let’s try games. Hangman. Too much noise and fight. Quiz contest. Too much noise, fights and verbal abuse between boys and girls. I just can’t believe only six kids can make so much noise. And I can’t get angry, because they aren’t misbehaving. They aren’t even naughty, one of them comes close but it’s not even that. They are just restless and noisy.

OK, let’s bring the artillery. Let’s prepare coloring activities and let them use THE pencil box after they’ve done the English exercises. I would have loved it when I was a child. Hey, I got The pencil box when I was an adult and I’m still amazed. I mean this one:

http://www.freestylephoto.biz/110011-Faber-Castell-Polychromos-Color-Pencil-Set-120-Pencils-in-Metal-Tin

To no avail. I was getting frustrated… Giving them prizes of candy has always been out of the question, ever since I got the job. Learning is a job and something good for them: they shouldn’t be paid for it. And sugar is a drug, specially at that age. If I need to use the eight year olds equivalent to crack in order to catch their attention, I do not deserve to teach.

Since they liked telling stories so much, I thought “Oh, well, stories it is”. I skipped the programme and the book, and begun teaching them the basics of the past simple and how to tell stories, so they could tell what they wanted in English, since making them stop talking out of turn and telling whatever came to their heads seemed far more difficult than teaching them grammar meant for kids between two and five years older.

That was difficult. It took time. It didn’t work very well. But it did work a bit.

I kept asking. They know what they like better than I do. They read books or play video games. They like fantasy.

Thus the “Story project” begun. I sat them down and started asking:

Imagine you live in a fantasy world.

What is your pet? Choices: dragon (depending on the color, I change their power), griffins, hippogriffs, unicorns, winged horses, phoenixes, three-headed dogs… whatever.

Who is your best friend? Choices: vampire, ghost, zombie, giant, troll, elf, wizard, mage, sorcerer, fairy, mermaid.

Where do you live? Palace, castle, treehouse, fortress, house, cottage, tower… and so on.

Where is your house? In the underworld, under the sea, in the Empire, in the forest, in the mountains…

That got them more or less attentive and more or less civil for an hour. Even if had to stop their “Mary Sueing” pretentions and not allow them one hundred dragons or armies or basically everything they asked for. They took notes about their characters, in the present tense. I took notes too.

The next class we tried to write the story and they, being so young, couldn’t offer anything beyond “we defeat the bad guy”.

So I went home and started writing the story and making pictures, with the notes about them I had taken. Making them the protagonists, of course. I did it quickly and it’s not very good… But the exercise did catch their attention, and they are learning the irregular verbs. The younger ones learn less, the older ones learn more, but they are learning and working together, interrupting less, asking more about the story, less about “What time is it?”. They don’t need a recess in the middle of the hour. It should have been a success.

And still, I lost the little one with no previous experience in English classes. She insisted that she didn’t understand and asked her parents to get out.

Now that’s a failure. My inability to manage four different levels of English in a class is galling. Those were SIX children. I cannot believe I didn’t manage to teach all of them at once. I need more practice with discipline and presence. I have failed, and I hate that. But at the beginning of the year, when I used to pay this girl more attention, the others lost all trace of proper behaviour. I tried to make them help her learn, something that has worked in other classes: to no avail. This tastes like ash in my mouth. Again, I will be helpful for any advice a more experienced teacher can give. I’m really depressed about how this ended up. I just did my very best and it turned out not to be enough. Therefore, my best needs to be better. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but if any experienced teacher can offer any advice, I’d be more than grateful.

My, that was long… and all this only to tell that the next class saw the story (they are older and are working with the past simple already) and they wanted to work with it. I thought someone else might find it useful, so I register it under creative commons, and am going to upload it in case anyone wants to use it. Feel free. Change the names if you need to.

And… I guess this goes without saying, but I am a non native English speaker who works as an English teacher. If you find any mistake in my writings, or something that sounds weird, please tell me! It’s really important.

Here are the images… I’m sorry they are not very good, I did everything in pencil. If I find the time I’ll clean them up a bit and re-upload them. Right now they can be used as both a grammar and coloring exercise. The problem is I did everything too quickly… and didn’t have much time to differentiate the two boys who share the name. If you use it with your students, you will probably want to erase the names and put others that are more exotic.

Needless to say, the story isn’t exactly original or catchy… Just in case any teacher was interested. Even if I did it quickly, I still put time and effort on it, so if someone else can use it, all the better. It’s not finished… I don’t have the next part because my students are still filling in the gaps of page eleven.

Hope your students like it. You probably won’t 😀

 

 

 

Foul Words.

Today at English class, level B1. A young student asks me:
‘Teacher, can you fail an exam because you used a swearword?’
Oh, this conversation again. Every year there is a point in which I must explain to my students that the vast amount of obscenity, foul language and profanity that is tolerated in Spain is rarely tolerated anywhere else, if at all. I explain to my teenaged or adult students that they simply cannot behave or insult in other countries the way they might do in Spain. I expected this conversation to be more or less the same.
‘Well, exams are usually formal, and swearwords are just the opposite. It depends on the word, what did you write?’, I ask.
‘Nigger’ he answers, the spitting image of cluelessness, with the genuinely puzzled expression of someone who has no idea what they did wrong.

Oh, mierda.

Now THAT has taken a long explanation, but I interrupted the class in order to give it.

Still, at the end he said:
‘I didn’t know if I should use black or “nigger”, but I had heard “nigger” in a song, and a black person singing, and it being used with other black people, so I thought it was right’. His confused look was endearing and funny at the same time. He had used old plain logic, and he was still coming to terms with the fact that not only it hadn’t work as expected, it had backfired with a vengeance.

Well, I can only say I thank god his teacher at school gave him a straight F so he came back to ask me and I could give a long explanation. This is a very fair, blue-eyed young boy from a little village in southern Spain. There are high chances he’s never seen a black person in the flesh before (he must have seen some immigrants in Cordoba, but I never saw a black person until I was 18, so I cannot be sure). I needed to give a quick class on USAmerican Political Correctness and History for him to start getting the point, and he was still a bit confused. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if he had chosen to apply his knowledge in New York or some part of the USAmerican soil… With his very fair looks (something few people expect from Spaniards, due to stereotyping), I fear he might have looked as a white supremacist, despite having, as all Spaniards, African, Arab, Celtic, Iberian, Roman, Germanic, Jewish and Nordic blood, at the very least.

In order to try to explain to him the strength of that word, I told him:
‘They avoid saying it by all means. They call it the “n-word”, white people just don’t pronounce it. It’s unspeakable.’
‘Like Voldemort?’

You just have to love this job 😀