Interesting Day

Today school was a bit painful anyways since my sunburn still prevented me from walking normally, but it was also painful because it was the day before the 6^th grade oral English exam, which meant that we spent almost the entire day practicing the same test with the 6^th graders. I of course got stuck with a group of seven 12year old boys. Whoever put the 7 of them together in a group wasn’t thinking. I gave up trying to control all of them (between turning off the lights, opening the windows, carrying their seats into the bathroom, asking me what “mother f***er” meant, etc.) as long as one of them was practicing the test with me (and that one kept rotating) I didn’t care. Eventually it got to the point where we were just talking about sports and they taught me the game they all play during recess. Honestly I know they’re all going to do more than fine on the exam and we were speaking in English (with prompting) so I didn’t care that we’d gotten off topic because at least they were all engaged in the conversation rather than drawing on the desks and themselves with a large green marker they had found. Finally we finished practicing and went to the last class of the day. I had 4^th grade (one of my favorite classes) and several kids immediately asked me if I had gone to the beach or told me they noticed I was burnt- not a single one of my 6^th graders mentioned anything to me about it. I knew I liked that 4^th grade class for a reason! Speaking of sunburn, the Spanish remedy is to put vinegar on the burn, several Spaniards told me that today. Thanks for the advice but 1) I don’t have vinegar and 2) I’ll stick to my aloe lotion since I finally have some.

I really enjoying talking to the parents of the kids I tutor because I actually learn a lot of interesting things about Spain, the Spanish, how they think, etc. Today I was talking with one of the mothers about the English exams. She completely hates them and thinks they are a waste of time- how can a child’s future be determined by one exam. The exams decide if the 6^th graders go to a normal high school or a bilingual high school (and hence have a much better grasp on English for future endeavors), no matter what their performance is in their classes at school. She told me that Alcala is trying to (and should next year) have all bilingual elementary schools. Meaning every single child in Alcala will attend a bilingual elementary school. The problem, she told me, is that they keep expanding the elementary schools, but not the high schools (there’s no middle school). She said the reason is that there aren’t qualified teachers to teach at bilingual high schools, but they should invest in getting qualified teachers because there’s no point for a child to spend 9years at a bilingual elementary school (they start when they’re 3 years old) only to go to a normal high school and lose all the English they’d been taught. It was interesting hearing her argument and honestly I agree with basically everything she said.

Another issue also came to mind- more bilingual schools mean more assistants. They’ve been increasing the number of assistants every year since the program started 7years ago, but they’ve been having financial troubles for the past 3 years at least. My coordinator said that our school has received funds late for the past three years, but until this year has been able to use its private funds to pay the salaries of the assistants (and just be reimbursed by the government). However, this past month was the first time they didn’t have the funds to pay us and hadn’t received our salaries from the government so on April 28^th, pay day, they told us we weren’t going to be paid, and in fact wouldn’t be paid until they received the funds from the government. Last time they at least gave us a month’s warning, this time it was out of the blue, on the day we were supposed to receive our monthly income. So yes, as of now I’m free labor… There hasn’t been any progress in the past few days, but if it doesn’t sound like we’re going to get paid in the next week or so I’m thinking of quitting and just traveling for the next few weeks till I go home. I don’t have enough euros to pay rent, so if I’m going to have to spend dollars I might as well spend them on something I enjoy doing. We’ll see how things work out. Hopefully I’ll get paid sometime this week; regardless, I’ll keep updating as the situation requires!