Teaching English

At Haverford, "free time" is a dirty word (well, words). No one ever has any, and if they do, it must be secretly and guiltily consumed, like the Milke bar in my desk that Rocio doesn't know about. Every moment spent watching Netflix, reading a magazine, or taking a nap comes with the sinking feeling that there is something else you should probably be doing. Here in Spain, free time is plentiful. The days are long and sunny, and there is abundant time to relax and hang out with friends. The problem is that mentally, I am still stuck at Haverford. Every time I am not doing something "productive," I feel guilty. How can I spend a precious moment of my time in Spain watching Netflix? What am I missing out on by taking a nap? I don't really know what to do with free time.

Luckily, I don't really have to worry about that anymore because last week, my activities started. I am helping teach English in a local school and also giving private English lessons. As an education minor, I am very interested in seeing how the Spanish school system works and observing the differences between Spanish and American education. The school I am working at is a private Catholic school 5 minutes from my apartment (actually, private Catholic school is a tautology, all the private schools here are Catholic). It goes from preschool to grade 12. All grades take English class, and the science and art classes are taught in English. The past week, I have been observing a variety of different classes, from a 2nd grade science class to an 11th grade english class. School here is pretty much the same. There are classrooms and desks and inspirational posters. There are some pedagogical differences, but I will save those for another time. The real difference is that I am an English speaker learning Spanish and they are Spanish speakers learning English. I also get to see this when I tutor three adorable Spanish kids every week. Seeing people learn English provides endless fascination. Things of note:

• To remind the kids of how to say "how," the 2nd grade teacher says "how, como un indio" (like an Indian) and makes a vaguely racist hand gesture. Apparently Spaniards think this is how Native Americans sound. Columbus's legacy is strong.
• The teachers are not native speakers, and teach the kids English words in their thick Spanish accents. Yesterday the kids learned about "blude" (blood) and today they talked about the "reteena" (retina).
• Spanish kids learn British english, so half the time I don't even understand what their books are talking about because it is practically a different language.
• Today a kid was asked about the 5 senses and had to say something that tasted sweet. He answered "chupito." The teacher turned to me and said "How do you say this in English, when you have a very small glass of alcohol?" I taught the class the word "shot." They are 8.
• Spanish girls love Violetta (the Spanish Disney Channel star), Frozen, and One Direction.
• U.S. places that Spanish kids know: New York, Chicago, Miami, and California
• Real question I was asked: "Do you own a gun?"
• Spanish people put an e in front of the s in some words but not others. They "espeak espanish" but live in "seville." I think it's something to do with consonants vs vowels after the s.

Seeing how Spanish students learn English has me feeling all sorts of ways about my own language learning process. One one hand, seeing the mistakes they make in English makes me feel better about making mistakes in Spanish, because after all, learning a new language is hard. Also, hearing the teacher's accents makes me feel better because they are getting paid to teach English and still make mistakes and have issues with pronunciation. On the other hand, my Spanish is about the level of the 7th grade's English. This is sad. The high schoolers are basically fluent and here I am, in my third year of college and living in Spain, struggling to form a proper sentence. When I told this to Dan, he pointed out that they have been learning English since preschool, and I didn't start until 6th grade. This brings up an interesting point: why do we start languages so late in the US? No wonder we are all hopeless at them. If we all started in kindergarten, I wouldn't be feeling so terrible about myself right now. When I tutor, I spend 2 hours correcting kids on very minor mistakes in their English, then proceed to speak with their mother in embarrassingly broken Spanish. I feel ashamed of my Spanish.

Another time I will talk about the complicated relationship I have with the Spanish language, but for now, I must nap.