TEFLees in Spain

Sometimes it takes just the smallest bit of encouragement to turn you day around. This morning my 9 o’clock class was a perfect example. When I woke up it seemed pretty nice out – a bit chilly for this Floridian, but nothing I couldn’t handle. So I hopped on the metro and rode over to my class on the east side of the city. Upon exiting the metro however, the weather took an unexpected change for the worse. Rain started pouring down and the howling wind started to hammer those tiny freezing rain drops into my face like icy nails. To make things worse I still had all day to go, and no umbrella!

Imagine my relief when I arrived in the warm, dry, classroom. I began their lesson as I always do – with the expression of the day. “It’s going to be a hell of a day,” I wrote up on the board. “What do you think this means?”

“It’s going to be a very hard day,” answered one of the students.

“Very good, Loreto,” I said, before moving into the day’s lesson.

After about twenty minutes or so, Raphael, the company’s marketing director, suddenly knocked his coffee all over the table. Startled, he looked at the coffee, then looked up at me, then looked at the board behind me, and in his thick Spanish accent and with a straight, serious face, he looked at me and said, “It’s going to be a hell of a day!”

Needless to say, the class burst into a fit of laughter, and from there all my annoyances over the dreary weather melted away. For the rest of the day, while battling through the cold wind and rain, I kept on going back to that moment from this morning, and remembered that sometimes you’ve just got to laugh in the face of your rainy days.