TEFLees in Spain

So what’s the big deal? You might be wondering. My roommate and I happen to have similar taste in cell phone color selection - whatever. It’s not really that big a deal, I know, but it’s a guy thing. Whenever we go out, we’ve got our matching pink phones to go along. If we go to the bar together, we’re both on our pink phones. When we’re on the metro, restaurants, etc. - we get looks. Not that this matters, really. But Madrid is a very diverse city in more ways than one, and it would just be nice to not have to explain myself every time I meet someone new – “Oh, yeah, I have a pink phone – no, it’s not like that – yes, my Spanish really is that bad” – and blah blah blah.

This is especially true with all of my Spanish classes. They’re first impression of me on the first day of class is always – teacher has a pink phone. I don’t have a watch and none of my classrooms have clocks, so I have to check my phone for the time, and I usually start all of my first classes with the explanation of my phone mishap, just so they don’t get the wrong idea. It’s acted as a great ice breaker, actually. It gives them a good laugh and calms those first day jitters and awkward getting to know you chit chat. Even now, after a month and a half of teaching, I get at least one comment a week per class about my phone – and you’ll learn quickly: one extra laugh per class is definitely worth the embarrassment.

Coming here with a clean slate as far as Spanish speaking is concerned hasn’t been nearly as bad as I’d first thought it was going to be. I’ve taken the time to study on my own whenever I’m on a lengthy metro ride or in the time spent waiting for my students to arrive (an extra fifteen to thirty minutes per class, guaranteed). I think I’ve picked up quite a bit in my first few months abroad, but like I said, when I first arrived on Spanish soil, my vocabulary was definitely still in its infant stage.

If this is the case with you, no problem. You can get around fine, the trainers at TT will do everything they can to help you out and guide you with whatever your situation may be, but if you decide to purchase a cell phone on your own, make sure that you’ve got a solid grasp on Spanish linguistics. I on the other hand, had to learn the hard way.

During the third week of the course, my roommate (a friend of mine from home) and I, decided that it was finally time to get our Spanish cell phones. So we headed over to the nearby supermarket (where apparently you can buy phones) and did tried our best to negotiate the deal. We both agreed that we wanted the cheapest phone possible as long as it had a camera, and after a lot of frustrated finger pointing and Spanglish, we finally completed the cash transaction.

With a sense of accomplishment and relief to now be plugged in to the Spanish communication network (like a real Spaniard!), we hurried home to activate our phones and make some long overdue calls. As soon as I got into my room I began attacking the phone package like a kid on Christmas, tearing at the tape and ripping out the Styrofoam padding. When I finally made it down to the bottom, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that my phone was there alright – but it was Barbie pink! Well, lush pink is what it actually said on the sticker. Judging by the gasps of shock from the adjoining room, my roommate had just discovered the same…

There’s nothing like a good surprise to revitalize you during the teaching day. Big or small, it makes no difference – it’s just one of those little things that stays in the back of your mind throughout the rest of the day that spurs you on and keeps you positive. Today this surprise came in the form of a class conversation.

One of my students, Sylvia, started the year off very shy and quiet, and I’ve been pulling teeth trying to get her to come out of her shell and speak with confidence, as I know she knows a lot but speaks very little. In the beginning of class today though, when we were all saying hello and talking about our weekends, she finally piped up. One of the students mentioned video games, and it was like a switch had been flipped.

“I like to play video games,” she said.

“What games do you like to play?” I asked, expecting her to say something generic like Super Mario Brothers.

She paused for a few seconds, thinking about what to say, before continuing. “I like to play video games where you kill people.”

Okay, I thought. So this sweet, little, quiet, married woman in her mid thirties, who never says much, also happens to have a thirst for blood. Interesting. “Go on,” I encouraged, intrigued and wanting to know what next would come out of her mouth.

“Yes, I like very much to fight the other people and when I kill them with my…how do you say? Um…” she then made a slashing movement with her hands like she was wielding a sword. “Like in the movie Kill Bill?” She asked.

“Ah, yes,” I answered, “a sword.”

“Yes, a sword. When I kill everyone with my sword, I get to move on to the next…to the next…ugh. How do you say? Um…oh – level!

“Okay, very good Silvia!” I encouraged, thinking she was finished.

“I also like to play another game, I don’t know how to say the name, but you have a gun and you have to run around and kill zoombies.”

“Zoombies?” I asked, in challenge to her slight mistake.

“No, not zoombies,” she corrected. “Zombies. And when you shoot them, there is a lot of blood, and sometimes their head goes bwah!” she exclaimed, making an explosive gesture with her hands.

“Wow, that’s really interesting, Silvia. Thank you for sharing,” I replied, trying not to laugh as I imagined her glued to the tv, eyes squinting in concentration as she rampaged through the zombie-riddled streets, popping off rounds and squealing with delight over the showers of raining zombie blood and exploding heads. “Does anyone else have any other violent hobbies they’d like to share?”

Just because I come from a place where football is a game where only one out of fifty players actually uses his feet, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate its European counterpart. Yes, we may call it soccer in that land across the sea, but I still have an avid interest in the sport thanks to my childhood video game hobby. If it weren’t for that, I’d basically know nothing about the game. I’d probably still think that you kick the ball with your toe, that every player runs to the ball no matter where it is on the field like a huddle of little kids, and that a pitch is something that only relates to America’s national pastime of baseball.

Fortunately I’ve been enlightened however, and so it was an awesome moment when I realized that I’d be moving to a city that is home to one of the best futbol teams on the planet. I’ve been here for just over three months though, and the closest I’ve come to entering Santiago Bernabeu Stadium where Real Madrid plays, is standing tip toe at the gate, trying to sneak a peak at the pitch. There’s been a list of excuses as long as my arm for this: I don’t have sufficient funds, I don’t have enough time, I don’t know how to go about buying tickets, etc. But all of these excuses flew out the window today during my noon class.

I started this one to one tutoring session about three weeks ago with this 25 year old guy who, like me, is straight out of college. We hit it off immediately as we quickly identified our common ground in the first minutes of our first class: “So, Antonio. What do you like to do in your free time?”

“Well, I like beer…and football,” he answered without hesitation.

“I think we’re going to get along just fine, amigo.”

I then came to discover that this student also happens to be a season ticket holder for Real Madrid, and goes to nearly all of the games. I didn’t want to pry, but I heard the opportunity knocking, so I offered to take some tickets off his hands in case he was ever in need of some seat occupants. He readily agreed that it was no problem – he’d hook me up as soon as he got the chance. But, this being Spain, I took his consenting with a grain of salt.

Oh yes, me of little faith. Well all of my doubts were put to rest today when Antonio walked in to class. After salutations were exchanged, he asked, “What are you doing next Wednesday?”

“I have no idea,” I answered. “I never think that far ahead.”

“I have four tickets to the Real Madrid game – do you want them?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “You can take your friends. I’m not going to be able to go to this game.”

“I don’t know what to say, but…thank you!”

It’s always great being able to get a good laugh out of work. Any of you teachers will know after a couple weeks on the grind that Spanish pronunciation and confused translations often lead to a good giggle or two. Take, for instance, my Monday evening student. He’s the marketing director of a mid-sized company, and I can tell by his apartment where our classes are held that they want to keep him in that position for a while.

So during one of our many conversations during class, we somehow got onto the subject of his family. I was following along, listening to his pronunciation and correcting him here and there, when he said something that made me do a double take.

“Yes,” he confessed, “Raul is my love-daddy.”

“Your what?” I asked in confusion, remembering that his wife and child were in the next room.

“He is my love daddy,” he repeated, with calm confidence.

“Um, I don’t, uh,” I stammered, searching for an answer. Hey, his personal life after all, is none of my business. What we do in class for that hour and a half only is my business – but who am I to judge? So he has a love daddy on the side – whatever. I guess that’s what they do in Spain. I mentioned a couple blogs back about learning from our differences…

Anyway, so I got my composure back, and decided to handle this in a mature and worldly wise way. “So, Raul is your love daddy,” I answered, not wanting to pry. “What’s another way to say that phrase?”

“I don’t know…He is the father…” he paused to think. “He is the father of my…” Oh, God, I thought, here it comes. “He is the father of my wife.”

“Ohhhhhh,” I replied, trying to maintain my poker face. “He’s your father in law.”

“Yes. My father in law,” he repeated.

“Of course.” He must have confused the words law and love, with a daddy thrown in there instead. I get it now.

“What did you think I meant?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I answered, fighting back a smile. “Anyway, let’s get back to those phrasal verbs, shall we?”

On the first day of TT’s TEFL class, we were given a valuable piece of advice: don’t work on Fridays. The aspect of a four day work week is something unheard of back in the States, so just the idea of it was enough to make me shift doubtfully in my desk. “You can work Fridays, of course, if you want,” Natasha informed us, “but no one else will be working of Fridays, and Thursday is the night where most people go out. So when all of your friends are enjoying their tapas, you’ll be getting ready for bed.” I for one would certainly hate to be left out…

So as soon as I started interviewing with agencies who knew I was still wet behind the ears, and who were also offering me nothing but classes that landed on Fridays, I had to make a decision. The angel on my left shoulder told me that not working on Fridays was a lazy thing to do. I could make a good extra chunk of change by taking these classes that would be great to put into savings for a rainy day. On the other shoulder, the devil was telling me differently. You came here to travel – having three day weekends will easily allow you to do this. Think about the places you’ll go! Think about how much faster the week will go by! You didn’t move to Europe to work like a madman – you came to explore, and you can’t explore without sufficient free time!

It seemed like a no brainer, but I didn’t make a decision either way at first. I had to make sure that all of my bills could be paid with more money to spare for travel expenses. So I did the math. Before coming, the kind people at TT informed me that most teachers work between 18-24 hours or so, at 15 Euros per hour as the absolute minimum. With rent coming in somewhere over 400, and my knowledge of Madrid’s crazy cheap grocery prices, I made the final decision – three day weekends, here I come!

Since then I’ve come to realize all the great things about my four day work week. First of all, it’s much more symmetrical. You get done with Monday’s classes, and you think, “Alright – first quarter is over!” Tuesday night comes around and you’re already halfway home, and then Wednesday comes – that dreary mid week day that I’ve never before looked forward to – and it’s like, “Bam!” tomorrow’s the last day of the work week. You know that fluttery excited feeling you get when you leave work on the Thursday night of a five day work week? When all you can think about is that tomorrow is Friday and therefore the weekend is so close you can smell it? That’s exactly how I feel on Wednesday now- they’ve become the new Thursday. Time already flies by enough when you’re staying busy with teaching, but add in this factor and your weeks become a blur until the weekends, when I swear time seems to just kind of crawl along like a senile Spaniard on the sidewalk. It’s awesome.

It’s taken me about a month of teaching, but I’ve finally realized one thing: my students have to improve their pronunciation. This is not at simple as it may appear. Okay, so maybe I’ll just say a word loud and slow, emphasizing the key sounds. Have the students repeat until they get it. Sounds easy, yes?

As I’ve discovered, this is not always the case. The more advanced classes get it with no problem. Those students have been studying English their whole lives and are toeing the ever elusive fluency line. Most of my students on the other hand, are entering into their third or fourth year of English, and still have a real struggle with some of our sounds. We take it for granted, of course. How can this really be difficult? We don’t have to roll our tongues with the Spanish “r” sounds or make the throaty French “r”. Those are tough. But try and teach an intermediate student to pronounce “judged”, and you’ll be thinking differently. I recently spent a solid half hour on this one word alone.

Me: “Okay Pilar. Try it: j-udge-d.”
Pilar: “J-udge-ed.”
Me: “There’s only one syllable, Pilar. Try it again: j-udge-d.”
Pilar: “J-udge-ed”

As you can image, this went on for some time before I humbly accepted defeat. That little “d” sound at the end is such a pain! At least she had a good sense of humor about it, and we were both able to laugh through the ordeal.

Thankfully practice has made perfect, though. It may have taken two straight weeks of trying, but she’s finally gotten it. One word down, a million to go. Thank you, repetition technique!

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.

You’ll soon learn after your first time in front of a classroom, that teaching English is not always as easy as you’d think. Okay, I’ve been speaking this language for over two decades now – I reckon I’ve got a strong grasp of its concepts and ideas. But then again, how do you explain when to use “at” instead of “on?” What’s the difference between “this” and “that?” Ouch. Grammar smarts sometimes. Thankfully I’ve been trained to handle such situations…
On my road to understanding our shared language and teaching it to non-native speakers, these types of questions are the ones you hope don’t get asked. Can’t we just hang out for a couple hours and have a conversation in English? Can’t we just sit around and talk about our weekends? That’s easy to do, yes. But that’s not what it’s all about. We all know that as teachers, we’re not just walking in, reading from the book, and giving out grades. The large majority of us are teaching businessmen and women whose promotion opportunities and job security depend on them learning to speak English more fluently. In an increasingly global economy, this is their key to success. Our students choose to take our classes. This isn’t a mandatory high school history class. There are no grades. There are no assigned seats. The students here need our help to obtain promotions that will improve their lives and send their kids to college.
And while we all have our favorite students and classes, whenever class is finished, no matter which group, we can always leave with a sense of accomplishment. Maybe at the beginning of class, a student couldn’t properly introduce himself. But by the end, they’re shaking hands and making great first impressions.
Students will surely learn a great deal from you, no matter what. But how about the other way around? We go in and listen to our students talk about their pasts. They talk about their future - their fears, their hopes. They share their lives with us, and it’s mushy and sentimental, I know, but even after one short month of teaching, I already feel a great connection with my students. I feel like I’ve learned just as much as they have. That’s the immersion in culture that I came here for. It’s not something you learn back home – watching the Travel Channel or reading books. It’s hands on and real. And it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

What do you get when a Floridian takes weather advice from a Brit? A freezing Madrileño! Unfortunately, when it comes to cold weather, I’m not exactly an Eskimo. Having never lived in a place with more than 2 seasons (Florida=hot for 8 months, warm for 4), this should put an interesting spin on my first year abroad. At least I’m not in Russia…
I have found the weather to be quite pleasant thus far though. Yes, I have awoken on a few mornings, confused by the October chill (it’s still hitting 90 in Florida). But it’s a nice change for me. Hey, we all come here to experience new things, and cold weather is definitely new to me.
Some people might think it’s crazy to leave the Floridian sunshine behind. Personally, I’m not missing it too much. The humidity of central Florida (central means no sea breeze) is enough to steam a whole bushel of oysters on an August afternoon. A sauna is a place you’re supposed to go to, not live in. When I arrived in Madrid at the beginning of August (which is supposed to be the hottest month of the year here) I heard people complaining about the heat for about four weeks straight, but I could never understand it. There’s no humidity here!
Okay, so the summer and fall have been great so far, but what about winter? No, I can’t write from experience, but from what I’ve heard from the two dozen or so people who I’ve asked, is that it only dips below freezing every now and then, and it snows maybe every couple of years in the city, but never enough to stick. The days are always bright and clear - perfect for an afternoon stroll to show off your fashionable European shades; and the only precaution one must take to keep Jack Frost from nipping at your nose is to wear something thick enough to block the swirling gusts of wind whipping through the narrow streets.
As for me, keeping in mind the baggage weight limit situation, I naively decided that cold weather gear would not be a necessity in Spain. After all, I guess I may as well live up to at least one American stereotype, and pay for my horrible lack of geographical knowledge. I honestly thought Spain was somewhere near Floridian latitudes! Oh well, sometimes lessons have to be learned the hard way, but at least now I get to buy some new, hip, and trendy European threads to keep me warm for the winter.
All in all though, the weather has rocked so far. I love the crisp nights and the cool, breezy afternoons. I love waking up to a chilly morning under a warm blanket and taking a hot shower. Café solo’s are so much better in cold weather! It’s refreshing and it’s different and I’m trying to learn to love it as much as I already love this wonderful city.