Urban cycling adventures

I’d been talking about trying to get to work by bike for a long while. The prospect, however, was a little daunting—somewhere around 20 kilometers of cycling through the urban wilderness of Madrid, the latter half of those kilometers crossing the multi-lane highways, mega shopping centers, and gated communities that make up the northern suburbs of the city. But earlier this month, the good people at En Bici por Madrid launched an initiative to help people find their route to work in the company of guides and on weekends, when things are quieter.

I emailed the bike bloggers quite last minute on Friday, but within a few hours they’d gotten back to me to say they had a route in mind from my house to my school and that we could meet early Saturday and try it out. That night I went to yoga class near Sol and left my bike locked up where I always do, and when I got out, my saddle had disappeared. How in the heck was I going to ride all that way without a seat? No fear: after a middle-of-the-night email to the guides, they showed up Saturday morning with an extra saddle in tow. Bless their cyclist hearts.

We had a lovely ride up to the northern limits of the city (the area around Chamartin/Plaza Castilla/metro Begoña), mainly via the quiet and hill-less calle Castelló and the super nice Colonia Cruz del Rayo. Then we began the tricky part, which took us past random empty fields (see left) and three cement factories near the village of Fuencarral, through the drab suburbiness of Montecarmelo, and finally across a pedestrian bridge where we had a splendid view of the smog beret that hovers over Madrid before getting trapped in the wilds of La Moraleja and finally finding a very roundabout way to get the short distance left to my school.

Needless to say, it took us something like an hour and 45 minutes to do the whole route (one way) to school, including our mishaps in the latter half. We got out of there pretty quickly and hustled back down to Lavapiés (1h 30m) to have some cañas.

The upshot of the experience is that when I go to school by bike, I’ll ride for 45 minutes through the city and leave my bike near metro Begoña to catch the interurbano bus that takes me directly to school. The other part just isn’t worth it.

A huge thanks to Aalto and MiguelS for being such enthusiastic and intrepid guides. ¡Sois la leche! (Here’s our track.)

Scenes from school

Making plans, fifth-grade style:

Girl 1 to Girl 2: “Llámame. O dile a tu madre que llame a la mía.”
(Call me. Or tell your mom to call mine.)

Sad truths revealed in exams:

Write questions. Then write true answers.

3. your dad / have lunch / at home yesterday?

Did your dad have lunch at home yesterday?
I don’t know because he is in Germany.

Snow day

It snowed yesterday evening through the wee hours this morning and, though there can’t be more than 3 inches on the ground, it wreaked havoc on life as we know it in Madrid. Result? Esperanza Aguirre, beloved president of the Comunidad de Madrid, canceled school.

When I went to bed last night and the snow was still falling and sticking I guessed something like this would have to happen. The Monday before winter break was also a snowy mess, but I had a second period substitution and slogged my way into school only to spend the morning entertaining the kids with games and a movie before they sent everyone (well, the few of us there) home. It hadn’t seemed like much snow that time, and was actually quite a slushy mess because it started to rain, but Madrid is completely unprepared for situations like this. I didn’t see a single plow or salt truck that day.

This time I was prepared for Madrid’s utter un-preparedness and, since I normally go in a bit later on Mondays, texted a coworker upon waking up. She said she’d gotten into school without a problem, so, disappointed but carrying on with my routine, I laced up my running shoes and went for a run in relative snowy solitude in the Retiro (gorgeous in white).

By chance I glanced at my email before hopping into the shower and saw a friend had mentioned that school was canceled in much of Madrid. I checked my school email and, indeed, class had been canceled today, though the facility was open to take care of the kids that did make it. I called my direct boss who told me that there were plenty of teachers there and they would all go home at lunch time anyway—no need for me to go in.

So I joined the hordes of camera-armed, hiking boot-clad unusually smiley madrileños and headed to the Retiro.

A conversation with one of my 7-year olds on the street

I was on my way to tennis class this afternoon when I caught up to Christian, one of my second grade students. He was alone, walking quite slowly, and clutching a bag of chuches (candy).

“Hi, Christian!” I said.

“Hello.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the computer.”

“Ah,” I said, thinking a moment. There was an internet café a few meters ahead and I motioned towards it. He nodded.

“Where’s your mom?”

“At the restaurant.”

Geez. Poor kid is trying to entertain himself while Mom works. “Where’s the restaurant?”

Without missing a beat he told me the address and then the name when I asked. We had an entire conversation in English. On the street.

I smiled the rest of the way to tennis.

Mi cole

My school is different from a lot of Madrid schools where American friends of mine work. For one, the student population (somewhere around 260 children aged 3-12) is 90 percent or more immigrant, or children of immigrant parents. Also, a substantial number of children at school reside at one of three nearby homes: either the one for abused mothers or one of the other two for children of parents deemed incapable of taking care of their children. The teachers at school like to say that we have “special” students. I like to think that my students are the face of the new Madrid.

One might think that a bilingual public school in a central neighborhood would act as a magnet, drawing in the neighborhood children to reap the benefits of a bilingual education. Not so in the case of my school. We are one of four bilingual elementary schools in the immediate vicinity. In addition, just three blocks down the street from school lies a colegio concertado, or semi-private Catholic school. This school receives some money from the government and has become a “refuge for middle-class Spanish parents” who fled with their children from our school when they saw it filling up with immigrant children. In turn, our school has become a sort of immigrant ghetto while the government subsidizes an escape route for Spanish parents who don’t want their children schooled with the frequently more disadvantaged immigrant kids. Where’s the logic?

In the meantime, enrollment at school is getting lower and lower. In some ways this isn’t a bad thing: my second graders are just 14 per class. But perhaps one day the school, in its lovely old building, will have to close? One of the problems with the student population is that it is constantly changing. The kids from the home for mistreated mothers leave when they receive a new house. We’ve had students return to Ecuador for several months or forever. One of the boys in my second grade class spent a month in Colombia this year. We also receive new students throughout the year. Several months ago we had an influx of Paraguayan children and a few Bolivians. And many families leave the center of Madrid (and the school) as soon as they earn enough money to live in one of the housing complexes on the outskirts of Madrid.

In addition to some instability about where they live, the parents of these children are often working so hard to make money that the children spend lots of time on their own. And in general, because they have lower income, they don’t have as many resources at home as other children. One of the questions for the Trinity exams is about what the child’s parents do for a living. The parents of my kids work cleaning houses, as security guards, and selling lottery coupons. I got used to practicing with the children and avoiding asking some of them about what one parent or the other does because some parents just aren’t in the picture.

Thus, the auxiliares at my school really play an important role. If we can get these kids speaking English well, they’ll have an advantage for the rest of their lives that they maybe wouldn’t have had otherwise. The tricky part is ensuring that this happens.

Thoughts about bilingual education in Madrid

This post (and the one that follows) has been a long time coming and feels appropriate somehow because I am about to start my last week working as an auxiliar de conversación, or English teaching assistant. I have worked at the same public school in the center of Madrid for the last two years.

I joined the auxiliar program the first year that the Madrid government opened it up to Americans and Canadians. A Spanish professor I had during my last semester of college had sent us an email with a bare-minimum description of the brand-new program, and I, having no idea what to do when I finished college, applied and later accepted, thinking, “Spain could be cool.”

The Comunidad de Madrid (the regional government) created the bilingual project to add more hours of class in English in the public elementary schools, presumably to improve Spain’s lag behind most other European countries in speaking English. Public schools in Madrid wouldn’t just have your standard English language class; Science (sort of a mix between science and social studies) would be in English, as well as Art, Music, or Physical Education. The idea is that the children, starting in first grade or primero de primaria, have at least a third of their classes in English (or a minimum of nine hours). The program started in the school year 2004-05 with British teaching assistants in 26 schools, and in 2005-06 grew to 80 schools and added auxiliares from across the pond as well. During the current 2006-07 academic year, the number of bilingual schools climbed to 122, and for next year will rise to 147.

The auxiliar serves as the school’s native speaker, collaborating with the bilingual project teachers, but never with the full responsibility of teaching a class. I (and many other assistants) had never studied to be a teacher. I had worked at summer camps for several years and worked as a baby-sitter for many more. During a fairly useless three-day orientation in September 2005, our bosses at the Consejería de Educación (Madrid’s Education Department) instructed us to never speak in Spanish with the children. And then we were off.

Working inside a public school has given me an incredible perspective on public education in Spain. The bilingual project sets lofty goals and provides many resources for schools that are part of the project, but falls short in some ways. The project is only just finishing its third year; it’s completely normal for there still to be hiccups and for all of us in the project to be sort of guinea pigs for the future. I admire the project for the high standards it sets, but its flaws are apparent every day at school.

The most apparent failings in the project stem from the teachers. If you are teaching in the project, you must be committed to speaking only in English with the students and NEVER ever translating. Most of the time the teachers in my school do speak only English, but I always cringe when they translate things. It is one of the worst things they can do. The goal of bilingual education is not for the students to be able to literally translate everything from Spanish to English. We want them to be learning in English, creating structures themselves: en fin, thinking in English. Kids are sponges, they pick things up. And there’s always a gesture that can be used to explain without resorting to Spanish.

If anything, these two years working in the system have made the discrepancy between the Comunidad’s standards for the program and the reality within the school more than apparent. Another of the big problems I witnessed in my school was that teachers taught the same children in both English and Spanish. This confuses the children about what language to use. When a class in English rolls around, they need to know that they can’t speak Spanish–the teacher and the assistant only speak English. At least in the case of my school, this appeared to be a logistical impossibility. The teachers who taught English as part of the bilingual project also taught Spanish language and Math to their respective homerooms.

Teacher training for the bilingual project consists largely of taking a four-month long English course at the British Council and then going to England to live and study for four weeks in the summer all on the Comunidad’s dime. This does not make teachers bilingual. In most cases, the teachers in the bilingual project are motivated and enthusiastic, but still not perfect English teachers.

This is where the auxiliar steps in: to be the native speaker, the usage and pronunciation expert, and the ambassador of another culture. That’s all fine and dandy, but those teachers who we are assigned to help need to know how to use us, about how to get the most out of having a young, eager English speaker in the class. I firmly believe that the teachers need to receive a lengthy training on this, and attend training sessions with their auxiliares (we go to three sessions per academic year) to learn how to work together. Some teachers do better at this than others, but in general they all need to have a clearer understanding that the classes should be a true collaborative effort, using each instructor’s strengths to create an effective English-speaking classroom.

Finally, everyone needs to understand that creating a bilingual program takes time. The program isn’t truly “bilingual” yet, especially with the way some teachers teach. Though my kids know that I only speak English with them, they still speak to me mostly in Spanish, aside from a few key phrases like, “Can I go to the toilet, please?” and “Can I sharpen my pencil?” You hear a lot of Spanglish from the kids: “Tengo three!” and “Me das el blue?” They understand me nearly perfectly, but I frequently have to remind them to speak in English back to me.

That said, my kids have learned tons of English in the last two years. By the end of last year, the kindergarteners could recite the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by heart. The first graders presented a (very brief) dramatization of “Little Red Riding Hood.” We made brownies (in English) during Cultural Week. This year the second graders prepared for the Trinity exams and, in doing so, started speaking more English. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly preparing for the musical the first and second graders performed, “The Wackadoo Zoo.” Though we didn’t win a top prize at the school theater competition we entered, we won 1,100 euros for the school. English has become a reality for them in many ways.

The Trinity exams are one of the ways the Comunidad like to boast about its successes with the bilingual project. These are 6- or 7-minute interviews conducted at varying levels by a British examiner. Questions range from “Where are you from?” to “What does your Dad do?” and “What do you do when you get up in the morning?” The Comunidad requires both second graders and sixth graders to take the exam, and by comparing the results (the younger children have a much higher rate of passing than the older), they demonstrate how the bilingual project has succeeded in getting these children to speak and understand English. And it’s true: the sixth graders, who have only had English as a Foreign Language several hours per week, know a lot less than the little ones.

In the end, we all know that the children who participate in the bilingual project are getting plenty of exposure to English, which is a fundamental step in mastering a language. The program may have a long way to go, but in some ways, the basics are there. Now we just have to fine tune everything.

El Musical

That’s right–this is a musical with a capital “M.” What am I talking about? The project we’ve been working on since October at school. The Wackadoo Zoo!
One of the English teachers at my school visited our “twinned school” in England over the summer, and saw them perform a very cute little musical called “The Wackadoo Zoo” about a zoo where the animals make the wrong sounds and a linguistics professor comes to try to fix them.Since this year we’re doing music class in English for the first and second graders, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to prepare a musical with them. What does that entail? We know now. Adapting the musical for our young English students. Teaching five songs as well as some fairly complex choreography(!). Teaching lines to our four narrators and the Professor. Spending lunch hours painting trees, making bushes, planning, organizing, and more planning and organizing. Tons and tons of work. You’d never guess.And sometime right before Christmas we found out about a theater competition for bilingual schools. So we entered. The big performance for the jury (and parents, friends, kids from other schools, etc.) is on Tuesday morning at 10.30 at Colegio La Salle San Rafael (C/ Fernando el Católico, 49 for you Madrileños).
Who knows if we’ll win. There are ten other schools competing, some of them veterans of the competition. We do know, however, that every single first and second grader will appear on that stage on Tuesday morning, singing and dancing like a lion, monkey, pig, sheep, or cow and we’ll be really really proud of them.

A breath of fresh air

The other day as we left school at midday to rehearse the musical with the first and second graders, an elderly man wearing a cap asked R and I if the children were “saliendo o entrando” (going or coming). He asked with a tone of nostalgia in his voice, as if remembering when he left school in the middle of the day to go home and eat. And he proceeded to tell us that he had gone to the school also when he was young, and had many fond memories there. After all, he said, it’s where he cut his teeth. He told us stories of playing frontón on the patio and swimming in the indoor pool (which no longer exists).

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he mentioned the year 1934 and some “hijos de puta” in the same breath.

My interest was piqued even more.

“When did you attend the school?” we asked. “Before the war?”

“Before and after the war,” he replied, smiling. (That is, the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39.) He described to us the interior of the school as he remembered it. I asked about the twin staircases, one in each wing of the building, that I had been told were from the days when it was separated into a boys part and a girls part.

He explained that during the Segunda República, the boys and girls had been mixed, but when “los hijos de puta fascistas” gained power after the war, they were separated again.

I’m only sorry I didn’t ask for his telephone number to really do a thorough interview with him. I’m going to keep my eye out for him.

La lotería

But perhaps the biggest deal about Christmas in Spain is el gordo. The national Christmas lottery. Last year I couldn’t wrap my mind around people’s obsession with this dang lotería. I’m understanding more and more.

The way it works is that there are lots and lots of numbers to be sold. And schools, companies, bars, stores, et cetera, have numbers–the same number every year. My association with the lottery, of course, is through my school. Number 41975 is ours and all the teachers buy a part of it. Last year, under pressure from my colleagues, I bought a décimo (a tenth) for 20 euros and played. We didn’t win. But we did get our 20 euros back because the big winner shared the same final digit as ours.

The idea of the lottery is nice, I’ve decided. You play as a group and it’s a whole camaraderie thing. People’s favorite words to utter this season are, “¿Y si nos toca?” (“And if we win?”) And they are also the words you think when you find out that the school’s number is agotado (sold out) and you don’t have your décimo.

That’s what happened this year. They ran out of our number! Oh, the scandal! If we win and a quarter of the staff didn’t get a chance to buy their part? The principal, herself, was left without a lottery ticket for our number.

It was the talk of coffee break.

Knowing that surely our number would win this year, the year in which a number of us don’t have it, the assistant principal took action. She asked those who already had their décimo to sell half of it to we poor souls and bought us décimos in another number to sell half to the people who’d shared with us. So now six of us have 10 euros in the school’s number and 10 in another number, which we’re hoping will be lucky.

The drawing is December 22nd. ¿Y si nos toca?

Lunchtime politics

Today, school lunch got a little heated.

One of the great perks of my job is that I eat in the school dining room every day for free. We’re a small group of teachers that stick around in the middle of the day for lunch (there’s a two-hour break). It’s convenient and relatively cheap for the other teachers, and it’s a full Spanish lunch. That is, the size of (or bigger than) an American dinner. First course, second course, salad, fruit, and yogurt. The kids eat this too. It’s really a far cry from school lunches in the States. There’s actually a woman cooking everything at my school. That’s not to say the food is out of this world, but it’s good enough, and it’s a huge meal that saves me a lot of money. But this is just background.

The point is that today at lunch we were seven teachers in the cozy room where we always eat. Somehow the conversation turned to Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator, and the principal began to lament the fact that statues and monuments to Franco have been (or are being) torn down. And that Spain’s current president, the socialist Zapatero, should be blamed for it. The religion teacher then chimed in to say that it was a crying shame, and that people don’t give Franco enough respect. (Yes, Catholic religion is still taught in Spanish public schools. It’s not obligatory. The few kids who don’t go in my school are Muslim.) He added that Spaniards lived very very well under Franco. And then two of the younger teachers commented that Franco shouldn’t be maligned as much as he is, that the monuments are a part of history. The conversation moved very quickly, like all of these teachers were excited to have discovered that their colleagues shared their views.

I was sitting there feeling my face get hot and that the room was just way too small for the seven of us. Then the school’s youngest teacher spoke up in response to the religion teacher, saying that come on, not everyone lived well under Franco. The other assistant (who’s also American) and I fidgeted in our seats. I said I certainly had heard Spaniards say some not very nice things about life under Franco. The bell rang and the conversation continued until the youngest teacher said, “Wasn’t that the bell?” I sighed inwardly. The other assistant and I walked out of the room shaking our heads in disbelief.

I’ve been thinking about lunch all evening. It is a known fact among teachers at my school that there are plenty of conservatives among our ranks. The principal and the religion teacher are extremely devout Catholics and they’re also some of the oldest in the school. The three of us who kept our mouths shut mostly during the conversation are the youngest working at school. And we are not at all Catholic.

But the point is that Franco was a dictator. He killed people. He isolated Spain from the rest of the world (both politically and economically). He disallowed political parties, the country’s other languages (Galician, Catalán, and Basque), and most press. He imposed strict Catholic mores on all aspects of Spanish life and above all, in the public schools.

Yo flipo.

Oddly enough, tonight I encountered another interesting, but not quite as uncomfortable conversation. After yoga, I stopped by a little market to pick up a few things. The owner, ringing up a customer, was commenting, “Everyone says people in the United States live better than we do. But it’s not true. We live well here.” The customer nodded his head in agreement, as the owner turned to me and explained that he likes to engage this guy in conversation, sorry for the hold up. I offered that I was American. The owner continued, saying that, yes the Spaniards live well. They shouldn’t complain so much. For example, the laws are much stricter in the United States. Here in Spain, we get away with a lot.

I had to agree. Despite my daily complaints or all the Franco lovers out there, life in Spain nowadays is not too shabby.