I realized it’s been six months and I haven’t shared much about what my work is like.
I had to make a blog as part of my program, so I’m including the link here. The blog explains about the program and some of the details of my assignment, but I’m also writing some of that here.
https://tonyamadridauxiliar.wordpress.com/
As a refresher, my position is a part time internship sponsored by the Ministry of Education of the Spanish government. My job title is auxiliar de conversación, and my role in the classroom is to provide a model of native English speaking and an example of American culture through a variety of ways. Every school is different, and every teacher is different, so my experience is not the same as everyone else’s, but I can still give an idea.
For me it has been a very low-key position, and I’m at school less than 20 hours a week, which is perfect for me as I am exploring career options and transitioning from being a stay-at-home parent for the past 12 years. The program is geared towards recent university grads in their 20s, but it’s available to university students/grads ages 18-60. One of the auxiliares at my school, a guy from France, used to be a middle executive in the tourism industry for several years but decided to switch careers and now is an auxiliar part-time and gives private language lessons the rest of the time.
Anyway, let me give an overview of the Spanish school system so you can get some context of what it’s like.
Schooling is divided into four stages:
*infantil, including daycare and preschool, ages 3 months to 5 years; primaria or elementary, ages 6-11, grades 1-6 (no kindergarten)
*escuela secundaria obligatoria (ESO), or secondary school, ages 12-15, equivalent to US grades 7-10 but the naming system is different, outlined below
*bachillerato, ages 16-18, equivalent to US grades 11-12 but also different. Compulsory education is only primaria and secundaria.
Every grade is divided into homerooms, labeled A, B, C, D, etc (depending on how many students there are in the grade–for our kids’ elementary classes, there are only A and B) and the students are with the same students of their homeroom for most of the day, except for electives.
There are four grades in ESO: 1st of ESO, 2nd of ESO, 3rd of ESO, 4th of ESO–not 7th-10th as in the US. Natalie is in 1st of ESO and her homeroom is B, so her class is 1B.
As I mentioned, the students stay in their homeroom most of the day, and for ESO/bachillerato the teachers are the ones who move around to different classrooms in between periods. There are seven 55-min periods during the day, with a 25-min snack/patio break/recess at 11:10 and a 15-min break at 2:10, followed by 7th period, although not everyone has seventh period every day; Natalie only has seventh on Mondays and Tuesdays. The reason is that everyone’s classes are on a varied schedule, the intent being that if you had math 7th period every day, for example, that would be a real struggle, so they mix up when all the classes are to make it “fair.” So all your Mondays will be the same, for example, but it won’t look like any other day of the week. Also, you don’t have every class every day; English and Spanish are every day, but math might be 4 times a week, science 3 days, PE 3, art 2, etc.
Also, there is no lunch break at our school and everyone just eats lunch at 3 or whenever they get home. The elementary kids do have a two-hour lunch and recess break, though.
The schools seem a little old-fashioned to me, at least the ones I’m familiar with; they use textbooks and traditional lecturing and worksheets and exercises and a blackboard with chalk. My school in particular seems either underfunded or mismanaged, because there is only one old PC in each room with a projector, which don’t always work, whereas the kids’ school has smartboards. At my school there is only one IT/maintenance person for the whole school who only comes like twice a week and is responsible not only for technology but also for broken tiles or burnt out lightbulbs or whatever. Also, the classrooms in my school are extremely bare, with cinderblock walls and old-fashioned schooldesks and chairs. There are lockers in the back of each classroom, and also a row coat hooks.
Elementary classrooms are colorful and decorated.
There are no school bands or orchestras. Our kids’ elementary school and mine and Natalie’s school have a choir, but they are optional and rehearse once or twice a week during recess. And while they do have a couple extracurricular sports, school sports teams are nowhere near as big of a deal as in the States. Neither are school spirit, spirit wear, school mascots, school dances, school activities, PTA, fundraisers, talent shows, etc. School is just for academics, pretty much. Same for universities–there is no sport culture, mascots, etc around those. But the secondary school does have field trips.
No PTA but there is a Cooperativa
Would be nice to have a middle ground. Sometimes in US the abundance of activities feels a bit much
So. I work at a secondary school, which includes ESO and bachillerato. All classes except Spanish language arts, math, and something else are in English. The classes I work with are:
1A–English twice a week, biology once a week
1C–PE once a week
2A–physics/chemistry once a week
3A–biology once a week, physics/chemistry once a week
3B–biology once a week, physics/chemistry once a week
4A–English twice a week
1F/H bachillerato–English twice a week
The English teacher I work with is very nice, very collaborative, and has me do anything from reading aloud textbook exercise answers during class to planning entire portions of class. She has been kind of like a mentor to me; she’s been the one to give me a tour of the school, explain how everything works, etc. She’s had quite the teaching career, including a time teaching in Ireland, three years teaching in Canada when her kids were about our kids’ ages, and time teaching in different areas of Spain, including Ceuta, which is actually a small portion of northern Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar that belongs to Spain.
The two biology teachers I work with are very nice; totally different but both nice. I’ve mostly just done a video or a google slides presentation on whatever the teacher asks me to, and sometimes I’ve made a worksheet to go along with it. I also just kind of walk around and help when students are doing work in class or doing a lab, or as they’ve been reading the textbook out loud as a class I’ve participated in reading some of it.
The physics/chemistry and PE classes are the ones I’ve struggled the most with figuring out what I am doing in there.
One thing that is interesting is how the students address the teachers. It’s on a first-name basis except for one, who is a stricter teacher and wants to be called by Ms Last name. Also, the students more often than not address myself and teachers as “Teacher,” which when I first heard sounded very cute coming from middle and high school students. Sometimes they revert to Spanish and say “profe” instead.
One Response
Thank you, Tonya, I did enjoy hearing about how their system is different from ours.. Here in Ecuador students always address the teacher as “Maestra” whether they are 6 years old or 60.