Working in Spain

Before I write this next post about Málaga, I need to tell you about my day today. I feel this is indicative of working in Spain.

You arrive at work, having prepared everything you need over the weekend for your normal Monday routine, when your boss tells you that the entire week has changed, and now you need to create an entirely new lesson plan for kids you've never taught before. You don't know if they speak any English at all, but your only instruction is "Find a game where they'll speak English."

...Awesome. I now have 50 minutes to rewrite me entire lesson plan for brand new kids. STRESS. AGH.

So I surf around the web and can't find a single game that's easy enough for kids I've never taught before, so with no time left to search, I walk into my first class of the day, 5A.

I settle on total physical response, where you say "Stand up!" and the kids have to stand up. You do a bunch of silly actions, like sing and dance and cry and laugh, and get the kids moving around and laughing. It ended up working well enough, and then I split the kids up into teams and we played a little competition to see which team remembered the most words.

After that we play a little game called "Can You Repeat?" where you give the kids a topic, like colors, and then the first person says one color, the second person says the first color and their own, and then the third says the first, the second, and then their own color, and so on. Okay, this works out pretty well, so we do animals and colors, and it seems to go pretty well.

I still have 25 minutes left. Dang it. Okay, so I have everyone pull out a piece of paper, and they have to draw either actions or animals and write the English word underneath it. The problem is, I don't know where I'm going with this. I thought, well, maybe we'll play Bingo, but then I realize I don't have a word list. So they're drawing, and I'm trying to think on my feet until I land on the most obvious answer -- Pictionary!

So with 5A all of this goes over very well, and a little while later the teacher came up to me and let me know I did a great job, and that the kids all absolutely loved it. Hurray!

Time for 5B. 5B is a bit rowdier, they argued during the games, I had to take away points, but whatever, if you don't want to follow the rules or pay attention, we don't have to play any games. No big deal. Most of them have a decent amount of fun.

Then comes sixth grade. I could tell pretty much immediately that these kids were at that age where they were too cool to participate, but I mean, come one, when you've got this goofy guy standing up in front of class singing at the top of his lungs and dancing around, how could you not loosen up a little? We play pictionary and Can You Repeat and this other game Chain Words where you have to write words where the next word starts with the last letter of the last word (like elephant -> time -> eat -> toilet), and all of these are quick racing games, so the kids had a great time.

In the end as I was walking out and saying good bye, the kids gave me a standing ovation and shouted thank you, so I suppose that means job well done. Good to know, after 8 months on the job, I can not only think on my feet, but I can be successful at it, too!

Hurray!