It's a Jungle Down There

 

This is an extract from Cucarachas or Cucuruchos: An English Teacher's Spanish Dilemma (2019) available from Amazon.

One of the year two teachers is away and I’m covering. Year two are six-year-olds - dangerous territory, as at this young age a year’s difference can mean a lot in terms of language, logic - and civilization. The end-of-year concert is looming on next week’s horizon like a long-planned (and long-dreaded) family get-together: will everyone get along and have a blissful afternoon? Or will Uncle Ted get drunk and have another row with Auntie Mabel?

              By way of preparation (for the concert) the teacher of the other year two class wants me to take a small group of girls from both classes to practise their ‘flower dance’. This is the long-straw option: she’s going to work with the majority of the children to invent a bumble bee dance. I’m much happier putting a dozen flower girls through their paces than I would be inventing a bumble bee dance - well, any dance for that matter. Also, the flower girls know their stuff, apparently, so I’m going to dress it up as them teaching me the dance.

              I head over to class with my bunch of flowers and I ask them to get into position. There’s a wee bit of ‘You must to be there,’ and ‘No, no, eees you must to be here!’ between a tulip and a daffodil but we get into a semblance of order without any punches being thrown or any petals scrunched. I hit the play button.

              ‘Each of us is a flower, growing in my garden, each of us is a flower, we need the sun and rain.’

              The only problem with my ‘garden’ is that I’ve got three or four flowers swaying in the opposite direction to the other eight or nine. It kind of leaves me paralysed, don’t miss the pun, not wanting to go the wrong way myself.

              ‘Do we all have to go the same way?’ I ask, having pressed the pause button - and carefully avoided using the word ‘sway’.

              ‘Yes!’ twelve flowers roar at me with that heavy dose of Spanish claro intonation which signifies that I’ve asked a particularly dumb question and shouldn’t really be trusted in the allotment.

              ‘Well, which way do we go first?’ I ask.

              ‘We go the left,’ says a tall, brown-haired girl, pointing to her right.

              ‘No, ees must go the right primero,’ says a small girl with blonde hair pulled into a tight pony-tail. She, of course, is pointing to her left.

              There’s always a problem with lefts and rights when concert time comes around. While you stand in front of the stage telling the children to go left - this will be the children’s right if they’re on stage and therefore facing you. Teachers quickly learn there are two ways to try to cope with this: you can point to your left but say ‘right’ to the children, or you can turn your back on them and point and say ‘left’. I’ve tried both options over the years - neither of them work. If you point left and say right, at least one clever clogs will tell you that you don’t know what you’re doing. The result will be mayhem. If you try option two, and turn your back on the children – the result will be mayhem. You really should know that by now.

              I don’t really want to re-choreograph the whole dance in case the other teacher has a very good reason for going to the right (or left) first, like not knocking some scenery (or younger children) off the stage when it comes to showtime and there’ll be more than a dozen of them up there. So, I ask for hands up for this direction (expertly avoiding confusing concepts like ‘left’ and ‘right’). Then, hands up for that direction. I’ve got a nine-to-three split for this direction first so we’re going to go with that. I mean this. I hit play again.

              ‘Each of us is a flower, growing in my garden, each of us is a flower, we need the sun and rain.’

              There’s a problem now with the ‘growing in my garden’ bit. There’s clearly some sort of a Hawaiian theme as half the class are doing that double-handed, sideways wavey sort of movement with wiggly hips - while most of the others are doing a kind of Jack-and-his-beanstalk climbing mime. You’ll forgive my lack of technical dance vocabulary, I really wouldn’t know an arabesque from a cabbage patch, so you’ll have to make do with my wiggly hips. A frail-looking daisy has wilted into a seated position with a scowl on her face. I stop the music again.

              ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask my sedentary bloom, feeling it best to get her back onto the trellis before deciding whether we’re going to Hawaii or up the beanstalk.

              ‘They do it bad!’ she sighs, waving a dismissive hand in the direction of my weed patch.

              ‘What? All of them?’ I respond. She shrugs, giving me hope that I might be able to pull the voting trick again.

              ‘You have de hairs in your nose,’ says the smallest girl in the room. She’s standing right in front of me and looking straight up so she’s obviously got a great view. Two not-quite-so-small girls scuttle over to check out this wonder of the natural world. They nod at each other, like the small girl has predicted showers later and they’ve just looked out of the window and spotted dark clouds rolling in.

              I mine years of teacher training and decades of experience for a reply that will floor this little minx. ‘It’s normal,’ I finally say. ‘Lots of adults have hairs up their noses.’

              ‘My mum, she have de hairs in here!’ says small girl, lifting one arm high and pointing at her armpit. ‘She cut them off!’ The three of them nod sagely at the odd ways of the adult world.

              ‘Shall we try the dance again?’ I blurt, afraid that we might begin a tour of the hairy parts of the human body if I don’t start doing my job by telling them what to do. We agree that we’ll do the Hawaiian swing the first time through then switch to the beanstalk for the second chorus. (This dance terminology isn’t so difficult after all.)

              We make it through the chorus and move on to the next bit.

              Sun, shine your warmth on me; moon, cool me with your night; wind, bring the gentle rain; earth, take my roots down deep.

              Doesn’t sound difficult, does it?

              The appearance of the sun demands that the flowers spread their petals wide over their heads then bring them down to their sides. (We’ll call that one the ‘rising sun’.) The only problem with this manoeuvre is that the classroom is a bit small for a dozen suns to rise simultaneously, so there are a number of bonked heads and bashed petals to deal with.

              ‘She hit to me!’ wails a small pansy with tears spurting into mid-air. It’s a trick I’ve never seen before and I’m a bit transfixed by the distance she’s able to achieve from a standing start. My shirt is already looking like it’s started raining despite twelve suns rising in front of me.

              ‘I’m sure it was an accident,’ I coo. ‘Shall I rub it better?’

              She nods and turns off the waterworks as I give her head a brief rub. ‘There. Better?’

She nods again. I really should’ve been a doctor - or, maybe the manager of a garden centre.

               Sun, shine your warmth on me; moon, cool me with your night...

              The appearance of the moon demands that the flowers sink gracefully to their knees while flapping their arms slowly, Hawaiian style. I can do the arms, I’m quite good actually, but the slow sinking to my knees ends in a sort of collapse as years of squash-playing take their toll.

              ‘No, no. You must to go down slowly, slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y!’ says a very solemn-looking girl, shaking her head and patting me on the shoulder. ‘You try again.’

              Two of them help me to my feet then stand back to watch my ‘graceful’ descent. It crosses my mind that I’ve lost control of this class. We were only meant to be pretending that I’m learning the dance, but these girls seem to have got it into their heads that I’m a bit of a ‘special needs’ case who requires lots of extra help. I’m beginning to fear that they might keep me in at dinner time.

              ‘No, no!’ the three of them chorus (rather unkindly, I feel).

              ‘Thees no ees very good. You must to go more slowly, s-l-o-w-l-y!’ says another girl who’s joined my group of personal trainers. ‘You do it again.’

              I haven’t the heart to refuse. They’re taking it all so seriously, like they really want me to succeed but think I’m a tap short of a full dance routine. I manage to pass my ‘sink gracefully to my knees’ exam at the third time of asking and pray quietly for the dinner bell, which is only 25 minutes away...

An extract from Cucarachas or Cucuruchos: An English Teacher's Spanish Dilemma. Free sample chapter available HERE

A Boy Called Goat...

 WE’VE DECIDED TO do the year 3 optional SATs. Or rather, management have decided that we’re going to do them. You might (if you’re not a teacher) want to know what SAT stands for: Standard Assessment Tasks. (‘Tests,’ if you speak English.) These ones are optional. That means you don’t have to do them.

By the time this book is published, they might not exist any more, as they’re pretty unpopular and controversial. Sensible people have worked it out and scrapped them. They don’t do them any more in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Only in England. (Oh, and Spain.)

Our decision to do them doesn’t seem the smartest idea in the world. For a start, on average, our children are younger than English children. In England, you go into year 3, for example, if you are seven years old sometime between September 1st and August 31st the following year. Here, the dates are January 1st to December 31st. That makes a big difference. It means a third of my year 3 class would be in year 2 in the UK. Also, the third of my children who should be the oldest in my year 3 class are actually in year 4. And sitting the (not very) optional year 4 SAT. And before you say, ‘but it’s only a test,’ I’ll tell you that the ‘Teacher’s Guide’ for the English optional tests in year 3 (not maths or science, just English) runs to 81 pages. But not only is the test not designed for a third of the children we’re giving it to because they’re too young, the test isn’t designed for any of the children we’re giving it to because they’re Spanish.

I’ve already done reading tests with my class. I do one every term, and it takes about 30 minutes. The children quite enjoy it. It’s not complicated. They get a four page booklet with a load of little questions in it. The questions on the first page each show a picture followed by five words. The children have to tick the word that they think goes with the picture. So one picture might be of a tree and the five words might be, cat, door, tree, camel, space shuttle.

The next three pages have sentences instead of pictures. So, the sentence might say, ‘I went to the ____ to buy some suits,’ and the words offered might be, watch, shop, ball, bicycle, asteroid belt. So simple, a child could do it… Even a Spanish child has a fighting chance.

I remember having a new boy join my class a few years ago back in Blighty. I decided to hit him with the reading test to get a handle on his ability. I also thought I’d do a bit of an informal assessment of his ‘speaking and listening’ at the same time, so I got him to talk me through what he was doing.

I explained the game (that’s what I like to call tests), and he set to.

‘Tree,’ he said, looking at the first picture. ‘That’s a tree.’

‘You sure?’ I asked, informally assessing for a sense-of-humour at the same time.

He looked at me as if he thought I was the sort of man his parents had warned him not to speak to. ‘Yeah! Tree!’

‘Can you find the word?’ I said, pointing to the choices.

He scanned them carefully, saying the words quietly to himself. ‘Cat, door, tree, tree! That’s it. Tree!’

‘Do you want to check the other words, in case there’s a better one?’ I suggest, helpfully. Well, you never know. He glanced at the other words, ‘camel,’ and ‘space shuttle’, gave me a withering look, and ticked ‘tree,’ with a flourish. The second picture was a house. The words offered were, book, dog, ladder, house, nuclear submarine. He didn’t hesitate. ‘House,’ he said, ticking with a dismissive flick.

He moved on apace. He was enjoying this and he was especially enjoying showing the crazy guy how smart he was. The next picture was of a letter. You could tell it’d just been posted because you could see the bottom of the door and the letterbox and two of those panels that proper doors have. There was no messing about here. This was a proper door and inside, lying on the mat, was a letter. You could even see the little stamp and a few scribbled squiggles for an address. The words offered were, letter, cup, shoe, finger, electron microscope. He didn’t even look at the words; he looked at the picture, looked at me and then without a hint that he was trying to be funny or cheeky, he said (with a resigned shake of his head), ‘It’s another bloody bill!’

That’s the way to do a reading test. Not like this one. There’s no four-page booklet to fill in here; we’ve got a seven page reading booklet, a seven-page text, a 14-page answer booklet; five pages of instructions on how to administer the tests as well as 22 (yes, 22) pages of guidance for marking. At the back of the Teacher’s Guide, there are five more pages of statistics showing you how to turn marks into levels, and how to get and what to do with age standardised scores. This had better be one hell of a good reading test.

We start with the reading booklet. I skim through the instructions in the Teacher’s Guide. I can’t take them too seriously, for two reasons. Firstly, because the test isn’t designed for children like the ones I’ve got; and secondly because I don’t really need to be told to give out the reading booklets and ask the children to open the first page.

I tell them they can start. The reading booklet is called, The Hunt for the Secret Treasure.

There are hands waving like they never expect to see me again. I pick Macarena.

‘What ees hooont?’ she asks hesitantly, uncertain how to pronounce ‘Hunt’.

‘Now I can’t tell you that, can I Mac? If I tell you what it says then I’m doing the reading test, aren’t I? And I’m much too big to be doing a reading test.’

She’s not entirely satisfied with this but she smiles and looks back at the cover. Her hand shoots straight back up into the air.

‘Yes, Mac?’ I say. I can see what’s coming.

‘What ees sec ret?’ She pronounces it like it’s two separate words, ‘sec’ and ‘ret’. I feel sorry for her. She’s a bright little girl who only wants to do as she’s told and I’ve given her something that’s going to be very tough. ‘Do you think I’m allowed to read it for you?’ I ask, as kindly as I can.

She shakes her head, smiling a little nervously. Half the class have hands up.

‘Vicente?’ I pick at random.

‘What ees… treh-ah-soo-reh?’

We’re not getting very far. ‘The hooont for the sec-ret treh-ah-soo-reh.’ I’m tempted to cut their losses. I steal another look at the guidance for English as a second language. I see that I can use gestures or drawings to help. I have a vision of me hunting around the class for a lost rubber but I know that they’ll only start trying to help me find it. I give Vicente as kindly a brush-off as I can and search for someone who’s made it past the front cover. Pablo the First is waving like his lifeboat’s sprung a leak.

‘Yes, Pablo.’

‘She’s ees called Cabra?’

It’s one of those moments when you don’t know whether they’ve said one word or six, in Greek or in Russian. ‘Can you repeat that, please, Pablo? There’s a lot of noise in here.’

‘Thees boy. She’s ees called Cabra?’

There’s a lot of nodding around the class. Jorge is giggling furiously and pointing at the picture inside. I look over his shoulder and see the issue immediately.

This had never caused much of a problem back at home. I mean, there was a bit of silliness but they soon got over it (after I yelled at them). The two boys in the book are called Jackson and (I promise, this is straight from the Government’s mouth) Goat. Yes, Goat. A boy called Goat. G-O-A-T. Goat. Maybe it’s short for something?

The giggling around the class is now close to pandemic. They’ll know the word because they do farm animals in infants. The surprising thing is that I know that goat in Spanish is cabra (it must be something to do with the cheese we like so much) so it clicks what Pablo is asking.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘His name is Goat.’

Uproar. I can’t blame them. A boy called Goat, how daft can you get? These English! What a bunch of clowns they are! I try to calm them. I might as well ask them to make me a roast dinner. Pablo is the only one who can command their attention now. He’s a bright boy, a bit cheeky but I like him. He’s got a sense of humour which always wins me over and he’s using it now.

‘You write eet!’ he says accusingly, pointing at where Goat’s name is written next to his picture, in a sort of childish scrawl so it looks for all the world like I’ve written it on the page.

‘No…’ I start. But they’re all pointing at me now, shouting, ‘You write eet!’ and laughing uproariously. They’ve sussed my little joke. Aren’t I a hoot? English teacher always making the good jokes.

Except it isn’t a joke at all.

‘No, I didn’t!’ I insist. ‘Look!’ I read the first line of the story for them. ‘”My name is Jackson, and my best friend is called Goat.” You see. His name is Goat.’

They’re confused now. While I could conceivably have graffitied Goat on every picture in every one of 26 books just for a little jape, I’m hardly likely to have rewritten the whole text.

‘He has goat!’ Carmen states. It’s not a question. It’s a sort of Manuel assertion. Plausible, but wrong.

‘No, his name is Goat,’ I say.

A third of the class (probably the ones who should be in year 2) are giggling merrily. Another third (including Carmen and Mac) are looking worried. They’re desperately trying to understand if this is a joke or if the boy owns a goat. They just can’t accept that he might be called Goat. The final third are losing interest. I can see the hairdressing school starting up again in the back row.

Pablo has his hand up again. He also has his cheeky grin on, which means he’s thought of something amusing to say. I could do with a break. We all could. ‘Yes, Pablo?’

‘There menee boys them ees called cabra, en Inglaterra?’

I shake my head. I’m pretty sure that Jackson’s friend is on his own. I can sense one of Pablo’s punch lines lurking around the corner. Everyone is listening.

He’s starting to giggle now. He’s got a punch line, I’m sure. He’s just not sure if he dares and uncertain if he’ll be able. He finally gathers his wits and manages to spit it out.

‘Your name eees cabra?’

This is enough to pop the cork. There are children lying on the floor now, crying with mirth. Lledó and Rocío are quite literally dancing with glee. I can see that Pablo asking the teacher if his name is ‘Goat’ is going to go down in the annals of their education.

And I think, ‘Well done, Pablo!’ This lesson was going nowhere and you’ve rescued it. ‘Well done, Pablo… And well done, Goat!’

*

This is an extract from Zen Kyu Maestro: An English Teacher's Spanish Adventure, the diary of my year teaching Spanish junior children, in English, in Spain. What could possibly go wrong...?

“The detailed way Dean has described the atmosphere of this little city in Spain is magnificent.” Salford University, The Salfordian.

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