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
