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