Does anyone's first day of work ever go as planned?

My first day teaching was a disaster!

It's been a while since my last update, mostly because I haven't felt like I've done anything very noteworthy. A big part of it had just been trying to get used to everything. I'm proud to say that I no longer need a map to get to the most important places, and I can even explore alternate routes to places without fear of getting lost. I'll try to sum up the highlights of the last 11 days. If you only want to read about my first day of work, skip to the paragraph that starts with "Today."

Last Tuesday, I went to Vitoria, the capital city of País Vasco. I got up early and took a bus there with little knowledge of exactly where I was going. So, I walked all around Vitoria, soaking in the oldness of it all. The Casco Viejo of Vitoria was a lot like that of Bilbao, with narrow streets between tall buildings, but Vitoria had what seemed like older cobblestone. Though I wasn't surrounded by hills like in Bilbao, it wasn't Oklahoma flat, and it was interesting to see escalators built into the road right alongside cobblestone stairs and ramps.

Eventually, I got tired of my photo-taking walk and I headed for the orientation, which seemed more like an orientation for the teachers than for the teaching assistants. I learned that most auxiliares had gotten a ride from their teachers, and that my school wasn't nearly as involved as most others. The reception was an hour's worth of non-stop Spanish, and not having had my morning cup of joe, it was difficult to stay focused. Despite my effort, they didn't provide us with any useful information there. The only thing good about it was that they served us free wine and pintxos afterward. I also got to meet more auxiliares from various parts of País Vasco, some of whom I hung out with a little longer in Vitoria.

photo compliments of Claire

The next morning, we all went to Barakaldo, which is like a suburb of Bilbao to the north (its Edmond, if you will) via metro. I couldn't find the people I was meeting, so I called them and learned that they were already on the platform, and I had maybe a minute to get down there from the surface. I raced down the stairs and escalators and made it just as everyone was getting on the train.

In Barakaldo over the next couple of days, we went to various workshops where they quickly presented to us as many classroom activities as they could fit into only 4 hours of presentation. One thing about Spain so far is that it seems like they're very serious about breaks. As soon as any meeting starts, I am immediately told when the break will be. I guess it's to be expected from the country that invented the siesta.

While I'm on that topic, that has been strange to get used to. People work from 8/9am-2pm. They don't eat lunch here until everything closes down (except restaurants) from 2-4 every day. Thus, for the past few days, I've made myself a pretty substantial breakfast. Then everybody goes back to work and everything (except banks) reopens from 4-7/8, which requires them to have dinner right before they go to bed. This is a big oversimplification of how different the daily schedule feels here.

I can walk through Plaza Indautxu at various times of the day, and each time it will have a different kind of people with a different feel: professional businessmen on their way to work in the morning; moms, babies, and retired people out shopping during the day; entire families enjoying each other at lunch; kids playing soccer after school in the afternoon; old couples doing a paseo (the Spanish customary evening stroll) in the evening, and groups of teens with kalimotxo (mixture of cheap red wine and coke) after about 10pm.

Back to Barakaldo: very informative, and mostly useful, though I had little idea of what my school's expectations of me would be. I was shocked when one of the classroom conversation topics they advocated was a sex column that was graphic enough to get a teacher fired in the States.

After orientation on Wednesday, everybody and their dogs went to IKEA, since the one in Barakaldo is the only one in the region. I had never been to any IKEA before, though everyone talks like it's the best thing in the world. I didn't have the best experience. All I wanted to buy were sheets, but I bought two sets of bottom sheets because they were mis-racked, and I still don't know why they don't sell them in sets. I returned the more expensive one with little difficulty, though, and they gave me a coupon for a free coffee for my mistake.

On Friday, I had dinner with the Ochoa family, which was entirely various kinds of meat, until Mariluz brought the bread. I just thought it was interesting, but I don't think they thought anything of it. She and I are the only ones who like salad. Tony calls salad "sheep food." It was nice to get a good meal after a week of cereal and pintxos. I was still trying to figure out the grocery store and what all I could make with what they had.

The last two Saturday and Sunday evenings, I have gone to the church that Tony leads. On Saturday, there's a bible study over John, and on Thursday there's a service in which Tony is going through Romans. They don't have a building but meet in a classroom that is in the building where Tony works. Even though I've never seen more than 15 of us together in that room, I love their fellowship, and they have such an authentic love for God and concern for others. Also, without this church I would have little to no connection to any native bilbaínos.


Last weekend, I also learned why Bilbao has more umbrella holders than trash cans. Luckily I bought a really good umbrella from a chino (discount stores with all your daily needs, always run by Chinese people). I'm sure I'll be using that word in future blog posts.

Sunday after church (which is in the evening, remember), I met some friends at a bar for salsa night. No, not Picante Sauce but dancing. Another auxiliar from Wisconsin had some salsa experience and wanted to try it out. I and my Irish friend Debbie and my British friend Ben mostly just watched until two more auxiliares came who I hadn't met: Steph from Australia, and Kelly from Belgium. Kelly knew how to dance. She taught me a couple moves and made me feel really comfortable not knowing what I was doing. We plan to return tomorrow night for free salsa lessons.

Monday I planned to meet up with couchsurfers (www.couchsurfing.org), but they weren't where I thought they'd be, so I wandered around for a little while with Irish Debbie until we ran into other auxiliares, one of whom had the phone number of the guy who leads a lot of couchsurfing events in Bilbao. Communication was difficult over the phone, but I eventually made it to his house where we hung out and talked before going to Oktoberfest in Deusto, which is the college-y part of Bilbao (its Norman, if you will). Oktoberfest was lame at first because the music was so loud that I couldn't communicate and didn't think it was worth it. For some reason, though, I decided to stay, and I met a lot of young native bilbaín@s along with two girls from Buenos Aires. So I ended up speaking a lot of Spanish and having a really good time, especially when they switched to techno music after the Germans were done playing.

Tuesday evening I watched Pilgrim's Progress at church. It was dubbed in Spanish, but thankfully they provided me with English subtitles. It was interesting to see English lip movements that matched the words I read while hearing Spanish. I had never read or seen Pilgrim's Progress, though I had heard about it, and it was pretty good. It's a rather complex allegory of the Christian life, and it left a lot of contemplation to be done afterward. I'm surprised that I don't remember hearing about it in my Western Civ class.

I thought that I'd be working on Wednesday, but I was met with more orientation. My advisor, Javier,  gave me a schedule and we ironed out some other details. He also bought me a café con leche, so I can't complain. I will be working with 12 different classes each week, which means I see each group of kids only once each week. This also means that potentially, I only need to have one set of activities planned for each week. I also observed two of Javier's classes. I found it interesting that his 15-16 yr. old students who he taught in English were more capable than his 17-18 yr. old students who he taught in Spanish.

Today (or yesterday, since it's after midnight here) I had my first teaching experience here in Spain. It was awful. Javier had told me that I would be left alone to teach the students, so I prepared a couple activities for the three hour-long classes. This required getting to school early to print something off and make copies. Such a simple task took much longer than expected, and I was only able to make copies for the first activity. I had no idea how many students to expect, so I guessed. When I got to the classroom the teacher said something to the effect of "Good luck working with the animals," and she took off, glad for a break. There were nearly thirty students in the first cycle of ESO (12-13 years old). I ran short a few copies of the activity, of course, and made some students share. It turned out that I didn't even need the second activity because there were enough students to draw out the first one. The students were really rude and loud throughout the whole activity. When I asked them to be quiet so I could hear what a student was saying, they would all shout at each other to be quiet and become even louder. Halfway through class, some older students came to class apparently from the nurse's office to tell me that I needed to bring my students down so they could all get some vaccine. Learning that they'd all be getting a shot, any control I may have had vanished as they screeched in terror. Trying to figure out what was going on, I walked down the hall to talk to an adult, followed by noisy kids. One by one teachers came out of classrooms to tell them (us?) to be quiet. At the end of the hall, the nurse told me that the kids were supposed to come down in prearranged groups of some sort. I did my best to gather them back up, but they remained out-of-control for the rest of the hour. A student from the classroom next door came in to ask me to make them be quiet because they were taking a test. One of my students told me after he left that this was payback for his class banging on the wall the last time they had a test. I don't know how an auxiliar who didn't speak any Spanish could have survived here.

My second class was with about 20 students from the second cycle (a year older than the first class). When the teacher came, she hadn't been expecting me and had already prepared a lesson for the day that was very important for their upcoming test. So, she went along with her plans, and occasionally used me to read something off. Luckily, she wants to work with me in the future to do something in her class that relates better the material they're working with. The students were pretty disrespectful and resistant to learning the whole time, but nowhere near as bad as the younger students.

My third class had about 15 third-cycle students of my adviser. I had them all to myself and felt prepared to deal with such a small group. They behaved extraordinarily well, and they participated well. However, since there were so few of them and since they behaved and participated so well, we finished the activity so fast that I had 30 minutes to kill with nothing prepared. So, I tried to start conversation after conversation, picking things out of thin air to ask them. I'm grateful that even when the class slowed, they remained participative and respectful. We did speak a lot of English and we did learn a lot about each other, so the hour was not unproductive. I learned among other things that one of my students (who looks like the lead actor in Sky High) wants to be a professional bullfighter, and he practices every day. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfighting (or Hemingway) for more info on how cool that is. I also asked them what they knew about the United States, and these were the only things they gave me, in order of what they thought of first:

1. It's big.
2. They eat a lot of bad food.
3. They're all really fat.

I'm not too bummed about my first day because I really didn't know what to expect, but now I have a better understanding of what awaits me next Tuesday.

 After school I got a few groceries, then went to an Irish Pub called Dubliners where they have intercambio language exchange every week, and I got to meet a few new people there.

I look forward to planning some trips outside of Bilbao and seeing some things in Bilbao I haven't seen yet ...like the inside of "the Goog."