Open Writing

Sorry it has been so long since I last wrote but I have been extremely busy with my course and teaching full-time on top of this. I have a six-day week, and most of my day between classes is spent commuting from one end of Barcelona to the other, just for 90-minute lessons,six hours of these being with children. This is the price I must pay for doing the Diploma and for working for the British council. I can so rarely use a computer in my free time.

Anyway, now that you've hopefully accepted my excuse, here's a little summary of life in Barcelona over the last four months.

I have been living just up the road from the majestic La Sagrada Familia, one of Gaudi's masterpieces, and also right next to Hospital de Sant Pau. I was amazed the first time I saw it as it looks far too beautiful to be a hospital. Lots of bell-shaped towers and tourists wandering around taking photos. It would be an ideal place to be treated for depression I should imagine.

The only drawbacks are the neighbours and flatmates. Several of the neighbours are workmen. They live underneath me and above me, and seem to be awake most of the day, apart from when they have their (BRIEF!) siesta in the afternoon. Their idea of relaxation seems to be very loud music, shouting out of the window to one another, and ringing one another's doorbells persistently for an hour or so at a time between the hours on 5am and 6am, when they roll in from the night club!

My three flatmates are equally intrusive. Apparently people from the Dominican Republic have a reputation of being the loudest bunch of inhabitants living in Barcelona.

I am managing to work for my diploma course with the aid of earplugs though, and somehow the necessity of handing in pieces of work to deadlines spurs me on. The course is interesting and so are my classmates. It's great to be meeting people with whom I can chat naturally and who I find stimulating company.

My dinner lady colleagues last year were lovely people but our conversational topic preferences were many kilometres apart. Much of the course though, while being interesting, seems a little impractical eg. will we ever really need to teach students that the sound 'p' is a plosive bilabial consonant, or that in the sentence, ‘It smells delicious', 'delicious' is a complement, because a complement tells us something about the subject and 'smell' is a 'complement verb'? However, I suppose it does make us better informed as teachers, rather like having knowledge of the workings of a car can make you a better driver.

Teaching wise, it is exhausting. I am getting more used to the eight year old students in the primary school. I seem to have no problem motivating them now, but it demands a lot of patience and constant supervision. I also have to make a real fool of myself by making up actions to songs and singing them as though I'm having a great time, even if I feel exhausted. I've worked out that if you sing with gusto, the students copy you and they find actions fun. It's also a good time-killer to keep repeating songs.

We spend the rest of the class cutting and pasting toys, with which they are supposed to practice speaking English, but they need a LOT of prompting before they do this. I've also learnt that the only way to make them write in their notebooks is to produce a worksheet with pictures which they can colour and fill in. I then make them stick these in their books.

They are a funny bunch and have very cute faces so I am probably a bit more forgiving of naughty behaviour than I should be.

The twelve-year-olds are AWFUL! They really don't want to be there. They enjoy meeting each other to chat in Catalan but not to study English, so it's hard to motivate them, and they are very whingy, and demanding. To study at the British Council you have to have a lot of money so they are used to getting what they want.

The adults I work with are all great, although the exam class at the polytechnic is proving very demanding, with 15 students in all who constantly churn out long essays and transactional letters. And then they have a huge exam every term. Of course we are paid no extra for the many hours we spend marking the exam.

My private class of two ladies who work for Avis, a dog identity tag company, are the best. They are motivated to learn English, and lovely people. Teaching them is pleasurable and it's great stress-relief as we have a lot in common and can talk to each other like friends.

Socially I am enjoying the coffee culture and am now very good at ordering 'uno cafe cortado descaffeinado'. I eventually got used to the small cup it comes in, although I missed big English mugs so much at first.