First Day!

Well, I survived my first evening of teaching English to a group of Spanish students at a local private academy yesterday!

Arrived in plenty of time (ok, ok, actually a whole hour earlier much to the bemusement of "la jefa") to prepare the room to my liking.  Spaced the chairs out in a horseshoe shape with millimeter precision and had my dry marker pens and props laid out military style on the table in front of me.  What I liked about the room was that it was quite small - oh yes I thought, my lessons would be split into 'easier to manage' smaller classes due to dimensional physics and life would be good!

I even prepared a humongous list of prompting headings/topics on the white-board to cover (in minuscule writing to stop the students preempting) to make sure I had enough material as I certainly didn´t want to crash and burn on my initiation day and suffer the age old teacher´s nightmare of finishing way too early.

And then 5 o'clock struck.  And then due to reasons unbeknown to me, my planned 2 classes of students were merged into one.  I now had 11 year olds, 12 year olds, 13 year olds and a 22 year old (!?) crammed into a room you could barely swing a mouse in, and my lovely horseshoe arrangement suddenly morphed into what could only be described as 'a splat'.

Despite the physical bodies in the room, the first part of the lesson was a bit like taking an afternoon stroll on the Mary Celeste.  Nobody really wanted to speak and I was beginning to envy their doodling.  Getting personal information out of them began to feel like an interrogation process, only lacking the battery and electrodes.  The moment I switched to my 'filler game' of "I am going to the supermarket to buy ...." where they each had to provide a noun starting with the next letter of the alphabet, all hell broke loose.  From that point onwards, I felt like I was driving a heavily laden lorry down a steep hill with failing spongy brakes. I couldn´t shut them up!  They were talking, sometimes over enthusiastically shouting over each other at times, once an element of competition had entered the mix. 

But the first mission had been completed and a debriefing by "la jefa" afterwards marked it as a success.  And I enjoyed it and even amazed myself that I can still remember all their names a day after the event.  Let the new dawn begin! 

• Spain