Auxiliar de Conversacion (Conversation Assistant)

I am, of course, here in Spain to teach English, and not just to spend my days drinking cafés con leche and cervezas and traveling from one cool city to the next. So, today I made my first visit to my colegio where I´m going to be working 24 hours a week for the next nine months.

I am an auxiliar de conversación or a language conversation assistant, to help the teachers and speak English with the kids. Specifically, I was hired through BEDA (Bilingual Education Development and Assessment), a program based out of Madrid whose aim is to improved bilingual education at colegios concertados (half-way between public and private, basically a private school that receives partial government funding) in Spain. While most of the auxiliares de conversación are placed at schools in Madrid, a few lucky ones get placed in other provinces, like Navarra.

This morning, we met the director pedagógica (who is like the principal of the school, although only in charge of the academic side. There is a nun who is the director of the school and runs everything else) and the BEDA coordinator, who is also in charge of secondary education at the school. The principal was a chemistry major, which was unexpected and really cool! (I just can't get away from chemistry!) Our coordinator gave us a tour of the school and introduced us to a few of the teachers. Everyone seemed really excited we were there. Shabri and I are going to be splitting the infantil and primaria kids (grades Pre-K through 6^th). They have another teacher from England who will work with the secondary kids (7th-10^th grade). In general, my schedule will be 9-1 in the mornings with a half hour break for recreo (recess), and then from 3-4:30 in the afternoon. I have Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons off (although they don´t start afternoon classes til October, so for the next two weeks I only work mornings!). We are also going to do a conversation hour once a week on Wednesdays with the English professors at the school.

The school is beautiful, though. From one of the windows from the top floor of the school,you can see out over the entire town, out to a mountain about 20 km away that I´m going to make my dad climb with me when he comes to visit. It´s about 2000 m. tall, so it can be the first on our “Navarra 4000 footer list.” There are some pictures of the school at their website: http://www.tudela.fesd.es/ if you want to see where I'll be working.

The two best reactions we got today on our tour were first, a middle-school boy who heard me speaking English with our coordinator and ran up and asked (in pretty-good English) “You´re from America? I went there once,” and went on and on about his cousin who lives in New York and how he went to visit him once, before ending confidently by telling us that he speaks English really well. At the other end of the spectrum was the son of our coordinator, who was about 3 years old and is a student at the school. As our coordinator said, his son is a bit “naughty” and when the coordinator introduced us to him and told him that we were going to be his new teachers this year and teach him English, his only response was “Me da igual" before he wriggled free from his dad's arms. Well, you win some, you lose some I guess!

On Monday we have a meeting with the infantil and primaria teachers, then we start in the classrooms on Tuesday!