Teaching English!

There’s 47% youth unemployment in Spain right now, but I officially have a job here! A girl on my program was teaching English to two boys, age 5 and 6, but she is leaving after this semester so she offered the job to me. Since I spent about half my childhood forcing my mom and sister to act as my students while I played with my whiteboard and shouted at them for disrupting my fake classroom, it seems only natural that I finally have real students to teach.

The kids are very cute. Their names are Eduar (not a typo) and Alejandro. The first day I met them they were dressed in matching Argyle sweaters, starting the typical metro European fashion early. They’re more interested in telling me long stories about trips to the mountains or recess at school rather than learning English, but this is universal in young children, not just ones who have no clue what I’m saying when I greet them with, “Hi boys! How are you today?”

I’ve been uncovering my arts-n-crafts side these past few days, inventing various games and activities to help teach them. I’ve decided to write and illustrate my own storybook so I can pick and choose what vocabulary to focus on. I encountered my first language dilemma while writing one story, “Ben’s Birthday,” in which Ben receives several presents, including a soccer ball. While coloring the ball I spent about 10 minutes deciding whether to call it a soccer ball or a football. I am American, but these kids will probably encounter British English the majority of their lives. After contemplating for too long, I realized that it really doesn’t matter since they’ll probably forget the word anyway. In the end I stayed patriotic and represented my American roots. Haters can be haters, but this will avoid any possible confusion if Ben receives a football (American football, that is) for his next birthday.

I got out a basic English vocabulary book from the library here, and once again I was faced with a predicament, as it was clearly written in British English. Some of the translations sound simply ridiculous to my American ears. Stove is translated as “cooker,” trash can as “rubbish bin,” underwear as “knickers.” Saltshaker is translated as “saltcellar,” which in my mind would be a closet-type room filled to the ceiling with grains of salt., and can I ask what the hell is an “Eiderdown?” Apparently it’s a comforter, which I only deduced after entering the Spanish word into an online translator. Apparently sometimes the Motherland’s dialect is just as foreign to me as Spanish. Needless to say, these kids might grow up to sound like American hicks, but at least they won’t be saying such ridiculous things as “Mother, it’s chilly in here, would you mind placing a thicker eiderdown on my bed?”

  

Then there’s the problem of book-English versus street-English. It’s funny how you don’t even think about the simplest things until you have to teach them. For instance, do I instruct them to answer my question, “How are you today?” with “I am good” or “I am well?” And when we embark on body parts, do I follow the book’s definition of “bottom,” or do I teach them “butt?” Is it better to have manners but speak like an 80-year-old British woman, or be a bit crude but be the first among your five-year-old peers to start making butt jokes?

For our first lesson today I played a game that I remember from my first year of learning Spanish. I would say a verb and perform the action that goes along with it, and the boys would mimic me. So by the end we were walking, sitting, dancing, laughing, hugging, and jumping all over the house. After we repeated the actions a bunch of times, each boy got a turn to be the teacher, and would call out the word for me to perform. It was apparent that “jump” was the verb that most stuck with them, because I feel like I did little else than hop up and down for the last 10 minutes. 

Towards the end of our lesson I read them the story I created. Never have I felt so validated! The older one kept commenting things like, “Wow, you drew this?” “What cool drawings!” When we got to the page with the birthday cake, they both said, “Qué tarta más chula!” (What a cool cake!). They both seemed to really like the story. It’s always impressive how captivated little kids can be by the most boring things, as “Ben’s Birthday” can hardly be called a Penguin Classic. It essentially reads, “This is Ben. Today Ben turns five. Cool! He get's a new pair of sneakers! . . . " (There's that damn dilemma again! They're going to hear "trainers" from all of their friends with British tutors!)

I feel like this could be an all-around winning experience. I get to hang out with little kids (win), be in a mostly Spanish environment since they don’t yet know enough English (win), prep for lessons by doing arts and crafts (win), and get paid (win win). (Is it sad that I calculate all my earnings in terms of tapas I could buy? One hour equals ten rounds!) Even the fact that I have to walk 40 minutes each way to their house could be considered a win, since joining a gym here in November doesn’t mean that I actually go to it!

The fact that I have a job (and without being an EU citizen, at that!) when the rest of the country doesn’t reinforces my desire to learn languages. Speaking English suddenly gives me value here, so it’s my hope that knowing Spanish in California will make up for spending four years of college taking classes like “Introduction to Alternative World Healing” and “Gender Studies in the Balkans.”