El Colegio Guadalhorce

When I received my letter from the Spanish Ministry of Education back in July, the only information I knew about the school where I’d be teaching was the name – C.E.I.P. Guadalhorce and the address in a town called Estacion. I was utterly confused because I thought “estacion” meant train station and I had no idea what the mysterious four letters C.E.I.P. stood for. I felt similar to the way Harry Potter must have felt when he received the mysterious letter from Hogwarts telling him he had to go to platform nine and three quarters in order to catch the train to Hogwarts. I Google-mapped the address and found out that the school was actually in the town of Alora, not Estacion. Everything else was to be discovered upon my arrival to the big white school with little square windows.

It’s utterly unfathomable that it’s already been an entire month that I’ve been teaching at el Colegio Guadalhorce. I quickly came to learn that C.E.I.P. was an acronym denoting the age groups at the school. My school has roughly 200 students between the ages of three and thirteen and it’s split into three levels: infantile, the adorable little babies, primaria, the elementary school-aged children, and secundaria, the first two grades of middle school. I work with both middle-schoolers and elementary-schoolers, and watch the little ones with adoration during the half-hour recreo where all the kids go out into the courtyard to play.

I work twelve hours a week and it’s been kindly arranged for me to work only on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from nine until two or two-thirty. That gives me four-day weekends and I doubt that I’ll have the luxury of such long weekends every again in my life. I take the early morning train from the city to Alora and arrive at the train station just as the sun is rising, while the air is still crisp and the dew is glistening on the tomato plants. I walk about ten minutes from the station to the school along a little winding road surrounded on both sides by lemon trees and get to a little bridge with a little creek beneath it and cross it to instantly find myself in the “Estacion” neighborhood of Alora. I get to the school just as the younger kids’ parents are kissing them goodbye and sending them off for their day of school. The older kids start an hour earlier.

The classes are hot and cold, up and down, exhausting and invigorating, intimidating and simple, exciting and boring all at the same time. The energy of the kids is electric and so very contagious and it’s impossible to be around them without absorbing their attitudes. The two older groups that I work with are much harder to inspire and work with, but all of my classes at the primary level are a pleasure to teach. I teach art to the oldest secondary school group of kids. They may be the worst behaved group of students that I’ve seen in my life. Within an hour of class, at most fifteen of those minutes are actually spent teaching and the rest is spent disciplining. The teacher with whom I work with this group is quite a character and the students seem to misbehave the most around her. Her name is Marina and she’s a short, pudgy woman with stringy blonde hair, bangs that plaster across her forehead and an uncannily red face. She has a screeching and high pitched voice that can be heard in a closed classroom down the hall and she uses it more often than not. She wears platform sneakers, red and pink tights, mismatched and intensely shirts, long scarves in her hair and she carries three heavy bags full of junk with her all the time. She’s the coordinator of the bilingual program for the secondary school and is the most frazzled and disorganized woman I’ve ever met in my life. She’ll start talking about one topic, make a mountain of copies of some materials and then instantly changed to another subject, completely forgetting what it was that she was doing before. Talking with her in class is impossible because the moment I start talking she interrupts me to screech at the class, for no apparent reason. She calls all of her coworkers “Profe-maestro-teacher” and insists on kissing each of us two times on the cheek every day, still using her screeching voice to say good morning. The students treat her like a clown, especially the oldest group. A student threw an eraser at her, hit her in the chest and aimed it to fall in her shirt. She spent the next thirty minutes yelling and threatening to punish the entire class unless someone confessed that it was them that threw the eraser. Nobody tattled, so she punished the class. The next day she’d forgotten about it. She’s from Benalmedena, a little village in the Malaga province, and she drives her car only to a certain point when she comes to work in Alora and then insists on taking the train to the school. When I asked her why, she said that she gets panic attacks when she’s driving.

The oldest group is currently learning pointillism in art class and Marina makes me repeat everything that she says in English and then has the class repeat after me. Needless to say, we don’t get very far. The students mindlessly repeat sentences in both Spanish and English and make no connections in their heads. They’re learning words like “pointillism” and “expressionism” in their English class, yet they can’t even exchange a simple salutation in English. Obviously, the bilingual program needs help at Guadalhorce. Esteban is the class clown and he sits in the middle of the front of the class, directly in front of Marina. He’s a chubby kid with big green glasses who hits his classmates, draws graffiti on his desk instead of art on his sheet of paper, and can’t pronounce a word of English. One day he gave me a handful of chestnuts as a preemptive gift to give him a ten on his oral exercise. Little does he know I have absolutely nothing to do with his grades.
The younger group of secondary school is also unbearable and Marina spends most of the class screaming at the top of her lungs. The girls tend to just sit at their desks, waiting patiently, watching their male counterparts act like clowns and disturb the entire class. In this group, Salvador is the class clown. He’s a tiny little boy with a Mohawk haircut and a blue piercing in his chin. A few of his buddies in the class have the exact same piercing and their game is to sneak up to the front of the class when Marina isn’t paying attention and draw horses on the board. They like to talk about horses a lot as well, I assume because each of them has one of their own.

The rest of my classes are with the younger kids and they’re much more enjoyable and productive. The little kids actually seem to know more English than the older ones. My class of six-year-olds I teach with Pilar, who’s the coordinator of bilingualism in primary school. Pilar is an incredibly thoughtful and organized woman, who is really dedicated to her job as well as the bilingual program. She has three kids of her own and lives in Malaga and has gone out of her way to collect maps and magazines for me to travel around the Malaga province. Her class is full of sweet kids who call my name with joy and clap their hands when I come to their class to work in English. We’re currently learning about healthy and unhealthy foods and just finished an art project where we created a food pyramid. Mary Lo is a cute little girl in the class who loves to talk and ask questions. One day she told me that she thought I was beautiful and that her friends tell her she’s fea (ugly). She then told me that she really likes to clean and help and that she wants to name her kids Andres and Isabel.

My other group of little ones is five-year-olds with whom I feel like I need to get down on my knees to communicate because they’re so tiny. The teacher I work with in this class is also named Marina and she’s a bit of a vagabond-looking woman with thick black hair that she wears in a loose bun. She has a piercing in her chin and used to be a taxi driver. She’s surprisingly really gentle and loving with her kids. I taught this class “Old McDonald Had a Farm” one day and after repeating it a few times I asked the class, “How do you say cow in English?” and a little boy named Ruben with gelled-up hair said “Moo moo here” in all seriousness. It gave me quite a laugh.

My seven-year-old group is really good with English, compared with the rest of the students. They know their colors, their numbers, their foods and other simple things. Alejandro is by far the most impressive of them all – a little blonde and pale boy with thick-rimmed blue glasses, who raises his hand with all his energy and pastes the other one across his mouth so that he doesn’t yell out the answer from excitement. Juana, their teacher, is a young and garrulous woman with curly brown hair. I spend an hour every week with her helping with her English through conversation and she always smiles really big and loves the intricacies of the English language, is fascinated by everything I have to tell her, and would love to travel to the United States one day.

Augustin is the physical education teacher at the school and the first person that I met when I came to Guadalhorce. He’s a thirty-two-year-old former rock star bachelor who realized at age of thirty that he’d better do something with his life. So he became a gym teacher. He’s traveled all over the world playing music with his band, he’s partied with Rod Stewart and Calvin Klein and he has a Swedish lover who he likes to talk about almost every day. He’s becoming more and more balding every day and has a five-o-clock shadow on his face. He’s great with the kids though and they all look forward to their P.E. time with him.

Jose Angel is the handsome, young first-year teacher from Cordoba. He lived in Ireland for two years and speaks perfect English. His students adore him and the girls draw him hearts with their names engraved in them. He’s originally from Cordoba, and says he needs a big party in his life because he’s been quite bored living in the small town where he works and using a hand puppet to talk to little kids all day. He too says he turned to teaching as a last resort, when he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his life. I wonder if I’ll find this to be a recurring trend.
The headmaster is a man named Salvador who looks like a character straight out of a Western movie. He wears tight, high-rise pants with a big belt buckle at his belly and he has pointy cowboy boots. His hair is slicked back across his head and his ear hair crawls down his jaw and neck. I found out that he used to be the mayor of Alora, before he took on the position as headmaster at Guadalhorce. As far as his job goes, he’s hard to find. I have yet to encounter him in his office when I need him.
So that’s the world I live in. They call me “Jasmine” with a beautiful Spanish accent because they can’t pronounce my name, and there’s nothing more exciting than walking into the gate in the morning and hearing a multitude of little voices calling my name across the courtyard, happy to have me there.