TEFL no more - by Theo

Today marks something like the end of an era for me; not only was it my last day at the Clifton language school where I've been working these last two months (more on that later), but also my last day for the foreseeable future as an EFL teacher. No longer will I be teaching English as a foreign language to foreign students; from now on I'll be teaching it to native speakers.

It's been quite a journey. It was 3 years ago that Kate and I decided we wanted the amazing adventure of our honeymoon travels in Sheena to continue and that we weren't going to return to Bristol or indeed the UK. So casting around for some means of supporting ourselves while living overseas, we enrolled on a CELTA course in Barcelona. We loved it, both of us really enjoying the reality of the classroom and the challenge of meeting the learners' needs. So when I found a job in Madrid, we headed back to the UK for Christmas to fill up the van with more of our things for the move to Spain.

Things have changed dramatically since then; Sheena's long since gone to a new home, Rosie has arrived and we've moved back to Bristol - but my job as an English Teacher has stayed a constant. I've really loved it. Sure there have been days when I haven't exactly bounced into the class full of enthusiasm, but generally I've been lucky enough to have keen, motivated students willing to participate in whatever crazy activity or bizarre discussion I've concocted for them. Some have even had the decency to laugh at my jokes!

My Spanish students in Madrid were always lovely and I remember them fondly. However, my experience these past two months teaching at a language school in Clifton on their summer program is that Spanish students, along with Turkish ones, are the absolute worst at slipping into their native tongue at the earliest opportunity. It's been quite the Tower of Babel in my classes at times, with a new intake every Tuesday and students staying for anything from 2 weeks to 7 months, but at one stage I had a class with one student each from: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. Not much opportunity there for them to chat in languages other than English! But allow two Spanish or Turkish students to sit next to each other and they would slip into their mother tongue as soon as your back was turned. The Swiss (especially the German speaking ones) were by far and away the best at keeping to English - one pair, who were in an optional class on British Life & Culture I was running, were best friends from back home, yet when I passed them in the street one day I was amazed to hear them speaking to each other in English. That's dedication!

My main class - which also had a lot of Swiss - was also pretty good and we celebrated the last morning (all but one were also leaving that day too) by carrying out a survey of Clifton cafes (English in use), debating their relative merits and then testing our conclusions with breakfast in the Primrose Cafe - which was just as good as I remembered. They were a lovely bunch of students with a real drive to learn, and while I didn't get to know them like some of my students in Madrid (well, most had only been here for a month or less) I'll miss them.


Naturally, I don't expect to get students with quite such high levels of motivation in the next stage of my teaching career, my PGCE, which starts in 3 weeks. Hell, I'll probably be pleading for a class of Spaniards come October...

Farewells - by Theo

So an era has come to an end. We're on the cusp of leaving Madrid; today most of our belongings shipped out and we'll follow, also by ship, on Wednesday. I've already finished work - Wednesday was my last day, which is to be the subject of this blog.

Working in a language school is a strange dynamic. You have colleagues but you don't really work with them; after all there's only ever one of you in a classroom. Sure, we swap lesson ideas and banter during the brief breaks between classes, but unless you're highly sociable (and I, as a new father, haven't been) you don't really get to know each other. In fact I know my colleagues who shared Spanish classes with me, both of whom were new this year, perhaps better than those who joined with me, two years ago.

Still this is not to say I won't miss them, or the boss and his wife, who were both hugely supportive to Kate and myself during Kate's pregnancy and Rosie's first few weeks. So I was more than happy to join them for raciones and drinks in Goya after work on Wednesday and then again in the Retiro for a picnic the following day - I thought I had stayed out reasonably late, heading home at midnight, only to find most of my (now former) colleagues had stayed out until 6am! I guess I never quite got the hang of that aspect of the Spanish lifestyle.

However, I think it's inevitable that when teaching English, or possibly any subject, it's with your students that a real bond forms, especially in the short-term. After all, if they stay the course you'll end up spending a considerable amount of time with them over the months, much of which will hopefully be by turns enjoyable, frustrating, amusing, challenging and sometimes outright hilarious. Such shared experience usually helps form bonds and ties, though not always: Of the two classes of intermediate teenagers I had this year, the group that were all new students to me in October turned out in full to say goodbye, while the group that included students I'd been teaching for 2 years was a total no-show. Not quite sure what that proves, but I'm sure it proves something.

So it was somewhat gratifying that my favourite group (now I've left I think I'm allowed to admit I had favourites), an adult proficiency class, pretty much all turned out on their last day (Tuesday), despite the fact that they'd already had the exam results back and most other classes weren't even half full. We had a fun time imagining which celebrities might make good English teachers ("David Beckham... well, he didn't speak English very well at the start of his career, but he does now, so he's clearly been through the learning experience") and then, joined by a former classmate who had already passed the Proficiency exam, we grabbed a table in the Plaza de Felipe II and spent a very enjoyable couple of hours setting the world to rights in both English and Spanish.

What a shame I forgot to take my camera to all three farewells.

Spanish Bureaucracy for Beginners.

I'm definitely coming down with Administration Anxiety Complex. Or filloutaformaphobia. Or something like that.

When I was living in the UK, my encounters with government bureaucracy tended to leave me baffled at best - efforts by the Plain English Campaign notwithstanding, their forms might just as well have been in Spanish, for all the sense I could make of them. Especially the annual tax self-assessment. I haven't had to do one for years, thank god, but the thought of it still gives me the horrors.

But bureaucracy that actually IS in Spanish is a whole lot worse. To be fair, I don't think Spanish red tape is too bad, compared with some places (German friends confidently tell me theirs is the worst and I suspect they're right about that). But officialdom is a dialect in itself and when it's a dialect of a language you find largely incomprehensible at the best of times - well, you can imagine the problems.

Unfortunately, I have no choice but to plunge into the administrative maelstrom if I want to actually get paid for my English teaching endeavours. The company I work for has given me several life-belts in the form of idiot's guides, step-by-step instructions and sample forms to copy out. But no matter how well-prepared I am, a single query from the person at the desk sends the teetering edifice of my understanding crashing onto my head.

Take today: I had to visit a local tax office - any would do, I was told - and hand in a completed form to register myself as an official freelancer, or autonomo. The first office, which I'd painstakingly researched, Googlemapped and pinpointed on the Metro plan turned out to have closed down. Some time ago, if the graffiti covering the door was anything to go on. Rather than leave the area straight away for the address suggested in the window, I decided to visit a nearby police station so I could change the address on my Certificado de Registro (another necessary document when it comes to being paid - with the all-important "NIE" number. People have killed for less.). "You can stroll into any police station and change the address", I'd been told. Except you can't. The policeman miraculously understood my explanation in halting Spanish of what I needed and gestured me and (an increasingly weary) Theo to another office up the street. We duly followed his directions and I joined the queue at the bustling building where they were processing extrajaneros. When my turn came, the woman at the desk babbled something at me several times. Eventually, the bored policeman beside her, treating me like the imbecile I must have appeared to be, wrote another address on a piece of paper. "Go here," he instructed. I nodded meekly and went out.

By this time Theo, who had heroically got up early to accompany me on my expedition, ran out of patience. Traipsing to three offices in a decidedly un-Spanish-like steady drizzle went above and beyond the call of duty. He gratefully took my suggestion to go home and left me to carry on alone.

The central tax office I eventually arrived at was huge and impressively high-tech. There was an automated and highly complex queueing system, which involved several different zones, large electronic displays, which looked rather like Airport departure boards and acres of desks, each with another electronic display, which lit up with the relevant number once the clerk was ready. None of the old, "cashier number six, please," nonsense of UK post-offices and light years ahead of the ticket-dispensing supermarket deli counter.

I painstakingly translated the instructions and pressed the button for my number. I sat and waited with a chatty South American on one side of me (I didn't need to know any Espanol to work out that she was complaining about how long it was all taking) and an English-speaking woman who either had a severe case of Tourette's or whose patience had been so severely depleted by the Spanish tax system that she'd lost the ability to communicate in anything except expletives.

When your turn came, the departure board gave you a little fanfare, which for those who had thirty of more ahead of them in the queue, was probably well-deserved. A neat and smiling middle-aged woman dealt with me and it all went swimmingly, until she pointed at a cross I'd made on the form and said something in a questioning tone. I responded like a landed fish. Despite patient repetitions by the clerk, I was still none the wiser, so eventually resorted to ringing up the Human Resources lady at my employer's in the hope her superior Spanish would untangle the problem.

It did - as an English teacher I was indeed IVA (VAT) exempt, whatever that may mean - my documents were stamped and I was free to go.

My next stop was to the comisaria to try and do the change of address on my Certificado de Registro. When I arrived the woman guarding the entrance took one look at me and gave a piece of paper telling me how the system had recently changed for Romanians and Bulgarians. Not very helpful, really. Eventually, I managed to convey to her the reason for my visit and was waved to desk 7. Once there, it all seemed straightforward, until I was handed yet another form to fill in and told I had to go and pay a ten euro administration fee at a bank.

Grumbling, I filled out the form using educated guess-work (I'm definitely getting better with all the practice) and traipsed off to the nearest bank. The cashier there said something unintelligible to me several times and after a while I got the message that I would have to return at another time. I tried another bank with the same result. After trying three more, I gave up. They had all allocated particular days and hours to the business of accepting government administration fees and most of them had stopped accepting that type of business at 1030. It was 1230 by now and I'd had enough. Deciding a partially-successful mission was better than an outright failure and needing to regroup, I turned back for home.

Tomorrow, with renewed vigour, I shall tackle the next stage - arranging my social security payments. I can hardly wait.