A typical day at school

I teach anywhere from three to five classes a day. I am usually done around 2:30 in the afternoon except for Wednesdays when I have a conversation group with other teachers who want to improve their English and on Fridays I am done at 12:30. All of my classes are English classes and they are about 50 minutes long. There are two bilingual programs at my school. There is ‘the section’ for more advanced students and ‘the program’ for students whose English level isn’t as high. I have a mixture of both. The school provides English books for the various levels. My teachers seem to only use the book to teach. So far, they tell me ahead of time what pages they want me to go over with the students and then they divide the class up and I take a small section of the class to do the book activities.

School starts at 8:30am and they go straight through with no breaks until 11:15am. At 11:15 we have a 45 minute break. Most teachers gather in the staff room and have some coffee and chat with each other or finish prepping for the afternoon. I am hungry by that time and still haven’t gotten used to the eating habits of Spaniards so I usually have a little snack too. We have classes again until 2:30pm and then there is a 10 minute break. School ends at 3:30pm. Not all teachers teach the entire day. When your classes are done you can go home, you don’t have to wait till the end of the day. Also, if you don’t have a class at 8:30am you don’t need to show up until your first class starts. For the most part, students stay in the same classroom all day and the teachers come to their class. All of us teachers have lockers in the staff room where we can keep the books, CDs, etc that we need for each class. At the end of each class, there is about a 3 or 4 minute break for the students as the teachers head back to the staff room to get what they need for the next class.

Throughout the day I have a few breaks in between the classes that I teach. Since I don’t have anything to prepare and since I am usually the only person in the staff room I bring a book along or I check email. This has been quite the different experience from student teaching! When I had a break during student teaching I was used to preparing activities for the next day but my teachers here use the ones out of the book so there is nothing to prepare except to read the pages and make sure I understand what they want me to do. Overall, I enjoy my classes and students and the staff has been great about making me feel welcome at school.