Woke up this morning, stepped into my patio, noticed a slight chill in the air and realized that it was September 1st. People all around the country are waking up with a different chill in their bones as they realize it's Monday and their holidays are over. Cities around the country are beginning to refill and villages empty, as Spaniards make their yearly migration back to urban areas. The newspapers will be filled with tragic news items regarding the absurd amount of people who lost their lives on the roads this weekend and yearly articles about post-vacation syndrome will be trotted out, slightly edited to match the times. Lamp posts and public phone booths will be covered with ads asking for roommates and back-to-school ads dominate.

Language schools with evocative names like Oxford-this and Cambridge-that around the country are also warming up, putting millions of flyers under windshield wipers, each one promising that their school makes learning English just that much easier. Would you like to learn English quickly, efficiently, without effort and with perfect pronunciation? Each academy promising that with their exclusive method, you'll be waxing eloquently in the Queen's English in no time at all...12 months...9 months...even 3!

Worried about your child's English? No problem, we take children as young as 18 months so that they will "coger oido", get an ear for it early! Drop off your toddler with us for two one-hour sessions a week and watch with amazement as they enjoy the Disney Channel in English! All for under a 100 euros a month!

Not to be outdone, print and TV media shower people with equally absurd claims. Learn English while showering, 600 words is all you need, put our book under your pillow and in the morning....viola! Dr. Kravinsky's fool-proof method of watching porno with English subtitles is just the one for you!

With all of these fool proof methods around, can you believe a teacher actually telling learners that learning a language is hardwork, a long and winding road that might last years? Telling them that unfortunately there is no magic pill and that yes, revision and homework are necessary to consolidate vocabulary learnt.

Maybe that's why I'm broke and the snake oil salesmen's classes are bursting at the seams?

Originally taken from www.troyshouse.blogspot.com

The warmer weather here in Spain has also brought with it much needed rains. The past week has been dull, gray and wet, an image far from the typical one oft promoted of Sunny Spain. In a country where the sun shines a large percentage of the time, the gloomy weather has definitely had an effect on my mood and certainly those of my students, most noticeably throwing a wet blanket on the spring fever the teens had been experiencing.

Teaching here in Spain, my classes mostly consist of adult learners, but in order to fill in the hours and flush out the academy's finances, young learner and young adult classes are taken on with alarming eagerness given I have no training in either field.

This week, while the rain slammed against the windows and ran in torrents down the hill, my objective was to engage and somehow teach English to a group of 5 boys aged 14 to 16. To put the class in context, they will have spent a whole day at school, had lunch and then are forced to come to class at 5.15, a difficult hour to say the least here in Spain. I say forced, as none come of their own volition, but under parental pressure and the adolescently-vague warning of, "It will be good for you when looking for a job."

I had planned my classes around the general theme of travel, a topic that would have sent me dreaming of far off exotic places at their age. With the underlying aims of practicing Conditionals and Scan Reading practice, they were given classified pages from an English newspaper and asked to choose the travel options that most appealed to them. They were then to form travel agencies, using the offers in the paper to convince the others that their trip was the best option. A lesson that targeted 3 of the 4 skills and was coursebook free.

Methodology aside, what I encountered was an extremely worrying disinterest. Not so much in the lesson itself but for the destinations, which spanned the entire globe. The students were happy to argue for their best option but these included none of the options in the paper which purposely included Spanish destinations. Their arguments were based only on one place, their village.

What's so wrong with a little pride in one's hometown you might ask? Indeed if it were only that, there would be nothing at all wrong with it but there is something sinister and threatening in this egocentric world view that manifests itself in disinterest in others and their traditions. Methodologists might immediately argue that this disinterest was because they lack a world vision or experience but I would argue that a 15yr old boy in the current technology age with a European educational background will have been exposed to the world over and has enough background information to complete the task. Why then the complete disinterest in the world beyond the horizon?

In a political climate that stresses regionalism above all else in order to justify its existence, perhaps a knock on effect has been a tendency to gaze inward rather than outward. A positive practice when done in moderation, but devastatingly negative when this inward look begins to exclude all else.

Originally posted at www.troyshouse.blogspot.com 

5pm in May somewhere in central Spain. The temperatures have already invaded the mid 30s and the brief rains of spring are a memory. The green plain beyond the expanding urban blight has already burnt off and the sleepy siesta streets are still quiet at this hour. But wait, what's that sound in the sea of calm?

Sure enough it is coming from an open window a few floors up, and what does it sound like? Perhaps English? English here in the middle of lost Spain? Sure enough there seems to be a few hoarse English words peppered amidst a general buzz of screaming children's voices.

See the rest of this post at  http://troyshouse.blogspot.com/2008/03/its-5pm-do-you-know-where-your-