Memories of Madrid: Please don't eat my doggie

You know how New Year's is...you want to do stuff that brings you into the future, but sometimes you get things that remind you of the past...

About ten years ago, I wrote a story for a website called Tales from a Small Planet, and I described a situation where an exercise from a textbook took an unexpected turn. Thanks to Stefan C. for rescuing it because it's not on the website any more.

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The ESL textbook we use in class is called “Cutting Edge” but the material is purely traditional: Talk about yourself. Tell us a story about... What would you do if...

It’s the second class after the Cynical Weasel and the Class Meanie drop out, leaving Icíar, Gaspar, Remedios and Santiago, four Spanish civil servants, none of whom are particularly adept at English. The classes are arguably mandatory, even though none of these four will ever use English in their jobs. Television in Spain, even here in Madrid, is never in English. They don’t listen to songs with English lyrics and their exposure to English speakers has been limited to their English teachers, who they see twice a week. 

They’re all interested, but gun-shy. Why even try to learn English any more, especially after twenty years of failure?

Because Human Resources and the Spanish government have decreed, using European Union funds for language learning, that these four must gain some kind of competence in spoken and written English. That’s why. So I am trying to teach them, to be cutting edge. Or at least different and vaguely interesting, so that they damn well learn something by the end of the year.
Today’s section seems straightforward: Write about your first... DVD. Boyfriend/girlfriend. Day at college or work. Outfit you bought for yourself. Pet. Time you travelled abroad or by yourself. It seems straightforward enough when they all decide to write about first pets.
Paper out, pens ready, heads down, they crouch over their nut-u-BOOK-es, absorbed in storytelling, which they’re very gradually getting better at. Ten minutes of scribbling, erasing. (“¡Down! How say cachorro en ingliss?” “¿Y mancha? What is mancha in ingliss?")

I bring out the squishy miniature football we use to control speaking in English. Ah, what the hell. If they mess this up like they mess up some of the other writing assignments, there’s only another, what, five weeks of classes?

I toss the football to Remedios. She’s the stereotypical middle- aged Spanish woman given to fighting the aging process with every fibre of her being (and every Euro in her wallet). Her cachorro was called Morito (which translates as “Little Moor” but is closer in intention to “Black Boy” or “Sambo”.)

“How say? POA-pee?”

No. PUH-pee. Sounds like “cup”.  The inappropriately-named POA-pee was a Spaniel who lived to the ripe old age of sixteen.

Then, over to Icíar, a Basque head banger with a passion for purple blouses and an infectious giggle. Another puppy: Pulgas (“Fleas”, or “Fleabag”) was a Golden Lab with a fear of staircases. Lived to seventeen. Then the ball goes over to Gaspar.

Gaspar, pobre Gaspar. He’s the class’s hanging chad, the Great White Hope. Taciturn, self-conscious, he left school at twelve to become a botones, an errand boy for the Post Office, to support his family. At fifty-three, he’s the head stationery guy. He’s got a thirteen-year-old son he doesn’t understand, a marvellous memory for individual words in English and a hangdog look that intensifies every time he has to say something in English. 

Gaspar stares down at his paper and starts to speak in a voice so soft that even Remedios, who’s sitting right beside him, has to tell him to speak up. POA-pee? No. It was a rabbit given to him on his birthday, June 15th. Many Spaniards don’t pronounce the “s” sound of plural nouns: it takes a bit before the class realizes that this wasn’t a one- time rabbit, but a series of them. Some were soft and cuddly, one had sharp teeth and an attitude problem, but all of them were fluffy and cute and, with alarming regularity, would appear in the paella Gaspar’s father cooked to celebrate the holiday for the Assumption of the Virgin on August 15th.

How many rabbits, Gaspar?

He starts counting on his fingers: Seven. Seven revoked rabbits, seven double-duty rabbits: birthday present AND celebratory meal. Given that Spain’s food industry was literally blown to bits by the Civil War, a rabbit was a valuable commodity in a protein-poor nation.

Gaspar smiles wanly and hands the ball to Santiago.


A chicken.


A what?


Santiago looks at me like I’m daft and tucks his hands into his armpits. “You know! Brak-brak-brak-brak-brak!!!!”

Icíar looks at Santiago. “But where you lived? You in a flat lived, ¿no?”

“Yeah. We call her Manchita. Like on your clothes, you know?” Little Stain. He points to his eye. “White here but everywhere else black.”

Remedios: “But was how big the flat?”

Santiago does some quick mental math: “Forty square metres, I think? Two bedrooms.” 

Santiago is the middle child of five.

“How say cariñoso in English? Affectionate, yeah. Was very affectionate and loved when people visited.” Hands out of his armpits, arms outstretched, he stands up and lumbers towards Remedios. “New person visits, Manchita running!”

The others can ́t hide the guilty grins on their faces: Traditional Valencian paellas use chicken as well as rabbit meat.

“How old when died?”

Santiago shrugs. “Dunno. She broke leg behind sofa once so she couldn’t walk. We taught how to fly.”

You what, Santi?

“Yeah! Here, me, this side of sofa, my brother Alvaro there.” He takes the ball and lobs it underhand to Gaspar. “Whoop! Whoop! Back and fort, back and fort and after two hours, Manchita flies! My mudder was cabreá (pissed off)! Feathers everywhere! But Manchita flies.”

“How long did you have Manchita in your house?”

“One year. Too big from eating the garbage, so we gave her to my uncle.”

“She finished [ended up] in paella?”

Remedios laughs so hard that rivulets of eye shadow and mascara run down her cheeks, jagging every so often when she hiccups. Icíar gives herself hiccups, too. Gaspar tries to stifle his laughter and goes red with the effort. Santiago just grins and shrugs.

“Next time, it’s boyfriends or girlfriends! No more pets.”

We now have four classes left. The thought has crossed my mind that we should go for paella for the last class. Seafood paella. Squid, mussels and shrimp make pretty lamentable pets. 

Some more thoughts about students who don't speak in class....

The Atlantic has an interesting article about silent classrooms - classes where students don't speak, either out of fear or boredom.

The piece focuses on American college and university classrooms, but I suspect that this problem also exists in English-language classes. Teachers are taught that the ideal ratio of communication is about 80/20: students talk eighty per cent of the time, teachers 20%.

Is this true in your language classroom? Who does more talking in your class - the teacher or the students?

If you don't participate in your classes.....why?

Some (more) thoughts on translation

One thing I really like about Twitter is the ability to follow what other English teachers, experts, gurus and mavens are doing. This morning, Jeremy Harmer, who definitely falls into the "guru" category, was Tweeting live from the Directors of Study conference. Reporting live from the presentation of one Guy Cook (who argues for using translation in the classroom), he sent a tweet through that...well, I shouldn't re-type it word for word, but it basically said that students don't want to pretend that they're native speakers when they're in a monolingual situation.

If I can provide another point of view...

I grew up speaking English and French, but it wasn't until I went to Prague in 1999 that I was forced to live in a situation where I didn't speak the language. To be honest, I think that it is something that all teachers of English should do. That way, a teacher can better understand the sense of humility, the frustration, the curiosity and the confusion that a person feels when trying to learn English.

I should mention that, in 1999, the Czech Republic had changed a lot, compared to its Warsaw Pact years. There were only five public universities in the whole country, and to be able to attend one, you had to have the First Certificate of English. As a result, there was a lot of demand for English classes. (There was also a lot of demand because boys who attended more than 20 hours a week of English classes were exempt from military service; and some of the boys were quite eager to learn English.) After all, if you attend university and you want to have a decent career, Czech will only get you so far. The chances of working as a Czech-speaking lawyer in London or Los Angeles...or anywhere outside of eastern Europe...are pretty small.

So most people under the age of thirty could manage to speak some English. A lot of educated people over the age of thirty could, too. But if you had to get your hair cut, obtain a visa, read a store receipt, deal with the banks, have lunch in a non-touristy area, visit the pharmacy, not get cheated by fake public transit police, buy a train ticket and not get charged double for being foreign, or try to communicate with a bus driver...good luck! It was Czech or nothing. I clearly remember one co-worker, a vegetarian from Toronto, had a really difficult time trying to have something to eat because he couldn't communicate his dietary needs to anyone. A group of us went out for lunch, and our coworker ordered a fried cheese dish called smazeny sýr. And I'll never forget the look of disgust on his face as he poked at it and muttered, "I'm SO f***ing sick of smazeny sýr that I could vomit." (He eventually got a Czech girlfriend who translated food sayings for him.)

What I'm trying to say is this: No language learner ever wants to forget how to use his or her first language, but there are times when you have to behave like a native speaker, even if you don't particularly want to, and even if you know that THEY know you're not native. Does it suck? Of course it does. I'm not going to say that it's easy, that it's fun, or that it saves you from embarrassment 100% of the time.

There's another problem: translation only works if everyone in the classroom speaks the same mother tongue. Even in Spain, that's not automatically true any more, unless you're in a one-on-one situation. What happens if you have students from Morocco or Brazil or Romania in your class? Do you automatically assume that their Spanish is as good as the Spanish of the rest of the students? What do you do if it isn't?

Three months after I arrived in Prague, I started Czech classes. Our teacher, Petra, spoke wonderful English, but she did NOT speak it in class. In the first class, we were given a page with common expressions. If we couldn't say what we wanted to say, we had to wait until the end of class, or try to put together sentences to tell her what we wanted. (And if you've ever tried to learn a Slavic language, you know that it's not as easy as putting words in a set order.) Was it comfortable? No. Was it easy? No. Was it effective? You bet: the minute we stepped out of the school and had to do anything in our lives, we were prepared for it. I only took one semester of Czech, but I'm proud to say that I still remember how to count to ten, how to order 100 grams of ham and how to ask for aspirin in the pharmacy (lekárna!). I admit that in the nine months I was there, I was never brave enough to get a haircut in Czech, but I learned how to stare down a corrupt police officer and paid 50% less for my train tickets than other foreigners.

Translation may be helpful, but it isn't always effective.