KENTUKIANA 6: Should I stay or should I go?

After five months on the school front lines, I've found I'm getting the situation more and more under control, or at least I think so. The students know you better and you know them. In this way, bonds keep forming and life together improves. So either you adapt to these slow, gradual changes or you go back home.

I've learned to stay on almost constant alert, a very powerful skill with which I keep that sixth sense in constant training and growth, because the second you relax, wham!, these lively little rascals start running wild on you and scoring goals on you 'all over the place', as we say back in 'Graná', and you don't even see them coming.

the second you relax, wham!, these lively little rascals start running wild on you and scoring goals on you 'all over the place', as we say back in 'Graná'

and you don't even see them coming.

And so, thanks to these lessons the students themselves teach you, one ends up polishing certain 'superpowers'. These gestate in every teacher, but only those of us who come to visualize them in a more conscious way manage to control them better. I admit that until now they had remained somewhat dormant. While I already put them into practice in the schools of Spain, though in a somewhat unconscious, automatic way, the moment I arrived here they began to hatch. Now, however, I try to apply them with greater discernment, for the sake of my survival.

Let me begin to reveal to you the power of some of these super abilities.

1. ‘Laser vision‘

This one consists of giving a lightning-fast scan of the faces of the group of students who show up at my door each morning in single file saying –Good morning mister ‘Duruoh‘-. Right there, I quickly calibrate with my Sharingan eye the possible level of agitation they're bringing, and by rough rule of thumb I proceed with versatility and great care to see which way they're coming at me that day. Then I apply one protocol or another depending on the situational context in the classroom at that moment, I shut the door with a lock and start quieting them down so the show can begin. As they start filing in and taking their seats, I sometimes seem to be playing a game of human ‘Tetris’ but on extreme mode, placing them here and there. Although I'm fairly permissive and even a good negotiator, discipline is a necessary weapon for maintaining order and a clear direction.

The ‘laser vision’ one consists of giving a lightning-fast scan of the faces of the group of students who show up at my door each morning in single file saying –Good morning mister ‘Duruoh‘-.

2. ‘Be an ice floe, my friend‘

Once you manage to get them all more or less in their seats, the adventure of steering the classroom begins, only that at times it feels more like a big wagon pulled by countless horses, and you never know at what moment one of them will bolt on you, dragging the others off the cliff. That's why you have to be more alert than a trapeze artist on a circus tightrope. This is where the magnificent powers of ‘mindfulness‘ and the ‘be cold as ice, my friend’ come into play, which I happened to have to practice this very week: ‘be an ice floe, my friend, or in other words: if they explode, you be water and soap. Let any insult or gesture of disrespect slide right off you. I mean not taking anything personally, not even identifying yourself with that fictional police-officer role we sometimes have to play. You talk with the student calmly, and if necessary you reprimand them, making them see that what they did falls outside some minimum standards of community life and courtesy, and that's that, on to something else.

‘be an ice floe, my friend‘ , or in other words,

if they explode, you be water and soap.

Besides, I don't see the same group again until the following week, because as I already explained in another post (see 3: Teaching Spanish in a Kentucky classroom), I have 18 groups spread across the five school days of the week, which makes giving them personalized follow-up very complicated. Although by now I've got all their faces very well read, I still need to get to know them more deeply.

When I see them appear down the hallway in single file, guided by their homeroom teachers, so very quiet (some of them), and waiting in quasi-military formation for me to give them the go-ahead to enter the classroom, I can already predict, from a fleeting scan of their faces, gestures and the other little dances they perform even while standing in line, what may or may not be in store for me. They can't stay still; they're pure nerve and energy. And if on top of that they've eaten candy in the previous class, and some even bring it into mine, the explosion is all but guaranteed.

3. ‘Eagle eye‘

One common thing is that the moment they walk in, if they haven't been assigned a desk beforehand, some confrontations can break out among them over disagreements about whether I get to sit with so-and-so or what's-her-name. That's why you always have to keep an ‘eagle eye‘ out so the class doesn't turn into a pressure cooker. Sometimes I feel like a firefighter placating tempers, putting out fires. If you manage to start off well, or you straighten the course of the class, everything will roll along on wheels at cruising speed, with some turbulence during the session, but with a little gentle handling it can be intercepted and dealt with properly. The bad part is when that turbulence rises up on several flanks of the classroom at once and you possess neither the gift of omnipresence nor a regiment of hoses to quell so many blazes.

you always have to keep an ‘eagle eye‘ out so the class doesn't turn into a pressure cooker. Sometimes I feel like a firefighter placating tempers, putting out fires.

When you pull it off, when you take control of the class and actually get to explain something to them, you feel heard and happiness washes over you; even when you have them absorbed in the activities you've handed out, it all becomes something thrilling: you feel the adrenaline of steering a ship over a sea of highly variable winds with a more than unstable crew. That's why it becomes essential to assign the desks as they come in or have them assigned in advance, though with so very many groups it's more than complicated to follow that to the letter.

As soon as they start causing trouble, I move ipso facto to ‘my protocol‘: 1. Approach the student and try to talk. 2. Change of seat. 3. Call security. 4. Reprimand via a disciplinary report. 5. Call their parents. If quite a few of them are being disruptive, I also take away their ‘soccer‘ game, because yes, we play this sport, as I'll explain in another post.

Once they rack up five disciplinary reports, a protocol is opened for them and on Wednesdays they get ‘detention‘, which doesn't mean they get ‘detained’ the way the word itself first led me to think, but rather they're taken to a room where they spend a few hours during which their behavior is worked on with them. This would be well worth applying in the schools of Spain. Although I believe that in many of them the coexistence committees already do something similar. The goal is for whatever you apply to work and yield good results, like a gradual change in the child's behavior.

4. ‘Finely tuned ear‘

Another of the gifts you come to discover is super-sharp hearing, since by now I can perceive even the erasers falling on the floor. Not to mention the markers, pencils, papers and even iPads and laptops, but of course, since they have their good protective cases they seem made of rubber, until one day that case stops doing its job and they wreck the thing. I can even hear their bodies flinging themselves onto the floor, and that's when I tell them: –I didn’t know you were the class broom–. Then they either get up fast or keep playing the mop.

I can even hear their bodies flinging themselves onto the floor, and that's when I tell them:

–I didn’t know you were the class broom–. Then they either get up fast or keep playing the mop.

5. ‘Forked tongue‘

This would be the next ability on the list. It's about the sarcastic, roguish comebacks that occur to me, sometimes spontaneously, and with which I like to bring a bit of humor into the classroom, like that one about the class broom or mop. For example, as soon as they finish a task they immediately shout ‘Dooone!’ and I answer them –congratulations!–, which in Spanish sounds even funnier, but here most of them don't even get it. May humor never be lacking, please, especially about oneself, and all the more so in this profession.

6. ‘Laugh at yourself, but with the others‘

From that one this other superpower would derive. Sometimes I start doing ‘clown acts‘ in class to break the ice in some situation and thus capture more of their attention and their admiration, both so necessary for this job, or simply because the whim strikes me and, purely for my own mental health, I need to do a bit of Mortadelo, like when I introduced the farm animals and started imitating, with gestures and sounds, the braying of a donkey, the neighing of a horse or the grunting of a pig.

7. ‘Improvise, improvise‘

Another one is the art of improvisation. This is where dialectics comes into play, and if it's in English on top of that, well, imagine the cocktail that brews. But yes, sometimes you have to improvise solutions and answers for totally new situations and, like divine inspiration, they come to me from who knows where, perhaps from the stage instincts one carries after a long list of war stories.

In short, you develop a series of capacities that come neither from college nor from the civil-service exam syllabus. They save those for dessert, for when the moment of truth arrives and walking into a classroom becomes an adventure of high psychological and even physical risk. Why, didn't a small student hang off my leg just the other day? He looked like a little monkey perched in a tree. Only in this case the student was such a pipsqueak that next to him I passed for a sequoia. It was something that struck me because, the day before, that same boy, who always seems angry at life, had thrown chocolate cereal in my face right in the middle of the cafeteria, as casual as you please. But if we know how to read between the lines, what he was really crying out about was a lack of attention. And so the next day, while I was working with him, he apologized for what had happened and we managed to connect through an activity of cutting out a paper heart and turning it into a little puppet, in a way that left me somewhat stunned. He climbed onto my right leg and, with me playing the incredible Hulk, I carried him hanging there for several meters across the classroom, hauling him along the aisles between the desks. He laughed and was blown away. If you could have seen how his face changed. I could even see a certain sparkle of joy in his surprised blue eyes.

He climbed onto my right leg and, with me playing the incredible Hulk,

I carried him hanging there for several meters across the classroom,

hauling him along the aisles between the desks.

This past January 26 of the present year 2024, the manager of Kentucky's academic education program, Mr. Clouse, got in touch with me to find out whether I would repeat the experience at the school next year or, on the contrary, was heading back to Spain at last. I wasn't at all sure. It has been a rough start to the school year, and an answer that had shifted a great deal from the beginning. Still, I spent this whole past week mulling it over, though the verdict was already more than settled. As a visiting teacher who lived this experience for three years told me: “if you're in doubt, stay, because when you want to leave, you'll know for sure”.

Look, of course I feel like going back to Menorca. However, so much has been invested in time, energy and money that I feel the moment to close this chapter hasn't yet arrived. Likewise, these five and a half months have flown by, and with three months and little more to go before the end, it all feels as if it had already happened. It's leaving me wanting more, despite the intensity of the students. If we put it all on a scale, the things that enrich my world here and now would outweigh returning in June to my old comfort zone. For example, I'll keep improving my English, keep acquiring a new experience, both personal and professional, that doesn't come along every day, new friendships, new musical options, new places, chances to save, more adventures for this blog, but above all, the fact of continuing to face these challenges in a school with students who ask for affection and attention, since many of them don't get it at home, not even close. It is, then, the human factor that takes on special relevance. If I told you how many hugs they give us almost daily without our asking, you'd be dumbfounded, as I am.

On February 4 I wrote to Mr. Clouse and replied, kindly and sincerely, that I was staying, at least one more year.

– Next post: coming Saturday, February 24, 2024. Kentukiana 7: ‘Soccer’ at school