Time Flies...

When you're having fun...or when you're really busy. I suppose my case is a combination of the two.

This week Sara and I have been working like crazy at school to finish up all the last details for the final Spelling Bee competition at school. Tuesday morning we finished up at the school level with three different Bees among the top two spellers of each cycle (first cycle is first and second grade, etc). And today was the Inter-school final. Students from here in La Roda came to Casariche this morning to compete in the grand finale. It was a lot of fun and overall a great success.

The first cycle competition was a little rocky. It's hard to prepare lists for the younger students because it's always a toss up whether or not they'll know a word. When I prepared the list I was thinking of the fact that we always come down to two or three students that just CANNOT be eliminated and we run out of words so I made the list kind of hard after about round 3. Well, it turns out that my idea of "kind of hard" is light years away from what the kids were capable of spelling. We got to the end of round 4 and everyone had been eliminated! Oops. So that called for a little improvisation: we called up the recently eliminated contestants once again and jumped around the list looking for "easy" words. All the same we knocked out everyone except one kid. A little unfair perhaps, but it's too late to make changes now. I will have to make a note to change that spelling list for next year though...

The second and third cycle competitions were much better. Aside from having worked out the technical kinks with the microphone, etc. the lists were much better suited to the sudents' level. And the kids from La Roda put up a good fight. The Inter-school Champion for second cycle was a fourth grader from here, La Roda. He was the only Rodeño to win, but all the other contestants from my home town gave the Casaricheños a run for their money. I was proud. ;)

As I said the overall experience was a good one even though Sara and I were kind of on our own with a lot of the preparation and planning. The coordination of the bilingual program this year has left something to be desired, but as always I have an all-star co-auxiliar so no worries.

It's always rewarding to see how excited the students get to compete and how much they appreciate things like the pins we made (I think about 400 total!). Today when we were passing them out I even got a "Thank you, teacher". :)

So the Spelling Bee has taken up most of my time this week, but on top of all that about a month or two ago I was asked to participate in a conference for English and Bilingual teachers in Granada. It was a conference put together jointly by the association GRETA (remember I gave a talk for them at the beginning of the school year?) and the Teacher's Association of Granada (government affiliated). The focus was to be a little bit more practical: advice on how to best work with your language assistant and what kinds of activities in the classroom have been most effective.

In typical fashion, I hadn't prepared anything until the end of last week (yesterday was the conference). Honestly, it wasn't so much that I was procrastinating but that I was drawing a blank--What IS the language assistant's role? I have been doing this now for four years and still don't really know how to define my job. It dawned on me that in fact my inability to define my role was evidence of the dire necessity for these kinds of conferences that are working to clarify our role and facilitate good communication between teachers and language assistants. I decided that not having concrete answers is part of why I was also participating and even though I was presenting, my questions were going to be more useful to my audience--we were all there to jointly take part in answering them.

My presentation was a success (that's what they told me) and I did feel good about it. Later we had rotating discussion groups each focused on a different aspect of the bilingual program and geared toward making things better and solving common problems. I was the moderator for the group titled "Troubleshooting": Solving common problems related to language assistants, right up my alley!

It was a long afternoon (I left school early to be able to eat lunch, then jumped in the car to drive the hour and a half to Granada and the conference lasted from 4pm-9:15), but so worth it. Just like last fall when I attended the GRETA conference, I found myself surrounded by people who think like me, people who care about education, about making a difference, and people who are willing to come together and brainstorm in their free time to improve the bilingual program. It was a very rewarding and recharging experience--exactly what I needed in the midst of feeling burned out and quite unsupported (by staff) at school with the Spelling Bee.

The best part of the day was that I had arranged to eat dinner with my family in Granada so at about 9:30 I met Isa at the Palacio de Congresos and we headed home for dinner. Fernando (the baby in the fam) is in his first year at ESO (equivalent to seventh grade more or less) and is so big! He greeted me with a huge hug that nearly knocked me over. Antonio is finishing high school and will be going on to college prep (two years) next year. I didn't get to see Isa my sister because she was out on the town celebrating the end of her exams. She's finishing the college prep this year and if she passes the entrance exams in June she'll be going to the University of Granada next year.

It was wonderful to see Isa and el abuelo. There's never enough time to catch up with everything, although this was an especially short visit since I needed to get home "early" to be decently rested for today's spelling excitement. As always, Isa and I somehow ended up in the kitchen chatting non-stop until the tortilla had finished cooking. It's always so nice to visit them. They are my Spanish family and even though we live so close, we don't see each other nearly enough.

I joked last night that it was good to have tortilla "grana'ina", but that wasn't really a joke. And neither was it meant to be funny when I said my visit was overdue because "it's important to remember your roots." My roots are in the U.S., of course, but the beginning of my current life was eight years ago at number 9 Ribera del Genil.

My heart belongs to Granada.