Week 13

By Joni

Who’s Coming to Dinner: My friend Stephanie came to visit! We worked together at CCPCS Petworth, and she was on a bit of a "European tour." She spent 2 days in Dublin, 2 days with us in Madrid, and then 2 days in Brussels. Perks of having a teacher friend visit are updates on all your favorite students, and a delivery of adorable letters. 

Exploring the City: Unfortunately, the entire weekend that Stephanie was here was extremely rainy! Very unlike Madrid as I know it. We still ventured out into the city, however, and were able to show her some of the sites. Saturday, we walked through Sol in the rain, enjoyed some gelato, tried roasted chestnuts, and later visited the Reina Sofia modern art museum. There are many famous works there, including "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso. 

On Sunday, we visited Cibeles Palace for the first time, and unfortunately just missed seeing the giant flock of sheep pass through the city as part of the transhumance tradition. Instead, we enjoyed the cultural exhibits in the Cibeles Palace. It is set up as a museum with different types of exhibits on each floor. We hoped to go to the viewing deck to get a good look at Madrid from above, but it was closed for the day due to the rainy weather. We'll have to check that out some other time. 

That same day, we walked through Retiro Park, and then enjoyed a traditional siesta, followed by a traditional Spanish meal at El Rincon II, a restaurant on our block. The meal felt slightly untraditional merely because the only other people dining while we were there were also English speakers, but that's because it was 8 pm, and most Spaniards don't eat dinner until 9 or 10.

Is that a buckeye or a chestnut?  As far as we can tell, the two look identical.

Memorable Meal: Saturday night we went to the nearby Lavapíes neighborhood to check out the TapaPíes tapas festival. Tons of bars and restaurants were participating in this festival and offering tapas from around the world for just €1.50. There were SO many people at the many participating businesses.

En la clase: I still don't like lesson planning, but I love teaching English. I knew this before, but I had some particularly fulfilling classes this past week (despite teaching while sick on Monday). In all of my classes this week, we focused on some type of pronunciation practice or rule. I absolutely love talking about phonetics and pinpointing exactly how to produce a particular sound, and this is very important to my students, as most of them hope to some day land English-speaking acting roles.

In my most-advanced class, they practiced pronunciation through reading a script from a ten-minute play. I have the script for this particular play because it's one for which I designed costumes back in 2013. It was amazing to see these professional actors and actresses (who act in films, on television, and in theater) perform in the classroom. One of my students took home his 2 page script on Monday, and Wednesday performed the whole thing memorized!

I also introduced this class to one of my favorite games: Catchphrase. They are hooked. Whenever we play it, I feel like I'm cheating because it feels like a get together with friends, not like work! They are so good at describing things in English that I sometimes forget they don't understand everything, but then we'll get to an idiom, or certain American customs (like Secret Santa) that I then explain in between rounds of the game and it makes me feel really smart (until I remember that they all can fluently speak Spanish AND are speaking English this well).

Final Notes: This coming week, Spain has another holiday, All Saint's Day. Since this falls on a Tuesday, many places also have a "puente" and also take Monday off. My workplaces are both taking both days off, so I have another surprise vacation. This time, however, Aaron is not off, so we will not be doing any last-minute travelling. Instead, I will try to focus on my Spanish classes, as next week will be our last week of Spanish class until we decide how we want to continue our studies. Despite the holiday, however, Aaron and I will both be adding a few more classes to our teaching schedules next week. I'll be adding an in-home class with two five-year-olds, as well as a class with a group of two and three-year-olds at a preschool. Those should be interesting!