Teacher-care

This week I’d like to talk about two specific practices I’ve noticed at my school and how these can negatively affect teachers.

I’ve been working in a concertado for almost a month now, and while for the most part things are going quite well, there are some aspects and practices that have surprised me, and not exactly in a good way. First, my concertado offers Cambridge prep classes both in primaria and in ESO. While on the surface this is a good idea, especially given the prestige and importance bestowed on Cambridge exams here in Europe (and perhaps more specifically in Spain in particular), the actual mechanics of the way these classes are offered seems to suggest something other than only the best of intentions.

Let’s start with the Cambridge classes offered to the students in primary education. The classes at this level are set from 9:00 to 10:00, before the normal primary school day begins. And, as this is an extra class, one that is outside the normal school curriculum, it’s technically not required, and parents must pay for their children to attend it. The problem with this is that, because this class is offered first thing in the morning and most parents have to go to work, they are left with no choice but to pay for this optional, extra class, and all of this money goes directly to the school. The secondary level Cambridge classes, on the other hand, run from 13:00 to 14:00. I can’t help but feel that this choice of scheduling is quite deliberate, and that they would not see such high enrollment in the morning classes if it were the secondary students had the optional class at 9 am. By the age of 12 or 13, I’d imagine that most kids could handle getting on a bus and arriving to school on their own by 10 am, especially in a country where the use of public transportation is much more a part of the everyday culture than it is in the US. Younger students, however, most likely need to be dropped off by their parents on their way to work, so to my mind it begs the question: How many parents of primary school teachers are paying for these classes because they genuinely believe that it’s helpful to their children, and how many of them pay for it just because they need to drop their children off early?

The other problem, this time with the secondary Cambridge classes, is that there is a lot of pressure on teachers to complete as much of the prep book as they can. Why? Because the parents have to pay for the textbook, of course, and they logically want to see a sizable return on the money they spent. I know that parents have to pay for the textbooks in the curricular subjects, too (something which is quite strange to me – my school always just had class sets of books that we returned at the end of the year), but the fact that this Cambridge prep class is optional means that it’s quite demotivating and boring for the students. And, at least in my school’s case, the book must be bought directly from the school itself, so it merely becomes another source of revenue. Finally, not only are the students less than thrilled to be there, the classes are also a burden to the teachers, who, as far as I know, are neither paid a significant amount of extra money for teaching the class nor offered any specific Cambridge examiner training. Despite this, this kind of system still sets teachers up to come under fire should the students not pass the target exam.

In my opinion, these classes are not particularly helpful to the students, and the same objectives could be incorporated into the normal curricular English classes, just as they were at the public school where I worked before. However, because the school as a concertado is allowed to offer additional services at a price, it seems like they have seized on the buzzword that is Cambridge as a way to make extra money.

Another area where I’ve heard about certain business practices that I don’t like is that of the comedor. At my school, the language assistants like me eat for free; it’s part of the scholarship deal that was arranged with UCETAM, so in a sense, I have fairly little to really complain about. For teachers, however, the story is different: they have the option of paying a monthly dining fee or having this waived in exchange for extra guardia hours. At first this seemed pretty standard, even reasonable. However, I was shocked to learn from my coordinator that teachers are not allowed to bring their own lunches from home to eat on campus. They do have the option to leave for lunch, whether this means going home or going to a restaurant, but that might not necessarily be convenient or even possible every day. To me, the school’s insistence that teachers not bring a prepared lunch from home is a pretty manipulative tactic to make money off of the very people that it is supposed to pay instead. Factor in the reality that several teachers are vegetarian like I am, or even vegan, and that there are not always satisfying menu options for people who eat either meat or fish, and the dining situation becomes more difficult. It seems a bit one-sided to me, on the one hand, to be told that you have to eat the dining hall food if you want to stay on campus, but then, on the other hand, that there are many days that options of required food available to you don’t include more than a very basic salad and bread.

The link between the two issues that I have tried to outline here – the extra Cambridge exam classes and school lunches – is that in both cases, my school seems to value profits more than teachers. The overarching result of this is that teachers’ jobs become much harder than they already are. In an ideal reality, the school should be doing more to empower teachers, both in terms of meeting their basic dietary needs (or stepping out of the way so that teachers can take care of this for themselves) and by providing them with the knowledge, resources, and adequate compensation to do the job that it asks of them. Obviously, as someone training to be a teacher I have a clear bias in this matter, but I can’t help but believe that by investing more in teacher-care, schools are also investing in a higher quality education for their students.