Back to school

Another school year, another chance to speak English to small people who may or may not understand any of what I'm saying. (Just kidding... they understand quite well, for the most part, but sometimes they like to pretend they don't, just like they do in their native language.) I'm working a lot with nursery school students again; in fact, this year I only have two elementary school classes a day. This gives me lots of time to work on learning names (with 375 students in nursery school alone, it's no small task!) and figure out who is playing the typical characters in each class: the English genius kid, the high-energy kid, the zombie kid, the escaped-from-the-zoo kid, the kid with the perpetual runny nose, the saintly, quiet kid, and so on.

Happily, the school has paired me with another language assistant, Beth, which made for a awkward couple of weeks during which the kids screamed, ¨Hola, Laura!!!¨ whenever they saw us together and ignored her completely. Eventually they progressed to trying to say her name ("Bahth! Bet!"), which was pretty entertaining, at least for me… my favorite two guesses were "Vac!" (which also happens to be their translation of vaca, cow) and "Pez!", which means fish. But now they have more or less mastered "Beth", and they're making progress on learning the litany of songs and ridiculous dances we lead them in every day. Some of the three-year-olds have even exchanged their puzzled stares for eye contact, responsive movement and repetition of words. Success!

One of the best things that's happened, though, was a conversation Beth had with a five-year-old girl on the playground during the first week of school. Chatting with the new teacher, the girl stopped and observed in Spanish: "You speak in English all the time!" Beth smiled and agreed, ¨Yes, I speak English.¨ The girl thought a little and came to the most logical conclusion: "I bet Laura taught you how, didn't she?" Like they say in the MasterCard commercials: priceless!

Music, part one

A fact you might not know: France has a law in effect that mandating that between 35-60% of music played on privately owned radio stations must be in French, depending on the type of station. (Stations geared toward “young talent”, which I assume means pop stations, must play 35% French-language music, while stations devoted to traditional French music are mandated a 65% French-language playlist.) When I studied abroad in Nantes, the radio stations got around the law by playing most of the French music in the middle of the night. It was a clever loophole: the daytime airwaves were thereby freed up for more popular imported songs, and the stations followed the letter of the law without losing listeners.

I expected the radio situation here might be similar, but as far as I know, Spain has no such rule. Despite the lack of legislation, though, there is a lot of pop music in Spanish on the radio, and most of it (by my standards at least) is pretty good. Spain, unlike France, has the advantage of being able to import music in the right language from Mexico and South America, which certainly opens up the musical possibilities. This isn’t to say there’s any shortage of music in English--you can easily hear Katy Perry, Beyonce, and even a song I heard a lot in Indiana this summer, “Need You Now,” which is currently number 16 on the Spanish charts and more than a little country. But there’s also a lot of Spanish music that is actually from Spain, and most of it is quite catchy. Three of my current Spanish pop favorites are here, here, and here (this video is truly odd). There are also several flamenco-only radio stations, which are popular among members of the blasting-music-from-vehicles club in the neighborhood where I teach. It's a comforting thing to remember: among the many small trials of living abroad (no bagels, having the verbal élan of an eight-year-old, struggling to determine the proper response when urged to drink liquor at 11AM by a kindly Spanish grandmother), at least there's no shortage of good music.