It’s taken
me 6 months to get this blog organized in my head and now with 189 days of
experience, I am finally ready to share with you all about my “new” job.
In
September I happened upon a job listing looking for a native English speaker
with some sort of classroom experience, willing to travel and talk in front of
large groups of students…
Turns out
it wasn’t a typical teaching English job at all. I was hired on at one of the leading
Publishing Houses for secondary school English textbooks in Spain as a
Teacher Trainer in the Teacher Development department. That’s whole big jumble
of whatever, so in other words, this is what’s up:
I work for
the well established and respected International Publishing company, Burlington
Books. I represent the company as a Teacher Trainer throughout 5 autonomous
communities in the North of Spain: Cantabria (Santander), País Vasco (Bilbao, San Sebastián), La Rioja (Logroño, wine
country) Navarra (Pamplona-running of the bulls) & Aragón (Zaragoza, the Pyrenees and most importantly, Calatayud). In parenthesis
I have noted the most well known cities and attractions pertaining to that
community.
My title is
‘Teacher Trainer’ and on some level I suppose the goal is to be somewhat of an
inspiration to the teachers with regards to teaching English as a language alongside
culture because neither culture nor language can exist without the other.
Each week I
am assigned an area, a province, what have you... And each day I visit a new
school and meet new students. The catch: As a gift to faithful Burlington
clients/customers (renewing or buying new books), as an incentive to become a
Burlington client or as a gift for recently becoming a Burlington client, OUR
OFFER is this: a native speaker to give extremely entertaining and pedagogical
culture classes to secondary students; a gift that nowadays has more value than
any piece of new technology.
It is an
extremely satisfying job, especially when we succeed in getting groups of 60+
teenagers to participate in English language discussions and classes all the
while laughing, smiling and begging for more.
It is what is going to help reverse the English language learning
decline in this country. Ask any Spaniard about the level of English in general
and most will tell you that it’s shamefully low... Low in comparison to any
other country in Europe (well except Italy, they say…ha ha ha) and in
the world.
All of us
teachers (in total we are 7 throughout Spain) are 150% convinced of the
success and positive effect of this program and that is why these classes work
so well. On a good day, and most days
are, we teachers enjoy the classes just as much as the students do, and that is
so telling of us, the material and the objective of our company.
Some days
though, I forget that even though we make up what is the Teacher Development
department, we are in fact a part of the Marketing team. I am half educator,
half marketing sales rep assistant, as we are basically the cherry on top to
completing the sale. Books… workbooks… digital material… You are welcome for
selling you the best English material out there, and our culture classes are
proof to why learning English is so important and beneficial.
Having said
all of that, my job is extremely dynamic in a different sense. I travel a lot.
It has not been an easy adjustment to make. Though I am “based” out of our
office in Bilbao (in the Basque Country), I have spent more time in Zaragoza
these past 189 days than I have in the Basque Country. Lucky for me I have a
flat in Calatayud (an hour outside of ZGZ) and by obligation, a shared flat in Bilbao for the days I
spend up north.
For those
who know something about Spanish geography, Cantabria and the Basque Country
make up half of the Northern coast on the Iberian
Peninsula. The waters here are called the Bay of Biscay or in
Spanish, el Mar Cantábrico. This region is famed for the rainfall they receive
from Autumn to Spring but we all know the result of receiving lots of downpour…
The scenery and mountainous countryside make up some of the most beautiful and
green, photogenic landscapes in the world.
Mountains +
rolling green hills + sea + unique and fucking delicious gastronomy make the
Basque Country and surroundings a dream.
I have seen
some absolutely breathtaking views, I have visited historically important
places (Guernica, one of the first aerial
bombings by Nazi Germany which inspired the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso) and I have
had the joy of learning about Basque people, their culture and their ever
entertaining and linguistically impossible language.
Besides the
Basque country, I have visited small mountain towns in the breathtakingly
gorgeous Pyrenees Mountains, driven through different vineyard towns in the
internationally famed Rioja region of Spain, tasted the best Grenache, Tempranillo
and Crianza wine and and a few times I have eaten lunch while looking across
the waters at Southern France. I have also visited such true pueblos tucked so
far away in the mountains where I am just a strange yet fascinating English
speaking creature to the village folk. The joys are endless and it always
cracks me up when I visit towns called: Cabezón de la Sal (Big head of the salt) or
Cenicero (Ashtray).
My classes
usually start in the morning and I finish around lunchtime which means when I am
on the road I have the entire afternoon for excursions and tourism. To be
honest though, I haven’t exactly taken complete advantage of this as it really
takes it’s toll on my mind and body, driving 4,355 miles in one
month.
When my
family came to visit in December, Cameron arrived a couple weeks before
everyone else and I was able to share this treasure of a place with him. He
fell in love instantly and I know he will be back... Hopefully one day we can
have some sort of parcel of land in the Basque Country to share, visit,
cultivate and partake in all the joys of life in this place where I would
honestly stay forever were the circumstances in my favor… as long as there were
beach close by.
Below I
would like to share some photos with you, of places I’ve visited. Some are
mine, taken usually with my crap mobile phone camera, so I’ve downloaded a few
from the internet… I claim no rights to those photos.
San Vicente de la Barquera (Cantabria)
What it looks like in good lighting:
What it looked like when I went for work in winter:
(the contrast of still sea with the snowy mountains in the background is quite a nice sight, too)
Bermeo (Vizcaya, Basque Country)
Lekeitio (Vizcaya, Basque Country)
San Juan de Gaztelugatxe (Vizcaya, Basque Country)
(my visit with brother Cam);
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