I have been offered and accepted a job as an Auxiliar de Conversacion in Cordoba, Spain. While it is not the city I would have chosen, I know I can make it there on what the Ministry of Education is paying. I am excited to depart soon, however, I recently found out that my student visa, which is required to work there, still is not ready. Therefore I have to change my ticket to a later time and drive the Consulate of Spain in Chicago crazy by writing to them daily. I am nervous, but luckily, I do have experience teaching. I taught English for a year in Costa Rica to all ages. I also majored in Early Childhood Education and Spanish as an undergraduate. I took a strong interest in bilingual education in the states, and therefore decided to make it my goal to work at a bilingual school out of college. So I accepted a job as an ESOL teacher at a public Spanish Immersion school in Indianapolis. It took me a few months to realize that this was a job that no one wanted and I was totally unqualified for in terms of training. In my undergraduate work at Xavier University in Cincinnati I wrote a thesis about two-way immersion programs, based on my experience as a student teacher in Cincinnati and attending several conferences in California to observe such programs. The school in Indianapolis placed most Spanish-speaking students in a program which only provided 1/2 hour per day or Spanish instruction. They did not encourage the students to be in the immersion program, therefore, it was a one-way immersion program, which I saw as a waste since students would have been able to scaffold off of one another if those in the ESOL program were encouraged to be in the immersion program. Anyhow, I resigned at the end of the first semester and returned to Xavier University to begin a Masters in Secondary Education to teach Spanish. One of my professors told me about the program for Auxiliares de Conversacion in Spain, so I applied for it. I also studied abroad for 5 weeks in Costa Rica, where I found out that I was 100 on the wait list for the program in Spain. I looked for other options, and decided to teach English in Costa Rica at a private language institute. This required a year commitment, which I kept even though the Auxiliar program offered me a spot in Extremadera, a region in Spain I had never heard of, in October, and again in December. So anyhow, this is the year I decided to go, having received a placement in Andalucia, my region of choice. The program placed me in a high school, which is interesting considering my undergraduate degree in Early Childhood, but I am actually grateful for this. I have so many materials, books and activities for elementary school-aged children that I would overwhelm myself in deciding what to bring. I learned from leaving Costa Rica that you do not want to bring too much when you are not sure how long you will be living somewhere. Cordoba is the city where I was placed. So far, the bilingual coordinator at the school has found an apartment, or piso, with Hispanic roommates for me and sent me the testimonies of the language assistants who were at the same school last year. According to some brief reading (Hanging out in Spain, Frommers 2001) Cordoba is a historic city known for having fewer American students studying abroad. This is good news for me because I would like to get a chance to use my Spanish a bit more. In Costa Rica, I had roommates and workmates who spoke mostly English, so this was more difficult.
As of today, September 23rd, my visa still has not been approved, meaning I may miss the orientation on the 1st and 2nd of October in Granada. The real reason I want to go is to meet other people and to get a feel for the goals of the bilingual program in Spain, and of course to see Granada. I would also like to feel somewhat prepared during my first days as a language assistant. We’ll see how it all goes!
