Pan Sin Gracia

The Camino a Ítaca loops back to an article I wrote years ago retelling a story my father-in-law once told me about the bread that was meant to keep them going. This fuses with stories of immigrants who have settled in this land of emigrants and the bread that binds it all together. Click over to the original article in Spanish or read the English below. Tambien se puede ver el original en castellano abajo en PDF.

If there’s one thing us guiris (foreigners) are good for, it’s for a laugh now and then. Our near extra-terrestrial habits like wearing socks with sandals, tossing chorizo into paellas, sleeping without Persian blinds, our foreign accents or insisting on voting for people instead of parties and then having the gall to expect them to comply with their promises, not only raise an eyebrow or two amongst the locals but at times can cause sidesplitting humour. And in moments like these, we could all use a few more chuckles.

Over the summer, this newspaper ran a series of interviews with people who were born outside of the region. In these they asked about our lives as immigrants to a land that unfortunately seems to be condemned to export people. In the testimonials many of us coincided in how comfortable we feel here but one of the comments that most surprised the local population was a repeated lament on the appalling quality of the bread that you find here (given the excellent quality of the food). I guess it could be, as some suggest, that we simply aren’t used to it or that it isn’t anything close to the bread of our childhoods…but I have my doubts.

Many years ago I wrote an article in this very same paper that told an anecdote that my father-in-law, a wise and gentle man from the lovely village of San Martin de Trevejo once told me. One early morning on their way to climb the highest peak in the area, Jalama, they dipped into a bar to buy some bread to accompany the homemade chorizo they were carrying to help them up the mountain. The waitress happily served them coffee but said that there was no bread because the man who was supposed to deliver it was still in bed.

That’s the way the story came out in the paper but something had got mixed up along the way. The story in fact had a different ending. It wasn’t due to an alarm clock malfunction nor a night out on the town: It wasn’t the delivery man who was still in bed after all, it was the bread. 

In other words fermenting, as all good bread should do. In today’s world it seems that few places give their bread the rest it needs in order to turn into something special. Crack open most loaves of bread and instead for being greeted by the irregular beauty of odd shapes formed by escaping gasses, you simply get a pixelated vision of a brick with no mystery. It’s like comparing aerial views of medieval cities like Toledo or Trujillo with a no-name residential suburb of just about any North American city, something without taste, without intrigue, without soul.

These imposter breads that are supposedly cooked in wood burning stoves in picturesque nearby villages are in truth the gastronomical equivalent of elevator music. And it seems these bricks are all that you can find in most of the supermarkets and bakeries in the region. It’s as though we were condemned, like the Jews in exile to eat unleavened bread sin gracia.

But as some commentators havesuggested, salvation awaits those in need. Thanks to a small renaissance, there are those that are now doing things, and bread, as it should be done. Every morning I enjoy my artisanal toast from Amasamadre topped with EVOO from the nearby Sierra de Gata, Spanish ham from Montachez and tomatoes from Miajadas and on special occasions, even cachuela. Mornings like these help me relegate childhood memories of breakfasts of industrial, white sandwich bread topped with processed peanut butter to where they belong, the past. 

The Eighth Trumpet

Koranic Learning

An academic detour on this week's Camino a Ítaca and a look at Spain's uncertain Back-to-school week. With COVID contagion rates soaring above the WHO recommended levels, it's more than likely only a matter of time before classes move online. If the recommended distance wasn't enough to kill cooperative learning, online classes will only finish off what little there was. Read the English below or click over to the original in El Hoy. Tambien se puede ver el original en castellano abajo en PDF.

You can hear it from afar as it echoes across the country, that annoying metallic shriek of desks being dragged across classroom floors. With just days before our kids go back to school, directives have finally been issued by suntanned ministers and classrooms across Spain are having to be rethought in creative attempts to establish the recommended distance between desks. But if you listen more closely, apart from this irritating screech, you can also hear another more depressing sound.

You can just barely make it out underneath all of the media noise debating the issues that dominate the conversation. Questions like whether cameras should be installed in classrooms, how many fancy, state-of-the-art tablets we need or just how big your bubble can get if you include afterschool activities. Listen carefully though, just beyond the white noise and you’ll hear the mournful death rattle of the incipient gains that modern cooperative teaching methodologies have made in classrooms across the region.

Across Extremadura, a small but ambitious group of teachers have been casting off the chains of a lifelong legacy of memorize and puke education. In doing so, they have battled against the koranic learning that has dogged them since their own school years. A fight that culminates in the pinnacle expression of medieval learning and the epitome of uselessness: the oposicion (public exams to become a civil servant) process that granted them their post.

Indeed, this scrapping isn’t ubiquitous. In fact, think back to when you picked up your children’s books back in May. More likely than not, the classroom already foreshadowed the supposed new normal. Do you recall single file rows, where the closest possible interaction with peers is an in-depth study of the back of their classmate’s head? Did the books you picked up have blank pages at the end of each unit? Had the ‘messy’ project work been conveniently skipped over in the frantic race to ‘cover’ the enormous content of the curriculum? More is better, right?

This is because there is nothing new about it. Spanish education laws may sound modern and cutting edge on paper but the reality in the classroom is invariably completely different. Each successive overhaul tends (7 or 8 since the return to democracy?) to highlight an emphasis on competences, group work and community learning, but unfortunately these are not always reflected in practice. Teachers do what they have seen.

Many still see children as finite vessels that are to be filled with information rather than allowing them to be active participants in their learning. Information that isn’t manipulated or interpreted just gets vomited back onto an exam, only to be quickly forgotten. Even if the curriculum does encourage change, the administrative nature of inspectors and misnomered Heads of Studies means they have little influence in regards to what happens behind the closed doors of each Taifa.

The non-stop pandemic drone has deafened us to all else. The enormous health challenge it presents is obviously a huge concern but a return to the chalk and talk class or its online equivalent sets off alarm bells that are equally concerning. Learning is social, we learn from each other and working together is the only way to defeat this. Our kids need to learn these skills now in order to overcome the next Apocalypse.