The Dark Side of Surprise

This week's Camino a Ítaca reminds me that after so many years, Spain can still be a mystery to me. September is in full swing and education is on many people's radars and it is definitely on mine. Combine that with the ongoing pandemia and then throw in a few negationists and you have a potent cocktail. Click over to read the original published in el HOY in Spanish or the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

After living here for so many years, Spain can still surprise me. Time and time again I find myself scratching my head and thinking, ‘Amazing that was completely unexpected.’ Whether this frequent state of bewilderment is a good thing or not, I’m not so sure. It’s wonderful when I come across a new dish in an undiscovered (for me) region, or when I stumble upon wonderfully creepy Romanic capitals on the other side of the Tagus. The sheer depth of uncharted territory for me here offers me several lifetimes’ worth of exploring. The darker side of this disorientation though comes when I’m struck with an occurrence that takes me completely by surprise.

This happened the other week when I heard about the poor little girls that were being used as politicized weapons by their malevolent parents in their infantile battle against reason. The images from abroad of misinformed lunatics injecting themselves with bleach and gargling with iodine in their deluded fight against a disease many claim doesn’t even exist had until then seemed completely foreign.

Spain’s response to the pandemic has been exemplary. The Spanish understand that vaccines work. They are the best line of defense against the disease and the fastest route available to us to be able to return to some sense of normalcy. Draconian lockdowns and the quasilegal imprisonment of our children aside, the measures adopted have been effective. Mask wearing has been taken to an extreme with people having to wear them while walking out in the countryside, but absolutely no one disagrees with the fact that they are the simplest, most effective measure that we can take against contagion indoors. No one at least who has the least minimum notion regarding how viruses are transmitted. My eight-year-old gets it.

But my surprise wasn’t that a few negationist nutcases were trying to impose their selfish whims on the wider community. In fact, until then my surprise was that the extreme right had yet to import and adopt, as they have done with so many other foreign positions, this anti science lunacy. My shock came about when I saw the Junta’s initial reaction and poisonous bile spilt by a large section of the general public towards the teachers, claiming they were lazy and simply did not want to work.

At a time when you can’t even conceive of stepping foot into a public administration building without a previous appointment, the Junta’s initial order to not only allow this family to flaunt the rules, rules that the teachers had been rigorously teaching and implementing for the past two years, and insist that the teachers place themselves and the entire school at risk, simply due to an unfounded caprice, was madness. Just imagine if you try to walk into a court building without a mask. How far would you get in before you are stopped by security guards or the police? But hey, these are just teachers.

Where does this deep contempt for teachers, and what they do, come from? Is it some sort of unconscious hostility that arises from suffering endured at the hands of callous and cruel nuns when they were in school? Or is this disdain based on the fact that many simply consider teachers overpaid babysitters? Whatever it is, it will never cease to perplex me. 

Back to the Future or Back to the Past?

Back to this?

As our children head back to school, this week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to the future and the eduaction that awaits them. What will this academic year year? Click over to read the original in Spain in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The long Spanish summer has come to an end, at least on paper. The temperatures might still soar into the high thirties and the rains may yet to fall, but yesterday the nine o’clock traffic jams have returned to the streets. The kids are back in school.

They do so under a cloud of uncertainty regarding how the pandemic will evolve in the coming months. With the much more contagious delta variant now being the most common type in the country, it remains to be seen how the school year will develop, even with the extremely high level of vaccinations across the country.

In most cases, the measures from the previous academic year remain in effect. The general protocol remains in place for the so-called “stable coexistence groups” or “bubble groups” in nursery and primary school in a continued attempt to avoid contact with other students, even if specialist teachers move from group to group. Granted, the minimum distance between desks has been reduced to 1,2 from the previous 1,5 meters, but the importance placed on this seems to be about as incongruous as many of the other restrictions that have been imposed outside of class. These are kids that may have ridden for hours on packed buses and airplanes over the summer, sitting just centimeters from people they don’t know. But even still, schools are once again supposed to minimize the movement of groups of students throughout the center and avoid assemblies or face-to-face meetings and, where possible, avoid all activities that involve mixing different groups or classes. This socialization factor of schooling, ever so important at these ages, must once again be put on pause.

We all want the best for our kids and of course want teachers to enjoy a workspace where they feel safe, of these things there can be not doubt. But there are such things as calculated or measured risks, activities that are worth undertaking because the benefits outweigh the acceptable risks. Last year, in many schools across the region, group work in class was forbidden by certain school committees even if the Junta’s general directive clearly stated that it was permissible if the minimum distances were respected. The pandemic served up the perfect opportunity for those in the educational community who do not believe in community learning theories to drag their students back into the black and white classrooms of old with straight rows of desks and with rote learning at its core.

Working in small groups provides learners with opportunities to articulate ideas, uncover misconceptions, and negotiate with others to create projects or reach consensus, even during the first stages of education. Group activities allow students to discover deeper meaning in the content and improve critical thinking skills. Effective use of group work engages students with higher-level content that is thought-provoking and that can have multiple interpretations. But this kind of teaching doesn’t neatly fit into exam-driven teaching, it takes hard work and planning.

I appreciate the concern that the authorities have shown when faced with getting out kids back into school safely. I only wish that half of that concern was spent on what actually happens once they are there.