"Demand for Garraf's international schools is growing..."

News video of the school where my wife Paula teaches.

(Of course, not all the students/families there are "foreigners" because there's plenty of local Catalan/Spanish kids too.)

"These days the educational centers are already thinking about the pre-registration periods for the next school year starting in September, including the international schools in the region. These are private centers that are noticing a notable increase in demand, from families who want to send their children to school in an educational system different from the one designed by the Catalan administration. The arrival of new foreign families in Garraf is one of the factors that explain this increase."

"Why Read Homage to Catalonia By George Orwell? A Short Review"

 

Rightly describing George Orwell as "one of the great commentators of his own era." Personally, I'd go further and say of any era in the English language. 

Orwell had an ability to get to the visceral in a way that few have. Shakespeare regularly did. James Baldwin also did.

"Translating 'modern slavery' around the world"

  

"The Freedom United community around the world [was asked] to take part in our survey Translating ‘Modern Slavery’ to better understand  how terms such as “human trafficking,” “forced labor,” “modern slavery,” etc. are discussed, framed, or translated in languages besides English. Language is complex and we recognize how local cultural contexts and linguistic nuances shape local advocacy and public understanding...

SPANISH:

Lara Chiavarini:
One of the main problems I see and read when talking about human trafficking in my native language (Spanish) is the difference between “trata de personas” (human trafficking) and “tráfico de personas” (smuggling of migrants). I dare to say this has its origins in “bad” translations. Forced labour could be said “trabajo forzado” or “trabajo forzoso”, forced marriages can be said in both ways as well “matrimonios forzados/forzosos”. Debt bondages is generally found linked to modern slavery: “esclavitud por deudas” and finally modern slavery could be found as “esclavitud contemporánea” more than “moderna”.  When talking about “human trafficking” and “modern slavery”, depending on who is writing and who is their audience, people chose one word or the other. Modern slavery may be more shocking so it is generally found (at least in my country, Argentina) in newspapers and articles. Nevertheless it is also true that people usually say that they are slaves of their work, of the system, etc.

Michael Solah:
Esclavitud, tráfico de personas/humanos (Spanish – Ecuador). There are a lot of signs in travel places (airports/border crossings) with warnings about human trafficking, including penalties. Unfortunately child trafficking is a big issue and I feel it is not discussed enough, it disproportionately affects those in poverty in Ecuador. The implications are similar to English, though in Ecuador it is often assumed the people being trafficked are children.

Elsa Grimaldi:
In Argentina, where we speak Spanish, those terms are translated into: tráfico de personas, trabajos forzados, matrimonios forzados, dependencia de la deuda, esclavitud moderna. What comes to mind with these issues is the humiliating, pain-inflicting ways in which humans treat other human beings, usually based on religious or cultural motivations but many a time for economic motivations, e.g. to make profit out of selling or enslaving other people (women, children, men). "

Read more here.

"More than teaching" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo of a 1-to-1 lesson by ANDREU PUIG]

 
 

Dear reader,

 

It seems I have misled you and that I was wrong about something I suggested in this column last year. 

In an article titled “House closed” that was published in November, I wrote about how across Catalonia the International House chain of language schools folded and this meant that the owners made a decision to sack all 300 employees. 

That left them still only technically employed because they were all being unpaid but also unable to claim unemployment benefits.

 

This was in addition to the shutting of Merit School in Barcelona and several others I used to work for. (I won’t name them here.) 

With these separate closures creating what I saw as a collective tragedy, I inferred – without actually saying it – that from the Covid pandemic, the entire English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) industry was highly likely to get flushed down capitalism’s stinking toilet. Not quite.

 

What is the case though is that teachers who still have jobs are being forced to do more for less.

 

Most people’s idea of a teacher is someone who stands in front of a blackboard or whiteboard and talks at a class. That’s what they see; just as what I see of a nurse is someone who walks into a hospital room and checks on me when I’m a patient. 

Of course, there’s a great deal more to it for anyone in both those jobs.

 

“Whenever two or more are gathered in education’s name” EFL teachers will usually talk about how we are practically social workers/counselors or even a kind of friend to our students. 

This is one aspect of my work that I really enjoy and it’s especially popular in 1to1 classes where some students divulge the most personal things without any colleagues around. Last week, I faced a student in an online class in tears about her recent divorce. I’d known her for two weeks.

 

In the recent past, I’ve also listened to male students confess their infidelities and tell me how they’re hiding ongoing affairs. I’ve had a female student come to class and spend repeated hours filling me in on how her husband manipulates her and tracks her movements. 

These are a few of the more dramatic examples but a normal part of the job is hearing and absorbing complaints about coworkers, bosses, or the government. We are seen by plenty of students as educators but also as people who can be trusted because we’re not a fixed part of their workplace. 

At other times, it seems we’re like travelling salespeople who visit your office to spruik the health-giving properties of the English language. All this and much more.

 

But we are doing more, for less, as I said before. Pay rates have been pushed down even further by ‘client’ companies who dictate to smaller ‘academy’ language schools from what their budgets supposedly allow them to afford in these hard times. 

This financial burden has often been passed on to teachers who, already trapped in a low-paid industry, are being paid an industry standard contract rate of around 15 euros an hour. Before taxes. 

When my family and I moved here in 2006 ago I was being paid 21 euros an hour at an international secondary school. (A house cleaner in Catalonia is generally paid around 10 euros an hour this year. In cash. No taxes but also no social security.)

 

Precious few EFL academies pay higher than the norm and plenty of employers pay even lower, now incorrectly claiming it’s cheaper for teachers to work at home via online classrooms. 

And travel costs for petrol, trains, metro and buses going from the inner city out to Sant Just or Martorell or Terrassa? That’s been quietly forgotten about or scoffed at when requested.

 

I’m also doing more admin for the 5 different companies I currently work for. I have a couple of better paid private classes and I’m happy to have work again after a barren summer. 

But I’m not happy to do at least an hour every day of putting class data into each academy’s separate system. That’s on top of planning teaching sessions or writing student reports: all unpaid tasks totaling up to another hour every day.

 

And here’s a cost comparison for historical context. The price of petrol has gone up by 50% since we moved here in 2006. I don’t think I need to tell you about the jump in costs of rents in Barcelona or the price of electricity going up by 36% in the previous 12 months.

 

More work for less? Oh, yes.

 

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, October 2021.]

LAUNCH EVENT: Spanish-English edition of Clive James' poetry

A bilingual Spanish-English volume of Australian Clive James' poetry has just been published.

Title: "Fin de Fiesta. Últimos Poemas". (Publisher, Pre-Textos.) Launch: 4 May, 19.00h,

@DocumentaBCN

bookshop, Pau Claris, 144 Barcelona.

Reservations (Max. 20 people:) Email correu@documenta-bcn.com ... OR follow event on Instagram:

@documentabcn

"House closed" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

"Precarious:" a word that accurately describes so many jobs under modern hyper-capitalism.

In Catalonia over the last few months this word has become a sword that is hovering over the lives of thousands of people. 

For around 300 employees at the International House chain of European language schools, “precarious” has come to be much worse than a mere word .

In their Barcelona branch (which operated for 40 years) at least 120 teachers and support staff have lost their positions. 

This is in addition to closure of IH’s other workplaces in Tarragona, Sabadell, Badalona, Terrassa and Mataró. Zaragoza and Palma de Mallorca are also shutting up shop.

Speaking to union representative Duncan Hawthorne, who has worked for IH Barcelona for the last 23 years, he told me he’d expected to stay with them for the rest of his working life. His opinion is that it was a great school but badly run over the years, particularly due to power struggles at the top of the company.

“There’s a lot of anger towards the management and that’s who the staff are trying to hold responsible for the end of the business," he said. "Covid 19 wasn't a major cause of us closing. It was just the last straw."

Duncan believes that employees feel abandoned by the owners of the company and their recent protests outside their former office on Trafalgar Street in Barcelona are evidence of that. He explained that one of the worst problems for employees is that they are currently in a kind of financial limbo, neither being paid by IH nor able to claim unemployment benefits (which for  hundreds of thousands of others, are currently taking up to 3 months to be paid by the Spanish government.)

Duncan also told me that the company is in the hands of a legal administrator but is not yet technically bankrupt. 

Another teacher said on social media, "Many of us have worked for IH over the last 5 decades. Staff left without pay or contracts 5 days before the new school year. Staff continued to finish classes yesterday because they care about their students."

Apart from this, it needs to be acknowledged that IH has stated online:

“The closure of schools is due to a sustained deterioration in recent years of International House's main lines of business, resulting from fundamental changes in the world of language teaching. This downward trajectory worsened, without a doubt, with the crisis caused by COVID-19.”

As someone who has also worked in and for a number of different language “academy” schools for many years, to me, this disaster represents just one of many that are striking this sector. 

This is due to the so-called free-market economy failing to provide secure jobs. The (supposedly temporary) closure of Merit School in Barcelona in July is just one other example.

As long as there are native English speakers in Barcelona and elsewhere in Europe giving one-to-one “classes” for a glass of wine or online for under 10 euros an hour -- both common enough -- there will be continuing exploitation of professional, qualified and experienced teachers. 

We are witnessing an ‘Uber-isation’ of teaching and learning in the private sector.

In reality, across our continent there is no law; there is only power. Or at least the power to enforce it. The “convenio” standard that legally exists has been widely abused for years and the pandemic has meant a genuine drop in pay rates. I’ve seen this for myself in trying to find teaching work since August.

So, what do we have in the industry? We have closed houses and open slather.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, November 2020.]

"Women Writers in Catalan"

"This is a catalogue with a selection of 50 contemporary and ten classic women writers...

Written in English, with the exception of the literary samples by each author, with the English translation and the original Catalan text, it's book to discover Catalan literature written by women, prose and poetry, classic and contemporary. 

A book to help getting to know and understanding Catalan literature and some of the women who have helped to create and construct it. "

Read more from source here.

"Brits in Spain resort to Irish ancestry to stay in the EU after Brexit"

[Photo: ALBERTO PEZZALI (GETTY)]

"On June 23, 2016, Emma O’Sullivan spent the evening in her apartment in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, initially concerned and later shocked by what she was hearing on the BBC: that 52% of her fellow Brits had voted to exit the European Union, leaving her and around 1,300,000 more British nationals living in the EU in a state of limbo.

“After the initial shock, I went through all the stages of mourning,” she recalls. “Denial, fury, resignation…” In fact, according to the Kübler-Ross model for dealing with grief, the third phase is bargaining, and this is essentially what Emma did; she negotiated her own exit from Brexit.

Fortunately, her grandfather on her father’s side was originally from Cork, allowing her to claim Irish citizenship...

(Ireland used to receive around 6,000 applications for citizenship a year before the 2016 referendum. But last year alone it received 25,000, some from British nationals living in Spanish territory.")

Read more from source here.

"Discover Catalonia -- Routes and Getaways"

 An extremely detailed and well-produced English language PDF on the various parts of Catalonia (for tourists and travellers) is available for free here.

"From across the centuries" - An article about Shakespeare for Catalonia Today magazine

One of the greatest things about Shakespeare - one of the things I love most about his writing - is his rare ability to have his characters speak for themselves but also somehow show a more universal state of mind. 

His fiction is as real as it can get despite the fact that we are reading his words or hearing them said hundreds of years after he wrote his works.

In Shakespeare's famous play Hamlet, the title character, the Prince of Denmark is depressed. His father has been murdered by an uncle and his mother has quickly remarried. Hamlet feels compelled to take revenge for his father's death but his new isolation and sadness cause him to be on the point of suicide. He says:

"I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! ...The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither."

To me this is one of the most moving of Shakespeare's passages. I first heard it performed by Richard E. Grant, playing an unemployed actor in the final scene of the superb film, "Withnail and I." Here, the character is seemingly making a balancing act in his mind, weighing up the good and bad of his species and the universe we inhabit. His judgement is a heavy one, as if mankind does not merit a place in the cosmos. 

Or is Hamlet just speaking for himself alone? That is another beauty of Shakespeare's writing. He is a poet and surely the greatest in the history of the English language. His words are open to many interpretations still (even after thousands of academics have picked them apart syllable by syllable) and this pliability gives his ideas a freshness that never dries up.

As a wordsmith and creator of English, it's also generally accepted that no-one can be compared with Shakespeare. When he couldn't find a word to do the job he wanted he simply invented a new word and many of these words live on in the language today. 

 His writing benefited from him also being an actor. Shakespeare knew how lines could be delivered and had an extraordinary ear for how their musical rhythm would be heard by audiences.

Sadly, many people's experience of The Bard (as he is often called) was having his sometimes archaic language drummed into them by secondary school teachers who knew no better than the traditional methods. I was one of these victims and didn't rediscover the glories of Shakespeare's work until well into my twenties. 

Then I found that I too had to teach his plays. This was not easy but surprisingly, I learnt that my Catalan students were much more receptive to him than those kids I'd tried to teach Shakespeare in Australia or England. Catalan students had the advantage of already being bilingual and Elizabethan-era English was just another challenge. 

 Shakespeare's timeless themes will continue to reach out across the centuries, "to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow."

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2016.] 

(The Flower Portrait above was long thought to be a contemporary painting of the Bard, but a 2004 investigation found it to be a 19th-century forgery. / Photo: ARCHIVE.)

New English language theatre in Barcelona

http://oshev.ipage.com/tremayneco/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Marie-poster.jpg

"Marie’s Crisis Cafe is a new play. It’s set in a piano bar run by Marie with help from her friend Beauridge. On the surface the bar is just a regular place where people, like Grainger, drown their sorrows – and tourists sing to fit in. 


Dig a little deeper, and it’s also a place where troubled souls are fixed. And so life continues day in day out, until Thea shows up out of the blue… Drama, humour, despair and hope with a touch of the surreal in the modern age."

See poster for details.

With no comment...

It would be interesting to see a similar map of Asia, wouldn't it?

[Source: http://jakubmarian.com/map-of-the-percentage-of-people-speaking-english-in-the-eu-by-country/]