"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.]

"So, how was your summer?" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

 

When people ask me this question I’ll be able to say it was unique. I had some novel experiences. 

Because the Spanish government doesn’t seem to have the ability to get its Social Security department to pay welfare benefits properly, I was one of the millions of unemployed who received nothing from them.

Like most private (or non-government) teachers in August I had no income.

This meant that the only state support for my household of three adults was a voucher for 100 Euros that I could spend in our little village’s only food shop. Still, I’m grateful for that. The town council helped.

Of course, it didn’t stop me worrying about the possibility of losing our house. That’s another new feature of 2021 but not confined to summertime.

What else? Well, we didn’t travel anywhere. We couldn’t afford it. Same as last year and the year before that. Instead, I spent hour after hour looking for the best place to sell some of my wife’s inherited jewellery. My mother in law’s gold bracelets paid for some of our mortgage.

I also put some time into a new hobby: persecuting myself and my wife and son to only use electrical appliances during the low-charge periods of the day, 2pm to 6pm. 

Of course, it didn’t work. Our electricity bill has gone up anyway. But we’ve almost stopped eating meat and drinking tea (the real, expensive stuff) so that might help even things out, do you think?

But surely I did something worthwhile? Yes. For my one glass of it a day, I found a bottle of wine I can actually drink that costs less than 1 euro. Also, I kept beavering away on my first novel. It’s getting close to finished. Nice. I watched my son with his girlfriend and I was proud of him. Also very nice. (She’s moved in so now there’s four of us.) 

As well,I walked here and there. It was free. Nice, again. It meant I discovered new patches of nature and parts of nearby towns that I hadn’t explored before: Pacs del Penedes and it’s Roman aqueduct in the medieval shade of a leafy forest, the thickest vines on the side of unfashionable Santa Margarita i Els Monjos and yet more wonderful Roman arches next to Sant Jaume dels Domenys.

All those in silence and with no one else around to distract me.  I went home and learned a lot reading Doris Lessing then dreamed about going to a restaurant again one day. It’s been more than 18 months since we did that.

On top of those fun and games, I enjoyed the heat of the sun. I always do. There was a part of me though that sometimes thought of that melancholy Bob Dylan line. “It’s not like the sun that used to be.”  

In short, while on a reluctant holiday, I tasted the stale, acrid taste of relative first-world poverty, or at least the sensation of sliding hundreds of metres towards it from what was once a comfortable middle-class existence. Surely, this is “The New Adventure” of the 21st century.

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

"The quiet one" -- From an article I wrote for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Lluís Serrat.]

There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult -- and certainly female too -- but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.   

Familiar to most of us who spend any time in group situations at work or in a social setting, the introvert is not shy by definition. 

According to North American author (and self-acknowledged introvert) Susan Cain, shyness is actually about fear of being judged by others.

In fact, she argues, it’s just that “introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments.” Extroverts -- their opposites -- are people who simply function better with a high level of social stimulation.

The wider point that Cain makes in her book on the subject is she believes that a bias has crept into “our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces. They are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.”

Myself, as someone who does not fit neatly into either category of the out-going chatterbox or the silent internal type (but rather seem to flit between the two depending on the moment) I confess to having largely failed in my attempts to run a fully inclusive classroom. 

When I was a secondary teacher I tried to democratically involve all of my students in being vocal but (like many educators) I was unaware of how best to do this or that some teenagers just do not want to speak if it can be avoided.

Teaching adults over the last few years I’ve learned that the prevailing culture in this part of the world too is clearly in favour of extroverts. I have even taught in companies where they believe that they do not have any introverts working alongside them as their colleagues. 

In the endless rounds of group meetings and chatty open plan offices introverts often fade into the background. It is as if being introverted is a mark of shame and sets someone apart as “not a team player.”  

But there is no good reason for this to be the case. 

As Susan Cain discovered, “when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely [ignored] for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful...and when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.” 

She gives the examples of Charles Darwin, Steve Jobs and genius children’s author Dr Seuss.

Of course, extroverts can and do lead us the wrong way though. 

Cain notes that “groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

For some reason, the name Donald Trump immediately comes to mind.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]

"In a small world" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

Barcelona isn’t well-known for flamenco but Kayoko Nakata, thinks it should be. 

As a Japanese flamenco dancer with a Catalan husband and two year-old son, she lives near the city’s Sant Pau hospital. When she can, she goes back to her place of origin in the rural Iwate region where she’s a lifetime cultural ambassador.


Kayoko told me, “At the Barcelona Ciutat Flamenco Festival at the end of October, my work, “Hermandad” was selected from a lot of applications and I was able to perform at the Auditori Sant Marti. “That was just before the last three concerts in the festival were cancelled due to Covid restrictions.”


“Flamenco is a small world,” said. “Here and in Seville where I studied it, the attitude is very often that [Romani] Gypsies do this and Japanese people could never dance flamenco. Tourists don’t want to see Japanese or Chinese or Africans dancing flamenco. It's a closed world too. I struggled a lot and eventually doors opened for me and I danced in “tablaos” (or daily organised performances on stage) a lot.”


“The title of my latest show means bonding but also brotherhood. In that way, it describes what I’ve done with two types of music. I fuse flamenco with traditional musical elements from Japan. 

For example, in the song that opens the show I dance dressed in a “kimono” (traditional and formal Japanese garment) and I use hand movements from the ancient “Nihon buyo”  dance from my region. 

There are people in Barcelona who really like being surprised by that mixture. I’m someone who wants to create music and movement without borders. I don’t feel Japanese or Catalan or Spanish. I’m a human, a person.” Summing up herself on her website, she uses the phrase “I DON'T KNOW WHERE I COME FROM OR WHERE I'M GOING.”


I asked Kayoko about the meaning to her of “duende,” that core spirit of the art that is said to take over flamenco dancers when they are in full flight. She compared it to the Japanese idea of “mu:'' nothingness or being without, "unasking." She said in that state, thought was absent, like when she meditates.


Other things are also absent in her life, however. Currently because of the theatres being closed and face to face sessions prohibited, Kayoko teaches flamenco online from her apartment, though she’s only doing a small number of classes. Her students are both in Japan and those living in Barcelona, where she believes the  flamenco scene is based on many thousands of residents who have an Andalusian family background.


Like so many other teachers though, she’s had to try to adapt this year. As have the people around her. “I think the neighbours in my building are angry at me because of all my stamping on the floor but luckily none of them have said anything,'' she laughs. “I want to restart classes in my studio because that’s more enjoyable.”


As a foreigner or “gaijin” as they are called there, I was lucky enough to live in Japan for three years. Similar to Kayoko Nakata, I also had a partner and young child with me. Also like her, I discovered something of a small world.


I learned that the world was not as big as I’d thought because Japanese people basically wanted many of the same things as me. This, despite the fact that they have a hugely different culture and history from where I’d grown up in Australia.

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

"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.]

Video (3.38 mins): "We are invisible to most people" -- A day in the life of Jose, a homeless language teacher

Talking about life on the streets and his (continuing) work as a teacher.  

Filmed around Barcelona city by OTOXO Productions and Barcelona Street Talk (now defunct).