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About me

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Hi everyone! I’m Tania, and I’m one of the auxiliares in Boadilla del Monte in 2018 - 2019. I’m Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian, raised in New York (Long Island). I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2016 with a degree in Sociology and Educational Studies, and had been working for the last two years in a nonpartisan research organization in the Washington, DC area before coming to Spain. There, I focused on Child Welfare, working on a national initiative supporting young people with experience in the foster care system. After two years working with numbers and spreadsheets, I decided it was time to take my education major to use and work with children again!

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Source

About IES Máximo Trueba

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IES Profesor Maximo Trueba. Image source

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Palacio del Infante Don Luis. Image source

IES Profesor Maximo Trueba is located in the west of Madrid, in Boadilla del Monte. It is a bilingual high school, with many courses offered in English. The school also offers German, Latin, and French as available languages to study. The town of Boadilla del Monte has a population of under 50,000 and is known for having the Palacio del Infante don Luis, which has actually been known for being featured in films!

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The school itself has about 1,000 students, and has 34 classrooms, with a gym, auditorium, 3 courts and a street work-out circuit. In the center of the school is a courtyard with ping pong tables, which turns into the social center during recreo periods! Class sizes are around 30 students. The school is also one of the schools in Madrid participating in the Global Classrooms conference. The school also participates in an exchange in 3 ESO with Dutch and French students.​

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The school has 6 auxiliares who can be found often chatting with teachers over the lunch table or playing basketball on breaks. 

Teaching Experience

As an education major, much of my training was in the theory of education and in structural ideas - how do we make school systems equitable? Outside of this macro level focus, I got to visit a lot of public school classrooms and see different teaching styles up close as I took notes about pedagogical styles. In my own classroom at Swarthmore College, I learned to associate class with discussion, with guiding questions rather than rote memorization as my core belief in how classrooms should work.

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Swarthmore College Classics Department. Source

In Spain, it has been a good challenge trying to continue this tradition in the classroom, as within classrooms, students have very different language abilities that limit them from participating in true discussion, and requires some adaptation so that they feel confident in answering basic questions.

Outside of classwork within my major, I had the opportunity to work one on one with students, tutoring in a high school and college tutoring center, and tutoring in a homework help center for Latin American students, my first introduction to bilingual education. It was in this experience that I understood how the importance of stepping back, looking at a text or worksheet, and asking yourself, “are there any English words or phrases that we need to define to be able to work on this?” And, importantly: “does my student feel comfortable being able to express confusion or ask questions about this text in English?”

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My largest group teaching activity was with eight students, teaching a standardized testing English exam. The material was dry and rather boring, but it was good practice for how to maintain my own positive attitude and transmit that energy to my students whenever their attention might be lagging!

Expectations, Contributions, and Highlights

As an education major, I spent a lot of time in field placements in Philadelphia public schools. I got to see a wide range of classrooms, and got to experience a wide range of educational experiences that informed what I wanted and did NOT want my students’ experiences to be like with me. That meant no rote memorization, and more of a focus on introducing social justice into the classroom. Swarthmore College is an extraordinarily liberal school, and our classes were more often than not student led, discussion based, and oriented towards civic mindedness and social justice. I try to keep the same ideals in the activities that I have, working to orient my activities towards guiding the students towards current events and inequalities in the world around me.

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Source: Instagram page gc.madrid

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I was given the opportunity to serve as a Global Classrooms language assistant, working with about 120 students in 3 ESO to prepare them for the Model United Nations conference. In this role, I had the challenge of trying to take the issue of juvenile crime and violence, and contextualize them within socioeconomic conditions. This challenge was right up my alley - much of my sociology training was in contextualizing people’s actions within larger structures. In this role, I largely independently taught these classes, adapting existing materials to try to make them more engaging, interesting, and accessible to my students. At times the material could be dry (plagiarism and citations, anyone?) and at times my expectations were that my students' comprehension might be lacking on this difficult topic because of their age, but I was happily surprised.

The hard work paid off as I saw my group of United Nations delegations arguing among themselves about poverty in India, about fighting refugee discrimination in Norway, about accessibility to schools in Kenya. Definitely one of the highlights of my time here in Spain is hearing them take into account the nuance of why young people commit crimes and violence, and hearing young people speak eloquently and passionately about topics like women’s autonomy in sex work in front of dozens of people in the Global Classrooms conference. Seeing hundreds of students being able to speak about this topic at age 14/15, and speak about this topic in a different language and in a public speaking setting, makes me incredibly proud of the shared experience of all these students across the community of Madrid. It was at times a lot of work, reading and re-reading over a hundred position papers, I am happy to have had the opportunity to help facilitate this experience for young people in my school!

Besides ESO, I also teach Bachillerato classes, where I have the opportunity to design my own lesson plans for an age group that is able to handle sustained discussion on challenging issues at a higher level.

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Overall, I came to the idea of teaching in Spain with few expectations - I did not know what to expect in terms of my role in the classroom since I had heard it varies so much from school to school. Likewise, I did not know what to expect with my students, in terms of their language level. This was a useful strategy in the end, as not having many expectations meant I came in flexible to adapt to the language and maturity level of each classroom. And since I had few expectations in terms of my role, I was more flexible to taking on the role of being the Global Classrooms language assistant, instead of what I was told to expect. (I solo-teach virtually all of my classes, rather than just assisting in the classroom with games and activities like the Handbook suggests. Though this was a surprise, the challenge to adapt lessons for each level's abilities has been rewarding when I see the click in my students when they master some idea or concept.

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