New year, new life, old-new school.

Hi all, 

In this post, I'm not going to describe any of the activities I do in class, but rather, I'm going to comment a bit on the start of the new school year 2018/19. 

For reasons I wouldn't like to discuss on a blog like this, a few months ago I decided to try to change jobs. One of the things I did was to sit the official exams to join the public service as an English teacher in the government-funded schools. For anybody living outside Spain, this usually means going through an antiquated, industrial process of recruitment where there are just a few permanent positions for thousands of applicants, and since they are in competition with each other, the atmosphere is usually tense, even hostile. Competence is a factor in your success or failure, but also luck: applicants must write an essay on a topic chosen at random out of around 70 topics (for English, these include linguistics, English language, literature, culture and such like). If one of your topics is drawn out of the bag, then you can count yourself lucky. That's only the first exam--if you pass, you still have to go through an oral exam in which you present a yearly programme for your subject in front of a panel. And then, your teaching experience, training and official certificates are taken into account to place you in a list. Finally, if you score enough points, you may get a permanent job. If not, you are put in the supply teachers' list. 

I'll spare you the details. I did a good first exam and was lucky in the topic, Romantic literature in Britain. I went through to the second phase and managed to impress the panel enough for them to give me a decent mark, which combined with my teaching experience, language certificates and other courses I've taken through the years, has landed me a permanent job as a civil servant. Hooray!!!

I'm currently working at the same high school where I studied as a teenager. This is by no means common, by the way. Let's say I'm a bit of a nerd that way, so I applied to work there and I was lucky enough to get the job. 

I'm still getting used to my new surroundings, my timetable, my students, my groups... I don't know if I'll be able to fit in any of the multi-skill projects I'm used to doing, as each group gets fewer lessons than what I'm used to. The evil demon sitting on my shoulder says there's no time for projects. The good angel sitting on my other shoulder says that projects tick many more boxes than traditional lessons. 

I'll keep you updated. 

Thanks for reading!

Maite