Introducing Thanksgiving (I)

In which I make a brief attempt to be a "cultural ambassador" and learn about the "Colegio Estados Unidos de América."
 

Friday morning I headed to a new neighborhood in Madrid (I keep discovering new ones), tucked away "between the river and the M-30" as the friend who invited me put it, to visit the impressively named (and adorable) Colegio Estados Unidos de América, the public school where my friend's son is in second grade, on a mission to show the students a genuine denizen of the mysterious place for which their school is named, and to explain the origins of the Semana de Black Friday.  (Not something the children - or for that matter Spanish adults - were terribly interested in, but which I felt obligated to do.)



The school, as my friend explained, is actually the combination of two older schools, which were originally single sex.  The building is from the mid 1960s, and is actually two L-shaped buildings built around an open courtyard where the children have their "recreo" or recess period.  One corner is devoted to their "huerto" or vegetable garden, which they attend only with supervision.  The main administrative offices are when you walk in, and we headed immediately upstairs to the library, so I didn't get to see any classrooms, but I caught a glimpse of a hallway with a long row of wooden hooks, hung with tiny jackets and scarves and so on.  Everything is painted in bright primary colors (as schools tend to be), and the library is a pretty, squarish classroom which looks out on the interior courtyard and has a wall of windows on one side, and bookshelves all around the others, and two rows of long tables (with small chairs) lined up picnic style the length of the room, with the librarian's (teachers) desk in one corner.

I was supposed to be an optional activity (meet the American writer) in the library during the recreo from 11:45 to 12:15.  The school schedule my friend explained to me also explained something which had puzzled me in my wanderings through my neighborhood, which was that there seemed to be tons of students getting out of the local schools between 1:00 and 2:00 but then lots more getting out between 4:00 and 5:00.  The school day at the Colegio Publico EEUU starts at 9:00 AM, and the children have class until their recess at 11:45.  Then they have class again from 12:15 to 2:00.  Then at 2:00 they can either get picked up for lunch (and go home) or eat in the school comedor, and have free play outdoors or afterschool activities until 4:00 or 5:00 in the evening (if they have parents who work).  The late Spanish lunch hour of 2:00 PM works out to be a godsend for the school schedule, because no one is faced with the awful immediately-after-lunch craziness, when the students are either over stimulated or sleepy and in either case cranky, and not at all focused.  Basically, there is a "morning" session, and then lunch, and then the kids are free.

I should add (regarding lunch) that when I walked in there was a little table in front of what looked like the copy room, and opposite the principal's office with a couple of piles of fliers for parents, one of the school calendar, and another of their "receta de la abuela" contest.  The "receta de la abuela" idea is that all the children are supposed to ask their "abuela" to contribute a recipe, and the ones that are most popular will get made in the "comedor" for lunch, and all the parents (and presumably also grandparents) will be invited to share them.  Generally, according to both the young librarian and my friend, the food in the comedor is extremely good.  (As my friend works evenings, she picks up her son and takes him home for lunch "unless there's a special occasion and he wants to stay.")  The idea of school dining halls serving food which is recognizable as such, much less edible, is very attractive.  That, plus the recreo, plus the emphasis on real physical education (the school has just started weekly swim lessons, although it involves busing the children to a pool some distance away) certainly explains why obesity is almost a non-issue here.  (I may be inadvertently changing that, as I am also friends with a pair of "abuelos" at the school, and gave them a cookie recipe today - while delicious - also involves more butter in one recipe than most Spaniards probably use in six months normally.  If my friend enters the contest with that recipe I'm going to be responsible for these adorable children getting pudgy.  I feel guilty.)

In any case, while there are signs in library that remind the children that "No comemos en la biblioteca" we had no sooner arrived than several girls of about ten showed up, with bananas or foil wrapped sandwiches in hand, checking to see if anything interesting was happening.  The librarian kindly relaxed the "no eating" rule during the recreo, since clearly her regular clientele are torn between their desire to spend a half hour in the library and the need of growing children to have a quick snack.  (Once upon a time I was an elementary school student who spent most of my lunches in the library when allowed, so I completely understood their dilemma.)  The girls (they were almost all girls though a few boys showed up later, I suspect because they were following my friend's son, who had stopped by to see his mother) planted themselves around the table where I was sitting and lost their shyness in about sixty seconds, and wanted to practice their English (which was quite good in terms of accent, although obviously of limited vocabulary and syntax) and also to ask questions about writing stories.  ("Do you write in a notebook or on a computer?"  "Have you written any books "para niños"?  "How long does it take you to write a book?")

As I had promised, I tried to answer their questions, and also tell them a little of the story of Thanksgiving, and the source of "Black Friday."  (I think they were dubious about the idea of it originally simply being a puente when people were free to shop because of the day off, but my friend was amused.)  I had worried about how to tell the story, but I realized (given the limited time) that the simplest thing was to simply say "cuenta la leyenda" and say that this was legendary history, not real history.  After all, among the books displayed face out in their pretty library was a child's version of Mío Cid (which I might or might not own at home), which is evidently part of the same series as the child's version of Don Quixote.  This is a country where elevating "very very loosely based on true events" to the level of myth is perfectly normal.  (Probably true in most countries.  And as it turned out that most of the girls were in "quinto" or fifth grade, they were perfectly old enough to understand that concept.)  So I was able to just say that there were English people who wanted to practice a special form of their religion and so they went away from England because "ya no había libertad de conciencia" (I'd told them that it was roughly in the "época de Felipe III" which it is, so the more historically minded ten year olds may even have an idea about the Inquisition, and if they don't, Spain has only technically been "estado aconfesional" since 1978, which may well be within some of their parents' lifetimes.)  I explained that they didn't know anything about farming and were in a strange place, and had a very hard time, and then asked the kids what they thought the local people had done upon seeing these strange people starving and freezing.  "Los mataban," promptly said one little girl who had placed herself at my elbow.  The profound skepticism which greeted my insistence that in fact the Massassoit people had offered help and advice to the English strangers suggests that the "refugees welcome" message has not filtered down into the ten year old consciousness.  These are ten year olds who have figured out that they can avoid the playground at recess, but they know what the playground is like.    I suspect that Machiavelli would be shocked by the deeply cynical view of human nature evinced by many elementary school students.  They only become idealists in adolescence.

At the end of the recreo the children thanked me very nicely, and to my surprise one girl handed me a little folded paper on which she had been working away while we chatted, with my name and the name of my novel on it, folded in the way that allows you to flip back and forth to form a three dimensional game.  (We used to make them in elementary school too, but I realize I have no idea of their proper name, in either English or Spanish.)  She had carefully scalloped the edges with a scissors too.  I was incredibly touched, and said so, and one of the other girls (who had appeared among the first with a notebook, in which she explained she was doing an assignment for science involving describing an imaginary new virus and how it was transmitted and what its characteristics and symptoms were etc. with space for drawings) seemed taken aback, and hastily wrote my name and a thank you on a piece of paper which she handed to me.  I managed to avoid hugging them, because it's very unfair to the dignity of someone who isn't quite a grown-up yet that grown-ups think they're fair game for hugging (even in this very embrace-prone culture), but I would have hugged them if I hadn't restrained myself.

After the recreo the librarian kindly invited us to stay and see the optional "extra escolar" activity she was doing with one of the classes next, which involved their "radio club."  Those enterprising readers who clicked the link above will see that the school's website has a tab "Oye mi radio" at the top.  If you click said tab, you get taken to a list of podcasts done by the children.  The point of the "radio club" as the librarian explained, is to teach the children to speak up clearly and enunciate properly "if they meet an older person or are in a more formal situation" and to give them the idea of sitting properly in their chairs and being absolutely silent while recording because "el micrófono capta todo."  In other words, it's a brilliant way of teaching the children public speaking, with the aid of an iphone which serves as "el micrófono."  Then the librarian uses software to mix and edit the recordings later, and put them up as podcasts.  As of today, the podcast I heard recorded hadn't gone up yet, but if you're interested in hearing a sample from the list of published podcasts, I strongly recommend listening to the very interesting "¿Qué querrías aprender en el colegio?" segment as well as their recent "Programa de Noticias."

The podcast recording that I watched was the "quinto" (fifth grade) class (which had a lot of the kids I had just seen which is how I know they were fifth graders), who arrived with their regular teacher, and a set of posters that they had been working on in small groups about various types of animals.  Each group (of three or four students) had to pick a reader or readers, and then had to read aloud the information from the poster.  (If you listened to the podcasts you may note hesitation in places one would not expect the students to hesitate.  This is because the radio club is also a way of teaching the kids to read texts aloud, so some of the younger ones struggle over longer words they are sounding out.)  The fifth graders had all prepared their posters in advance, and after some discussion among themselves worked out who was reading what.  Then they did "practice" reads, and then they read aloud a second time, while all remained staring at the librarian's iphone with bated breath.  During the course of the podcast (which I hope and expect will appear fairly shortly), I learned many interesting facts about "los mamíferos," (including the chinchilla) "los felinos," (including the white tiger) "los animales en peligro de extinción,"(including the panda) and "las medusas."  (Las medusas are jellyfish.  It's a good name for them.)

Overall I was deeply impressed with the way in which the librarian and the students' teacher managed to very nicely remind the kids that they should begin speaking with an appropriate introduction.  (i.e. "Hola.  Somos el grupo del quinto de X, Y, y Z.  Yo soy Z, y hoy os vamos a hablar de...")  It was also nice to see how seriously the kids took the activity and how basically supportive they were to each other.  (One girl put a comforting arm around another who was visibly upset when her recording was played back and she heard herself stumbling over the word "genética" which in fairness is not an easy word for a fifth grader, and which she managed to pronounce perfectly on her second try.)

Of course all of this was made easier by the fact that the fifth grade group only had eleven students in it.  I am told that the school suffered problems with enrollment, and that the relatively new and very active principal has taken aggressive steps to recruit parents, and that the younger grades are 20 students and above, so presumably the school's future is assured now that enrollment is rising (due to innovations like robotics and swimming lessons, and heavy recruiting of parents who want to send their kids to a smaller and more personalized school).  All in all, it was nice to see a public school that has been fighting both the bureaucratic standardization that I am told is endemic in the Spanish system (as it is in the US) and also fighting to retain kids in public school who would otherwise go to concertados or into the private system.  So while the children and the librarian were kind enough to thank me for coming (and my friend invited me out for coffee afterward as thanks), I really have to thank the very kind staff and students of the gallant little Colegio Estados Unidos de America, for letting me see a place that makes me remember what really good elementary education looks like.

Thank you for letting me see your school, and the very pretty little neighborhood around it, which is just on the far side of the river from the Parque del Oeste which leads up to the Complutense.  The school obviously had rules about taking pictures inside it (Spanish law is very strict about any photos in which minors might appear, and I do understand why), but I took some of autumn in this neighborhood of elegant little one family houses, one of which even had an orange tree full of oranges, while others were all dressed in harvest colors.  Enjoy!