A Day Volunteering at IES La Paz

Last Friday, a friend of Lyle's colleaguem MJ, invited us to join one of the activities in the school where she works. We had met her before, and had talked about it a bit, and we were happy to go for the day. She warned us that the school we were going to was very different from the schools we were teaching at. The school, IES La Paz, is located in the worst neighborhood in Granada, and it's one of the worst schools not only in Granada, but also in Andalucía. The school is 'bad' not because of the facilities or the teachers, but rather because of the students. The school building is actually quite big and well maintained. They have a basketball court and a football field (something my school doesn't even have). They do receive a lot of money from the government, but they have very few students in the school because nobody really wants to go there. They only have a total of 40 students at the school, and with 20 teachers, it's practically a 2:1 ratio. Unfortunately, since the school is in a bad neighborhood and such, most of the students from that school have less than fortunate upbringings. Some of them are violent, disrespectful, etc., many of them have failed and have had to repeat levels over and over again (for example, they had 17 year old students in 8th grade, etc.). Others have gotten kicked out of so many other schools, and are at this school as a last resort. The school is also part of a sort of compensatory education program, which means that they provide education for those with social disadvantages, immigrants, those who come from families with socio-economical difficulties, etc. You can imagine the kind of students in the school.

Nevertheless, we were happy to volunteer, and it was really interesting to see another side of the education in Spain. The school is not a bilingual school, but they do have English classes (though the level of English of the students is very very low). The activity we had with them was a special activity that they have about once a week, where they mix up the students in different groups (not by grade or level), and they take turns doing various activities. There were about 5-6 students per group, and there were 4 tasks or stations that they had to do for 20 minutes each. Lyle and I handled one English station where we did activities on clothes vocabulary (that's how low their English level was).

For the most part, the students were pretty behaved. Lyle and I kept saying to each other that it wasn't as bad as we had expected it to be. They were pretty participative and made an effort to speak in English with us (it took some coaxing, but they did try). MJ told us beforehand that when the students found out we were visiting their school they were both surprised and excited since no one ever visits their school. So I think they were pretty happy to have us there, and made an extra effort during the activities.

After the morning break, we just did a simple activity where we showed the students the "It's More Fun in the Philippines" video, and afterwards spoke about the Philippines and answered any questions they had. They asked us various questions from "How many islands does the Philippines have?" to "What color is the sand in the Philippines?" and "What is Philippine hair like?"

Thank you gifts :)

All in all, we had a pretty pleasant experience (it was nowhere near as horrible as we were expecting it to be) volunteering at IES La Paz. We even plan to go back next month and spend more time with them. The school even gave us some moscatel - a sweet Spanish wine made from moscatel grapes - and some Spanish books as a thank you gift.