Visiting the upper secondary school at Las Lagunas

On wednesday 20th of March I visited a Spanish upper secondary school called I.E.S. Sierra de Mijas. The teacher I met was Maria Carmen Oteros, who teaches spanish and literature. The teachers at the school were interested in the Finnish school system, and they said I will see lots of differences between the Finnish and Spanish school. More than differences I noticed similarities between the students, teachers and the subject during my quick look at the school.

Literature and grammar

One of the lessons I visited the students were writing in groups an article about the novel El Cid. The articles are supposed to be published at the class’ own paper. The lesson were at the library of the school and there were some computers available for the students and also some students have their own laptops. The lessons lasts about 55 – 60 min and there was only 5 min break between the lessons.

It was nice to talk to with the students. This class is so called bilingual, it means that they study english more than the other classes. A group of boys told me more about El Cid who they were writing about – the name was familiar to me from my literature studies, but I really don’t know anything about it. The boys explained some things about El Cid, who is a one national hero of Spain.

The second lesson was for the oldest students of the school, they are going to study at the university next autumn. They were watching at the film about the novel they are going to read afterwards. The film was American and it was dubbed in Spanish by actors. We discussed about this dubbing with Carmen. In my mind dubbing makes the film a little bit artificial because it changes the whole audio image of the film. A great deal of the film is different from the original version by dubbing.

The last lesson was also for the students of 15 years old. They were studying grammar by using the computer based exercises made by Carmen’s colleague. The exercises were quite similar we have with our workbooks. These kind of exercises are quite fixed and you have to know exactly the similar answer what the writer of the exercises have had in his mind even though there could be also other possibilities. These exercises are nice for brush up the memory before the test.

Open questions

My visit was very short and we did not have lots of time to talk with each other, so I cannot say pretty much about the work of the school. I began to think about teachers workload: how the work is organized if they do not have breaks? Is it efficient to have lesson after lesson without 10 – 15 min. break between? I would also like to know more about the whole system: the school is named institute, so what does that mean? We are going to meet again after the Semana Santa, and I have many questions to Carmen.

The students were open and ready to make a contact with the visitor. It would be nice to visit again, because they are having project works during April, like poetry week. That would be interesting to get to know more detailed.