Working Girl (September)

This blog is going to be a lot shorter than the my usual ‘Working Girl’ blogs for 2 reasons: one, it was an uneventful month with a lot of the same students and two, I’m writing this eight weeks after the fact so I don’t remember much. This started the first month that I worked and lived in Madrid. Therefore, I it was the first month I took on a full-time schedule. September is still considered a summer month here so there aren’t as many teachers or students for that matter.

I had a morning class starting at 10 with only two women (Vivi and Patricia). This was a difficult class because they had totally different personalities. Vivi is very outspoken and controlling where Patricia is very shy and insecure about her Englsih. So it was a battle everyday trying to get Patricia to speak English and not Spanish and then keeping Vivi quiet enough to let Patricia actually try to talk.

It was also the first month I had classes in Tecnicas Runidas, one of my academies business clients. I met with 2 of their executives for private classes in the morning. I enjoyed these classes the most because I get to utilize my business knowledge instead of the repetitious travel, food and body parts vocab that I teach normal students.

I had an afternoon intensive class as well 5 days a week with 6 more students. The class wasn’t anything exciting but over that month I did encounter something I hadn’t encountered in the 4 months I had been at the academy: my first student complaint. He thought that the information I was teaching was irrelevant and that I didn’t utilize class time in a productive enough way. It was a big strike to my ego as I have always been a little insecure about my teaching abilities. I sat down with my bosses a few times to work out any kinks and to see where I could improve my classes. It took me a week to get my confidence level back but overall I took this as a positive stepping stone.

All in all, September was just another month at the academy. It was pretty under-emphasized in the grand scheme of things as my new life in Madrid stole the show.