Another day, another step into autumn. I’ve just finished the washing up and am reading about Enrique’s rebellion on the island of Hispaniola in Simon Park’s Wreckers. The others are downstairs watching a League of Legends championship (apparently that’s a thing). Work seems a long way away.
I wonder what the future holds? Where will I be in a few years’ time? It’ll take me a year or two to find my feet as an English teacher once I get to Santiago, but I have every confidence I’ll get there in the end. Where will I be? Will I have a flat of my own in trendy Providencia or Nuñoa, or will I find myself in some other part of the city? Who will I choose to spend my free time, as I’ll have so much more of it than I have ever known?
What worlds will my new friends introduce me to, when our paths cross? My friendships have taken me to the blossom forests of Prague – where I was told it was a shame they had no daughters left to bring me into the family – and the starlit streets of Athens, where I saw my dear friends tie the knot after a Cadillac ride through the city. One of my wildest relationships sent me across the ocean to the American South. Even this spontaneous adventure to Hyères is the fruit of a friendship. My friendships open up the world to me.
With any luck, She is over there, waiting. It does nobody any good to pin hopes on dreams, but I’m starting to really believe that. Hopefully she’s a Spanish speaker, because while I’m prepared to teach any children I’m lucky enough to have to speak Spanish, I’d rather they learned from somebody who grew up speaking it – not from a professional mimic. I may be 40% Iberian to 26% English, as the DNA test said, but I can’t help the fact I grew up in England. There’s a whole world I still need to learn: language, lifestyle and love. I hope there is space enough in my heart.
We’re running low on some of the smaller groceries. Five men get through a lot more food than I thought. Time for another trip to E. Leclerc, I think. BB x
It’s raining outside. I turned off my alarms out of courtesy to my companions, but the dissonant blare of a flood alert woke us all up around 8am anyway. The Giens Peninsula is enveloped in a thick cover of white cloud, out of which the islands of Petit and Grand Ribeau seem to come and go. I haven’t got out to explore yet, thanks to the inclement weather. With the flood warnings threatening the thin strip of sand connecting us to the mainland, we could well be stuck here today. It feels very cut-off from the world.
Now seems as good a time as any to come clean. Five months remain until I turn my life upside down and leave the UK for good.
Over the summer, while I was working in Santiago, I was made an offer that was very hard to turn down: a permanent post as Teacher of English Literature in the school’s Senior Department (the equivalent of our Years 10-13 in the UK). That might seem like a complete u-turn on the last eight years of French and Spanish teaching experience over here, but in more ways than one, it’s the natural evolution of my career, which has already become extremely literature-heavy. This was always the plan: to teach MFL to the stage where I had mastered both French and Spanish to the point where I could capably deliver advanced literature in both, take an SEQ (Subject Enhancement Qualification) over the summer to add English to my roster, and then use all three as a sledgehammer to break into the Spanish education system. They can take away my ability to work across Europe as a citizen of the EU, but they can’t take away my will. You might call it my personal revenge against Brexit.
I hear you. Chile is a pretty big sidestep to reach that goal – over 8.000km to the side, to be precise. But let’s be realistic: just how often do opportunities like this come around? Here, at last, is a chance to bypass the additional expense of further training and (quite possibly) the need for a degree in English Literature. It’s the job I always wanted, and while it might not be in Spain, it is in a Spanish-speaking country. As the bandits of Skyrim would say, that’s close enough.
It’s not just the job. It’s the lifestyle. I’ve been living and working within the British boarding school system for the last eight years. I ran the calculations through AI this morning and was genuinely alarmed by just how much of my time I’ve given away over the years. Factoring in Wednesday and Friday nights, Saturday mornings and occasional Sunday duties, I’ve lost well over a year of my life to the boarding school world. That’s pretty humbling – and it might go some way to explaining how so many of my friends appear to have found the time to meet their partners, tie the knot and settle down already.
It’s not just the amount of time but the quality of it. I’m not working every hour I’m on call, but I can’t do anything or go anywhere. Little things like house assemblies and tutor time mean I can’t disappear on a Friday night, even if I have no lessons to teach on Saturday morning. Spontaneity – the freedom to improvise that I hold in dangerously high regard – is hard to exercise in such a world.
Moving to Chile means leaving that world behind. It means finding a place of my own to live, where I can live by my own rules. It means commuting to work (which, I’ll be honest, I have missed). It means losing an immediate community – and the additional incentive to go out there and find my own. It will be a more costly existence than the one I have known for the last eight years, but that is what the last eight years have been for: to make this change all the easier.
I will have to leave everything behind. I have five months to get rid of all the furniture I have acquired over the last ten years or so, as I can’t take any of it with me. I won’t be sad to see the back of it. I won’t be parted from my books, so I’ll have to find them a home until I know whether this move is for life. This is all a lot easier said than done, of course, but I can’t help feeling I’ll be a lot happier starting from scratch. As long as I have my journal, my camera and my health, I’ll be OK.
It goes without saying that my wildlife bonanza over the summer has played an enormous part in swaying my decision. The fact that I might be able to see condors from my office every week is surreal. The whole of South America will on my doorstep. Peru’s keys to the Amazon. Brazil’s Pantanal. Argentina’s great whale migration. Chile’s magnificent pumas. All of the little things: hummingbirds, mockingbirds, meadowlarks and caracaras. Having pelicans, albatrosses and enormous sea lions within a couple of hours’ reach at weekends. The summer just gone was without a doubt the happiest of my life, and I would dearly like to be that happy forever.
It’s no guarantee that She will be in Chile, but with such an incredible wealth of wildlife to see every day of the year, I don’t think I’ll have all that much time to contemplate. I’ll be much too busy seeking out pudus, kodkods and tucúqueres to care all that much. If I find Her along the way, I’ll consider it a bonus. All the same, it can’t hurt my chances: Santiago’s population of seven million is sure to be a better place to start than Taunton’s sixty-one thousand.
It will be quite easily the most dramatic move of my life so far. I’ve lived in a number of places – Uganda, Morocco, Jordan and Spain, of course – but most of them were very much intended to be temporary. This could be it. I will certainly treat it as such until I know otherwise.
I’m not relishing breaking the news to my students, but I’ll have to do so sooner or later. My job ad went up today, and with the interviews due to start shortly after we return, it will only be a matter of time until they put two and two together. That’s partly what this is all about – reasoning it out to myself before I have to spell it out to them. Knowing what to say. Hopefully they’ll understand.
The New World is calling. Like so many before me, I must leave my life behind and seek my destiny across the sea. Knowing what you know, having read what you have read, can you blame me? BB x
Aeropuerto Arturo Merino Benítez, Santiago de Chile. 23.23.
Three weeks at Craighouse School have come and gone in the blink of an eye. In that time I have seen and done all sorts of career-boosting things. I have observed Maths, English, Spanish and French classes, as well as a number of department meetings: sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. I have taught the basics of French conjugation with -ER verbs, folktales from England, the Basque Country and the Middle East for a middle school kamishibai project and Augustinian theology within an exploration of good and evil in Othello. I have moderated an extended essay, taken part in an MUN debate on the two state solution, discovered that what I have only dreamed of doing for years – teaching English Literature – is well within my capabilities… and I have made some friends for life out here.
I think one of the reasons I avoided anything and everything to do with Latin America at university was because I wasn’t ready yet. I should have known that, having lost my heart to an American once already, I would be drawn back across the Atlantic like a moth to a flame. It’s not the light – it’s the warmth. The warmth of the people here. I have barely begun to scratch the surface of this country.
First things first – my Othello lesson was a triumph. After dropping in on a couple of Y12 classes and offering my take on Carol Ann Duffy and the religious context behind Shakespeare’s work, I was told that the senior deputy head and former head of English wanted to see me teach. Teaching a forty-five minute French lesson that I’ve taught for years is one thing. Teaching a ninety minute class on hardcore morality ethics, Protestant ideology and social context within one of Shakespeare’s weightier plays is another matter entirely.
Lucky for me, I had a bloody good teacher back in my schooldays, and a quick refresher last week was enough to remind me that I had forgotten very little of what I was taught, even across a distance of fourteen years. I’ve also been gearing up to teach Othello myself as part of the Spanish Language A course, so I was not unprepared. Still. No pressure.
I’ve got to hand it to the kids. They might have only been a standard level class, but they handled the higher level material extremely well. When I circulated as they were practising a Paper 2-style comparative task, I had some really enlightening conversations. So many great questions, so many bright ideas. I was really proud of them. Ninety minutes seemed like a tall order when I turned in around eleven o’clock last night, but it was over far too soon.
I spent the afternoon wrapping up. Signing out of all my accounts on the school laptop. Handing back the IB Language books I’d borrowed. Switching out my teaching boots for hiking shoes. I dropped in on the middle school Lenguaje department to say goodbye and had it corrected to a see you soon. Hispanics don’t do goodbyes. Much too final.
One final and unexpected resident of the English department hung around to see me off: the mockingbird that has been hanging around the office for the last couple of weeks. Somebody had left the door open so it had popped inside to see if there was anything edible. After a small circuit I managed to guide it back outside. They’re extremely characterful creatures, mockingbirds. I hope to see more of them where I’m going next. It’s a place where they made history. Natural history, that is.
To close out my time here, Alfredo (the head of English) took me and a couple of colleagues out to dinner at Baco, a swish restaurant in upmarket Providencia. It felt like I’d been part of the team for a year, rather than a week. Chileans may have more in common with the Basques than the Andalusians, but they’re an incredibly warm and honest people.
I’d say that’s that, but I’ve got to come back to Santiago to pick up my suitcase and catch my flight home in nine days’ time, so I’m not quite done with Santiago yet. But now I’m sitting in the departures lounge of Santiago’s Arturo Merino Benítez airport, absolutely buzzing about the last great adventure on my South American odyssey. It’s been an amazing month so far, full of unforgettable wildlife encounters and exceptionally warm people. This will just put a seal on the whole thing.
How do I describe what I’m feeling right now? I’m not sure. So I’ll do my best to reason my thoughts as I write. That’s what this whole blog exercise is for, after all, right? To throw down all the scattered puzzle pieces in my head so that they make a lot more sense on paper. That’s the idea behind it, anyway.
It’s like this. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life teaching foreign languages: English, Spanish, French, Arabic and even Italian. I do it because it’s what my degree was all about, primarily, but also because I have a pretty good ear and, frankly, I’m pretty good at it. In the last five years – after I’d earned my stripes – I’ve started teaching more and more literature, first through the Spanish Language B section of the International Baccalaureate Diploma, then as a fundamental part of the A Level course for both French and Spanish. The further I get into my teaching career, the more I hunger for the literary side of the course, genuinely revelling in the exploration of theme, character, identity and authorial philosophy. I love teaching the little ones, too – it’s immensely entertaining to go from discussing the corruption of the soul in French to learning Spanish phonics with various animals within the space of an hour – but every year I feel myself drawn ever closer into the literature.
Here in Chile, for the first time since my schooldays, I’ve had the freedom to teach English Literature as though it were my alma mater. It feels as natural as breathing. It helps that I have being using the same skills for years now to deliver the literature aspects of the French and Spanish courses, but… there is something more to it. This feels… right, somehow. Like this is what I was meant to be doing all along. And I’m feeling very conflicted about this.
I shouldn’t. This was always the plan – to move back to Spain and teach English Literature, if I could. But it is never going to happen in the UK. Never. I wouldn’t be allowed to cross over because of a lack of subject expertise and experience, no matter how much I point to my long years teaching literary analysis in another language. Similarly, it’s tremendously unlikely I’d be hired as a Spanish Language and Literature teacher in Spain, for which I am arguably more qualified, because why on earth would you hire a foreigner who has acquired your language from scratch to teach it to children when there are so many native speakers who are far better equipped to do so?
In short, my qualifications and my intentions simply do not add up. I did Spanish at university because I wanted to move back to Spain, but because my profession is teaching – a career path from which I will not stray on principle – I find myself stuck, unable to break into the Spanish education system as easily as mother did with music. I know what I want to do, but the barriers are all around me.
It’s frustrating – and yet the impression I get out here, in a school built upon the IB core philosophy of the universality of thought, is that none of that matters. Where I came from, what credentials I hold, what language I use from day to day. The only thing that matters is a passion for literature and for inquiry, wherever that takes me.
We could learn a lot from this system. Rather, I could learn a lot from it. The only question is, does Spain have anywhere that follows the same philosophy? That really would be the dream, if I could only track it down.
The sun has been out all day. Only now, in the last moments of the evening, has a thin carpet of cloud been pulled up as though to tuck it into bed. This would be only the third day of sunshine I have had since arriving in Chile, now four weeks ago to the day. So I have come up to the top of Observatory Hill to watch the sunset lay its Midas touch upon the Andes, perhaps for the last time, and think about the future.
Tomorrow, one last class of Othello – a proper hour and a half’s marathon on morality and ethics, Augustinian philosophy and Paper 2 preparation – and then it’s over. This strange exchange with Chile that was never on the cards until suddenly it was. I hope I leave a good impression.
And after that… somewhere completely different. Somewhere I have wanted to go since I was six years old. Somewhere… enchanted, even. BB x
Today has been a bit more of an admin day. One of my activities for next week fell through, so I spent a fair part of this morning re-arranging my plans with a couple of other agencies to keep my itinerary as close to the original as possible. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve been leaning heavily on AI, not as a lesson planner, but as a travel agent, and I have to be honest, I fear for the travel industry. ChatGPT and Copilot may need gentle nudging and correcting as they work, but they do a phenomenal job at trawling the net for deals, dates and travellers’ tales from TripAdvisor, Reddit and beyond.
I’m not the biggest fan of AI, but as an impartial entity to bounce ideas off, it’s an absolute doozy. It has really helped me to streamline my plans, keeping them within a very reasonable budget – especially important as my choice of location is not exactly famous for being a budget destination. I do often have to correct its mistakes, which is why I would caution any students of mine from meddling with it unless it’s on terms they understand – good advice for just about anything unknown – but as a rule it does a pretty good job at doing the heavy lifting.
I genuinely can’t wait – I’m practically chomping at the bit here – but I promised to keep it a secret, so I will leave just the smallest of clues in this post in case you want to hazard a guess at my intentions.
I’m currently sitting in the English office, listening in on the weekly department meeting on debating strategies and what constitutes a suitable number of poems within the Language A anthology. On my left, the windows open out onto the hill country around Manquehue, where I saw no fewer than sixteen condors circling shortly before lunch. That makes three days out of three this week where I’ve seen the titans of the Andean skies from my office. Normally it’s just the diucas and mockingbirds that pop in for a lookaround once the kids have gone back inside for the third hour of the day. On my right, the windows open out onto the enormity of the Andes to the north, still wearing a wintry mantle of snow. Further down the hill – just out of sight beyond the classroom blocks – are the school’s sports pitches. Our kids play rugby against the backdrop of a nineteenth-century clock tower and the Southwestern Railway. These kids have the towering heights of the Andes all around them. These are just the foothills: somewhere beyond stands the fearsome Cerro Plomo, reaching some 17,861 feet into the sky.
Upon reflection, by journey’s end, I will have spent an astonishing two months south of the equator this year. The last time I was this far south I was tracking mountain gorillas in the impenetrable cloud forests of Bwindi on the Congolese border.
I remember being of the opinion that Chile was a destination I was only prepared to visit thanks to some generous financial assistance with the flights, considering it otherwise a prohibitively expensive destination. I see now just how wrong I was. Not about the money – Chile is easily one of the more expensive South American countries – but about how much there is to see and to do.
I’m now genuinely considering coming back someday to pick up the things that I missed: Chiloé, Conguilio, Punta Arenas, San Pedro de Atacama and so much more besides. There’s simply too much to see here, even when you have five weeks to play around with, and for a naturalist like me, the fact that it pales in comparison to its megadiverse neighbour, Peru, means very little when a casual glance out gives you one of the most spectacular birds of prey on the planet.
Two weeks from now, I will be back home, a brief pit stop on the island before duty calls me to Athens for one last dance. I had a brief moment of nostalgia for it today when I popped in to help a colleague set up a game of Just a Minute to give her students a boost with their listening skills in debating. I love that game to bits – and the BBC Radio show from which I have poached it.
It’s getting to that stage of my time in Chile where I’m starting to take advantage of every moment remaining. Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten quite used to the sight of the Andes, the caracaras that seem to be constantly somewhere on the horizon and the wheezy call and response of the characterful meadowlarks. But soon I’ll have to say goodbye. So, while the weather holds at least, I’ll try to get out after work and soak up as much of that view as I can.
After a productive day spent exploring Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry (specifically Quickdraw, Demeter, Shooting Stars and Delilah) and hanging out with the Senior English team, I popped in to grab my camera and went straight back up the road to Observatory Hill (Cerro Calán). It was smoggy and overcast on my way up, but by the time I reached the summit, the sun had found a breach in the cloud line near the horizon and came shining through – just in time to light up the meadowlarks that were scrambling about the summit.
I went all the way to Patagonia for pumas and took a boat out into the Pacific to see an albatross, but the meadowlarks have been a feature wherever I’ve gone. For me, they’re probably the bird of Chile – after all, national bird or not, I’ve seen condors in Peru, albeit perhaps not as frequently as I have here.
If I had more time – and the weather were kinder – I’d head south again in search of the chucao, a smart little Chilean speciality, and try my luck in search of the Magellanic woodpeckers that reside within the forests of Chiloe. I’d also try to track down the elusive tucúquere, the largest of the owls of Chile, that has thus far eluded me. I suspect I’ll be absolutely knackered when I return from my final adventure next week, but if the sun decides to make a very overdue return, I might make one last jaunt out to Batuco, a wetland reserve to the north of the city, in the hope that I might find the burrowing owls that live around the lake.
Until then, I’m quite content to watch the meadowlarks bousting about.
When the sun can be seen, Santiago experiences an incredible second sunset. The dying embers of dusk catches the peaks of the mountains and showers them in golden light, before they fade to an imperial grey against the iron skies beyond. Then, just when you think it’s over, the mountains erupt in an incredible crimson light. I’m not sure what triggers that second burst of light. Maybe it’s the sun hitting the Pacific, or some trick of the clouds. Either way, it’s breathtaking.
As I walked back down the road toward Avenida Charles Hamilton, the clouds became a mirrored beach, like so much stippled sand. To the north, the triangular summit of Cerro Manquehue rose into the ether like a child’s drawing. It’s been the eternal backdrop of my stay here in Santiago, visible from both my home in Las Condes and my office in Craighouse on the other side of the mountain.
Before I came here, Manquehue was just the name of a Chilean Catholic community who I met once in Durham, many years ago. Now it’s one of my favourite waymarkers in the Valle Central.
Tomorrow brings an observation – one of my last – and a planning session with the Deputy Head for a fully-fledged 90-minute lesson of my own on Thursday. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were testing me. It almost feels like a job interview.
I saw a fox near the car park as I left today – a gold and silver vixen, rooting around the trees just beyond the fence. These culpeos are a lot closer to wolves and jackals than they are to true foxes, but nature clearly likes the design of the fox, because the culpeo and its cousin the chilla have both evolved to fill that niche.
I’ll take that as a good sign. Nothing that beautiful could be anything else. BB x
My time in Santiago is drawing to a close. Five days remain before I pack my rucksack with a few warmer weather supplies and set out for one more grand adventure – before responsibilities call me back to drought-afflicted Europe. It’s been so long since we had a day of truly clear skies – not since the day I arrived, to be honest – that it’s hard to imagine what most of Europe is going through right now. I’ve almost forgotten what’s it’s like to be hot outside.
I took it easy today. The weather was supposed to be miserable, but while the forecast rain did eventually come down, it was only for about five minutes. I thought about exploring the rocky mountainside reserves around Santiago’s east side in search of a few Chilean specialities that I have missed thus far, like turcas, tapaculos and the one and only tucúquere or horned owl… but in the end, it looked far too complicated to get there and back again under unpredictable weather conditions in time for a social outing at 2pm, so I gave it a pass. That’s where I draw the line between birder and twitcher – I’m not going to miss out on a chance to meet people and practise my Spanish just because I’m leaving the country in a week and haven’t seen all the Chilean endemics. There are limits even to my obsessions.
It was a lovely gathering at one of Tomás’ cousins’ apartment, in true South American style – that is, thirteen people and two dogs squeezed into a living room, with a lovely array of snacks and conversation.
Most of their attention was demanded by the new puppy Tomás’ sister has acquired over the weekend and his cousin’s dog, who went absolutely ballistic at the presence of so many strange-smelling new faces and a puppy to boot. I hadn’t really given it much thought, to be honest, but I think it’s safe to say I am not a dog person. They really are far too much.
Growing up with cats has had more of an impact on me than I realised. Tolkien once that “sheep get like shepherds and shepherds get like sheep”, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s happened to me. Cats are loving and affectionate in their own way, but they’re also highly independent and will only tolerate so much attention before they need to slink off somewhere on their own. Maybe that’s why I’ve also ways been drawn to the quieter, more noble dog breeds that don’t bound about so much, begging for your attention, like mastiffs.
I feel very welcome here. Sure, there have been times when it has not been lost on me that my assigned department aren’t entirely sure what to do with me, since I did seemingly fall from the sky, but most introductions lead to some sort of inquisition, born from a natural curiosity as to what I, an Englishman, am doing out here in Santiago.
I wonder how my colleagues will treat Tomás during his stay. I know they will be welcoming, but I doubt he’ll be the centre of attention as often as I have been out here. I don’t think it’s even a generalisation to say that the British simply aren’t as curious. It’s not in our nature. An Englishman’s life is his own affair, and to ask too many questions is to intrude. I had that much beaten into me by a previous girlfriend who found my inquisitiveness and love of deep questions nothing short of invasive. She might have been an isolated case, but I will always remember a dinner with her colleagues where not a single one of them asked me a question or even acknowledged my existence for the entire three hour sitting. She is the only Briton I have ever dated, and it was enough to convince me that it is a mindset I must avoid at all costs.
The sunset from the cousins’ eleventh floor flat was quite spectacular. I’ve been away for quite a while now, so I am starting to look forward to the familiar trappings of home, but I will miss the mountains. You’d have to go as far as the Himalayas to get mountains as impressive as these… and don’t think I haven’t considered that – once I’ve saved up some more, of course, after what really has been a very splurge-y summer!
Tomorrow should – I hope – bring me the structure I have been craving. Two hours of Othello followed by another couple of hours of French. It will make a nice change from working on my novel in the Middle School Lenguaje department! BB x
I’m up early after falling asleep far earlier than usual last night (around 8pm – shocking!), so I thought I’d use the time to pencil in my afternoon’s adventures.
While I’ve been working around the Craighouse campus, I’ve had a lot of time to watch the comings and goings of the birds that make their home around the capital city. Taunton has its fair share of feathered friends, of course, but I’ve had thirty years to get used to herring gulls, crows and woodpigeons. I might be in my third week out here, but I still get a big smile watching the rufous-crowned sparrows hopping about. Naturally, I don’t bring my camera to work, so given that we actually had some sunshine today – and that my colleague Tomás was done an hour before the end of the school day – I thought I’d capitalise on the sunlight and do a bit of suburban birdwatching.
One bird that’s easy to find around Santiago is the mockingbird. I’ve come across these characterful creatures in New Orleans, Lima and the open steppe of Patagonia, but the cheerful Chilean mockingbird is very much a feature of Santiago itself. I imagine they’d be garden birds, if one had the money for a garden in this habitually dry part of the world.
I thought I might try and snap one of the many Chilean swallows circling the heights of Cerro Calán, but they were much too fast and never came down to roost. I did, however, finally have manage to capture a fire-eyed diucon – a little grey bird with striking red eyes, almost like those of a Victorian doll, that moves just like a flycatcher from back home.
It was really encouraging to see more than a couple of other walkers up on Cerro Galán with binoculars and the BIRDA app on their phones. I can’t help but notice that birdwatching seems to be a lot more popular here than I anticipated. I suppose it helps a lot when your average city birds are really quite spectacular to start with.
Take the meadowlarks, for example, who make their presence known with a tremendously loud wheezy call that goes off like a Mexican wave as soon as the first one in the flock puffs out its chest and sings. These are the birds that the locals in Santiago seem to love the most, and with such an eye-popping splash of red on the males’ chests, I can’t say I blame them.
Definitely saving a corner of this post for my favourite little sparrows, though. Slightly smaller than our house sparrows, with an endlessly cheerful chip to let you know they’re nearby, they also have a beautiful song when they’re feeling more musical.
I was up on the cerro long enough to catch the sunset, which was an added bonus. It must have been tremendous from Valparaíso, no doubt, but even here in Santiago, with the forested mountains of La Campana between us and the horizon, it was quite a sight to see.
Today I think I’ll wander over to the Senior English department and try to catch a few more lessons. Be proactive for a change! BB x
The sun has returned. It feels like quite a long time since I last saw it. It has been so cloudy with the constant threat of rain here in Santiago that I haven’t really seen the sun since the day I arrived, now some three weeks ago – with the exception of that glorious afternoon down in Patagonia when the snowclouds cleared. I have missed it: Chile looks so very different in the sunlight. The lingering snow in the high mountains is a special shade of blue, though it looks about as soft and cold as marble. The students spent their breaktime playing one of their quarterfinal intercolour football games, with a mixed team of boys and girls. A meadowlark is singing somewhere above the classroom block, and every time I turn around, I can see a harris hawk or two gliding high up in the wintry blue sky. This is a very special place.
One of the most reassuring things about this Chilean exchange is the renewed confidence I have regarding my text choices for the Spanish Language A course I’m rolling out. After a chat with the English department yesterday, it turns out they are studying some of the texts that I planned on exploring with my students next year – so there is a precedent! As it stands, my reading list looks something like this:
Rebelion en la granja (George Orwell, UK)
Maus (US)
Pedro Paramo (Juan Rulfo, MX)
El tunel (Ernesto Sabato, AR)
Romancero gitano (Federico Garcia Lorca, ES)
El reino de este mundo (Alejandro Carpentier, CU)
El burlador de Sevilla (Tirso de Molina, ES)
La casa de los espiritus (Isabel Allende, CL)
Cien años de soledad (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, CO)
El maestro y Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, RU)
Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Pablo Neruda, CL)
Otelo (Shakespeare, UK)
El extranjero (Albert Camus, FR)
To be honest, I’m surprised at myself with this list – primarily because of the tremendously heavy Latin American focus. Years ago, in my university days, I steered my Hispanic Studies degree firmly away from Latin American texts, focusing instead on all things Iberian: Castilian medieval epics, postmodern Spanish literature, and the Quijote module that never was. However, the parameters of the IB are clear: the texts studied should cover a broad range of geographic regions and time periods, so that students can discuss the similarities and differences between the overarching themes, and in so doing, ask insightful questions that push them closer to being truly global citizens. That, at least, is the idea.
It’s a big ask. My usual stomping ground is medieval epics like El Cantar del mio Cid (which, funnily enough, is one of the set texts for the Spanish Language and Literature course out here), but I really want my students to get to grips with the wider Hispanic world – just as I am getting to grips with it myself, after stubbornly ignoring the Hispanic World beyond the Atlantic for far too long.
I´ve tried to cover as many countries as I can while threading together a coherent corpus that lends itself well to comparative work, revolving around five primary themes: power, identity, memory, morality and the supernatural. It’s a tall order for my students, I know, and I hope they are up to the task. Hell, I hope I am up to the task! But I am seriously looking forward to being a full-on teacher of literature at last, even if I have had to come by the road of Spanish Literature in order to do so.
With that being said, I had better crack on and get some of these presentations whipped up. This curriculum won’t write itself! BB x
Today marks the halfway stage, both of my three-week exchange post and of my five-week extended summer break in South America. Life goes on for the students at Craighouse, and I have to remind myself that while it’s cold and coat weather here, and everyone is hard at work, my summer holidays are ticking by. Not that I haven’t made the most of them, of course – I can scarcely remember a more action-packed summer than this one – but it is something I have to tell myself when it feels like I might spend another day observing lessons.
Today I finished my myths and legends compilation for the Middle Lenguaje department and popped over to the Senior English department to get to know the team. Turns out that’s where French is based too, so I guess I’ll be up there a fair bit for the rest of my placement. They seem like a really friendly bunch. Hell, everyone here is really friendly. It’s been a really neat choice, coming out here for the summer. I’ve also had a lot of time to speak Spanish and work on my novels, so that’s been pretty useful, too.
Bit by bit, my last week is steadily falling into place. It’s going to be something to look forward to, to really set a seal on what has been a phenomenal second outing to Latin America. I hope it’s the first of many. BB x
