Teaching English in a Secondary School !

After eight years working in bad physical conditions last year me moved from our old barracks to a new big building. But, in my opinion, one the most important changes has been the increase of the number of students and, obviously, teachers as well. There are six English teachers this year.

This has good and bad points; the good point is that we can now offer one or two hours of “desdoblament” in all the courses except in 2^nd year of “batxillerat”.

There are 4 courses of 1^st of ESO of about 25 students in each classroom; the teachers have two classes with all the students and two more with half of them every week. (hora B). The same happens in 4^th of ESO with also four groups.

There are 4 courses of 2^nd of ESO of about 30 students in each class more or less and the teachers have two classes with all the students every week and one more only with half of the students every two weeks. (desdoblament quinzenal). And the same happens in the four groups of 3^rd of ESO and 1^st of Batxiller two groups.

Of the nineteen class-groups we have today only eight of them have what we call “hora b”, and all the rest have “hora de Desdoblament” every two weeks, except one , as 2^nd of Batxiller hasn’t got any. The increase in the numbers of all these “non-conventional classes”, together with the increase of the number of teachers has made the teachers’ coordination quite difficult, in the sense that there are a lot of different teachers teaching at a same level and, in most of the cases there are two teachers teaching a same group class this means a great effort in coordination and most on the times an hour meeting every week is not enough.

This is our new Foreign Languages classroom, we’ve got seven computers and a printer, a laptop that works together with a projector -both portable -, a TV with a DVD and a video player and an overhead projector and we will have three more computers too.