Our house, Villa Medellín, was within walking distance of Sunnyview School to the north. Uphill, but within walking distance. We set out to walk to the school just to try things out, see if we were up to the task. It was a beautiful, sunny day without a cloud in the sky. How Spanish. After all, this was the Costa del Sol, Coast of the Sun.
To the north of the school lay some hills, and within the hills lay an active rock quarry. As we walked we heard a dynamite explosion from the quarry and watched as a cloud of dust rose into the air. Within minutes the dust reached a proper altitude and clouds began to gather round. Within an hour clouds covered the sky and it began to rain. It rained for several hours.
I recalled stories of the rainmaker going from town to town and setting off explosions, but I always thought it was fiction, something the Wizard of Oz would try. But no, it really works.
Showing posts with label Sunnyview School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sunnyview School. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Polyglots
I had a small sixth grade at Sunnyview with a couple of daily incursions from a very small seventh grade. One day, on a whim, I polled the classes as to how many languages they spoke amongst them. The results astonished me.
Most of the students spoke English and Spanish as a matter of course. Some also spoke French. But there was also an albino girl from Peru who spoke Quechuan, she and a few million Incas. Then there was the girl who grew up in Hong Kong but whose family was moving their assets to Europe. She claimed to speak a passable Mandarin. I believed her. Another spoke Swahili, the lengua franca of Africa.
Seventh-grader Dorica de la Fuente was raised in the Philippines and spoke Tagalog. She and her brother, Tony, were chauffeured to school every day in a bullet proof Cadillac. The Cadillac shed bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelet, but it leaked water through the windshield whenever it rained. I guess bullets are bigger than rain drops.
The star linguist in the sixth grade, hands down and thumbs up, was Thanos Sioris, a Greek and Finnish boy. He spoke English and Spanish, of course, as well as Greek (his father was Minister of Education for Greece) and Finnish (his mother was with the Finnish diplomatic corps). Later, when his mother was sent to the Philippines, he added Tagalog to his arsenal of languages, and German when they were stationed in Vienna.
All told we came up with almost a dozen languages spoken in that select group of sixth- and seventh-graders. And I came up with that amount without even counting English, American and Canadian as separate languages.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Most of the students spoke English and Spanish as a matter of course. Some also spoke French. But there was also an albino girl from Peru who spoke Quechuan, she and a few million Incas. Then there was the girl who grew up in Hong Kong but whose family was moving their assets to Europe. She claimed to speak a passable Mandarin. I believed her. Another spoke Swahili, the lengua franca of Africa.
Seventh-grader Dorica de la Fuente was raised in the Philippines and spoke Tagalog. She and her brother, Tony, were chauffeured to school every day in a bullet proof Cadillac. The Cadillac shed bullets like Wonder Woman’s bracelet, but it leaked water through the windshield whenever it rained. I guess bullets are bigger than rain drops.
The star linguist in the sixth grade, hands down and thumbs up, was Thanos Sioris, a Greek and Finnish boy. He spoke English and Spanish, of course, as well as Greek (his father was Minister of Education for Greece) and Finnish (his mother was with the Finnish diplomatic corps). Later, when his mother was sent to the Philippines, he added Tagalog to his arsenal of languages, and German when they were stationed in Vienna.
All told we came up with almost a dozen languages spoken in that select group of sixth- and seventh-graders. And I came up with that amount without even counting English, American and Canadian as separate languages.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Softball, Sunnyview Style
It Aint Cricket
I was no longer teaching at Sunnyview School in the spring of 1976, the time of the Great Faculty-Student Softball Game. There were only three adult males connected with the staff who had any expertise in the game, and the rest of the positions had to be filled by sincere people who meant well. One such well meaning person was a visiting Brit who had never played baseball. But he had played cricket. That’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?
Well, no, as a matter of fact, it isn’t.
We explained to him that in softball the pitcher does not come running up from somewhere in the next county and bounce the ball towards him. Instead, he stands on a mound of earth whirling his pitching arm around like he was wringing a chicken’s neck and then he tries to fog the ball past the batter as fast as he can. And, this was the critical part, when he hits the ball, if he hits the ball, he is not to charge the pitcher’s mound with bat in hand, but run to first base instead. Putting the bat down. Putting the bat down was critical, although I’ve often thought it would be a far more interesting game if base runners could carry their bats with them.
Then we had some practice and I batted fungoes for 45 minutes. Fungo, that’s a fly ball, and according to the dictionary the word is an “Americanism, origin obscure.” I’m desperately right handed and so batted fungo after fungo that way, swinging my bat from low right to high left and torquing my back each time.
The next morning I couldn’t move. I had a really bad sciatic pain and could only alter my orientation in the bed 90 degrees and try to get up without bending my back. Bedtime was a similar move in reverse. Fall over backward like a tree and change my orientation in bed 90 degrees.
But the Brit did learn to catch fly balls, and he did quite well, even if he forgot and charge the pitcher’s mound after his first hit. Waving his bat. Scared the bejazus out of the pitcher. But that's good. Adults should terrify teenagers every now and then. Makes them polite.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
I was no longer teaching at Sunnyview School in the spring of 1976, the time of the Great Faculty-Student Softball Game. There were only three adult males connected with the staff who had any expertise in the game, and the rest of the positions had to be filled by sincere people who meant well. One such well meaning person was a visiting Brit who had never played baseball. But he had played cricket. That’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?
Well, no, as a matter of fact, it isn’t.
We explained to him that in softball the pitcher does not come running up from somewhere in the next county and bounce the ball towards him. Instead, he stands on a mound of earth whirling his pitching arm around like he was wringing a chicken’s neck and then he tries to fog the ball past the batter as fast as he can. And, this was the critical part, when he hits the ball, if he hits the ball, he is not to charge the pitcher’s mound with bat in hand, but run to first base instead. Putting the bat down. Putting the bat down was critical, although I’ve often thought it would be a far more interesting game if base runners could carry their bats with them.
Then we had some practice and I batted fungoes for 45 minutes. Fungo, that’s a fly ball, and according to the dictionary the word is an “Americanism, origin obscure.” I’m desperately right handed and so batted fungo after fungo that way, swinging my bat from low right to high left and torquing my back each time.
The next morning I couldn’t move. I had a really bad sciatic pain and could only alter my orientation in the bed 90 degrees and try to get up without bending my back. Bedtime was a similar move in reverse. Fall over backward like a tree and change my orientation in bed 90 degrees.
But the Brit did learn to catch fly balls, and he did quite well, even if he forgot and charge the pitcher’s mound after his first hit. Waving his bat. Scared the bejazus out of the pitcher. But that's good. Adults should terrify teenagers every now and then. Makes them polite.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Around the World in 80 Days
Huguette Pettis owned Sunnyview School. Even though Sunnyview was advertised as an “American School.” Honey (she despaired of any non-French person ever pronouncing “Huguette” correctly) imparted a distinctly European atmosphere. She was French, raised in Algeria, and educated in the European style, the only style suitable for educating young people in her opinion.
I possessed none of those advantages. Although the school year started out well enough, it soon became apparent that she did not think much of my American ways or style of teaching. We had saved money during our profitable years on Guam and had planned originally to not work for the two years we spent in Spain. Given this financial situation, I made plans to work as a self-employed full-time free-lance writer for a year. Honey quite liked Joanne since her style of teaching was more “French,” and so our economic plan involved her continued employment. I recommend this situation to any young married man. This is a great plan for a free-lance writer.
It was in the spring of 1975 and I wanted to go out with a last hurrah, so I volunteered to supervise the end-of-the-year program for the kindergarten through eighth-grade. I was interested in total student involvement and in having interested and talented children working with each other no matter what their grade or who their teacher. Very unFrench. Kindergarten and first grade were the exceptions. Their teachers felt that their kids weren’t quite ready for a free-wheeling activity like this and would rather participate as a group. I wasn’t sure I was quite ready for this activity either. But I was obligated, and so away we went
.
First we had a brainstorming session. There were lots of interesting students and I mixed and matched them so that at least three grade levels were involved in every group, more often four grade levels. The groups were charged with generating ideas no matter how silly, impossible or expensive. The only thing worse than a bad idea, I told them, is no idea at all.
Ideas emerged from movies to monsters to kung fu. One girl didn’t care what we did so long as she got to do a ballet number. The one idea that struck most everyone’s fancy was the story line from Around the World in Eighty Days.
So now we needed to adapt Jules Verne’s novel to our needs and we formed a writing group. I really didn’t want a script with blocking and memorized lines because I thought they would interfere with these kids’ strongest points, imagination, spontaneity, creativity, enthusiasm. In other words, I didn’t want to do a lot of directing.
The group roughed out a story and we selected the countries we would visit for a variety of reasons. We chose Russia so our ballerina could dance. We chose the United States so the kindergarteners and first graders could stage an Indian raid. We chose Spain because we had a Spanish dancing class, England because that’s where Verne started and ended his story, and Africa for no reason at all.
Because we had no theater, we built our sets in different classrooms. That way they could be put up permanently and the audience could go from set to set under the direction of student “tour guides.” About twenty students threw themselves into set building projects. They built Africa and Russia on the second floor, the USA, Spain and England on the first floor, and a portable Indian teepee for the playground outside. They acquired their own materials and designed and built their own sets. Good thing. I’m terrible at designing and building sets. It turned out they weren’t very good either and sometimes the sets wouldn’t nail together or tumbled down as fast as they put them up. But they kept at it and found solutions. Where they found them, I don’t know, because they didn’t ask me.
The acting group had to first get used to improvising. We did some of the beginning drills, pretending we were flowers opening, apples falling from trees, bacon frying in a pan. I gave a few hints on movement and voice projection, but not all that much. Then we started on our play, the story for which had by now been written.
We began daily rehearsals. Everyone involved acted several different parts each day for two weeks before I cast anyone. There was so much interest in the show among the parents that we decided on four different performances. I cast the show in four different ways so everyone got to do four different parts. In one show Passapartout, the valet, was played by three small second graders who had worked out a comedy routine. In another the valet was played by a French boy who had enrolled the previous October speaking only French and Spanish. By June his English was acceptable but heavily accented. He said all of his lines in French. I think I was the only one who didn’t understand what he was saying.
The kindergarteners and first graders were making their costumes and weapons and practicing a dance. They were going to tie their captive to a pole and dance around him. The only difficulty we had with them was persuading them to release their captive so he could be in the next scene.
An eighth grade boy assumed the role of stage manager and took it upon himself to be sure that the set was ready and the actors in place on time. Some of our props had to be hand made and weren’t always successful. We had a hand lens for the detective, but it always bent in the middle so we never used it.
The students interested in music had dwindled to a precious few. Our orchestra consisted of a clarinetist, a guitarist and a bongo player who massaged Moroccan drums, tin cans and other bangables. They furnished most of the music to start the scenes, although the dance music was provided by record player or tape recorder.
As opening neared, the remaining students were pressed into service as furniture movers, tour guides and “expediters” whose job it was to get the parents away from the punch bowl and into the correct room so they could see the play.
Here is as much script as we ever had.
Scene One—London, a pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. A newspaper reader recounts a story of the robbery of the Bank of England to other patrons. This leads into a story about whether it is possible to circumnavigate the world in 80 days. There is a heated argument. Phileas Phogg bets 20,000 pounds he can do it. He and Passapartout, his valet, leave with a bag of money, their traveling expenses.
Scene Two—Spain, a café. Guitarist: Pasodoble. Phogg and Passapartout are on stage admiring the dances from the Spanish dancing class and eating oranges, the peels of which they put into a bag which is an exact duplicate of their money bag. Enter detective, Hemlock Bones, who explains that Phogg and Passapartout were seen leaving England with a bag of money which he thinks is the loot from the Bank of England robbery. Bones steals the wrong bag and exits vowing to dump the contents on the bank manager’s desk.
Scene 3:--Africa, outdoor bazaar. Drummer: solo. Bones enters muttering something about soreheaded bank managers and is about to make his arrest when he is fed a native delicacy and collapses. A witchdoctor performs an emergency laporotomy in his clinic and removes all manner of items from the detective’s abdominal cavity including cans, bottles, lengths of hose. The doctor’s clinic was made of branches and leaves in the center of the room. The front of the clinic was covered with a sheer and a light set up at the rear of the room so we could project this high drama in silhouette form.
Scene 4:--Russia, indoors. Bones enters clutching his abdomen and is about to arrest Phogg and Passapartout when a smuggler asks him to hold a mysterious package. Police then drag the protesting detective off to jail. Afterwards the ballet was performed as well as a Russian folk dance created by four girls in the Spanish dancing class. One of the girls had a hissy fit and dropped out, so the dance for four was done by three. One of the remaining three girls could actually do kazotskies, which amazed us all. That helped make up for the missing dancer. Sometimes one of the dancers also acted in the same scene. Then they would improvise a way to change from policeman, or smuggler to dancer.
Scene 5:--USA, outdoors. Clarinet: Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Actors enter on a train. Just as Bones is about to make his arrest, the first graders and kindergarteners, who have been hiding in rooms all around the set, stage a raid and kidnap him. To attack they had to work their way through the legs of the parents who were standing between them and the USA set. The train collapsed before it’s final performance, so the actors formed a conga line and shook cans of gravel for sound effect.
Scene 6:--London, pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. Phogg wins the bet by arriving just as the clock strikes 12. (Sometimes we had someone off-stage strike the chimes. Once we had someone dressed in a clock suit hit himself in the head with a mallet. It was up to the clock in each performance.) Bones enters and is about to finally make his triumphant arrest when the newspaper reader announces that the thief was caught. It was the bank manager. Bones faints and all of the Indians and other participants enter over his (or her) recumbent form. All bow and exit.
I had forgotten all about this play until I reviewed my Spain notes from over thirty years ago. I really liked this show. For one thing, I didn’t have to do much work. Whenever some kid asked me if something was good, I’d reply, “Let’s try it and see.” Also, I never knew what was going to happen. Each performance was brand new.
As I think about it, this was a good unit. I’m sure the kids learned something. I had no lesson plan with goals, objectives, evaluative criteria, none of that. But I’m sure they learned something. I just don’t know what.
The parents loved the show. Some of them saw all four performances. There were lots of compliments on how creative the children were. Honey Pettis was pleased. How French.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
I possessed none of those advantages. Although the school year started out well enough, it soon became apparent that she did not think much of my American ways or style of teaching. We had saved money during our profitable years on Guam and had planned originally to not work for the two years we spent in Spain. Given this financial situation, I made plans to work as a self-employed full-time free-lance writer for a year. Honey quite liked Joanne since her style of teaching was more “French,” and so our economic plan involved her continued employment. I recommend this situation to any young married man. This is a great plan for a free-lance writer.
It was in the spring of 1975 and I wanted to go out with a last hurrah, so I volunteered to supervise the end-of-the-year program for the kindergarten through eighth-grade. I was interested in total student involvement and in having interested and talented children working with each other no matter what their grade or who their teacher. Very unFrench. Kindergarten and first grade were the exceptions. Their teachers felt that their kids weren’t quite ready for a free-wheeling activity like this and would rather participate as a group. I wasn’t sure I was quite ready for this activity either. But I was obligated, and so away we went
.
First we had a brainstorming session. There were lots of interesting students and I mixed and matched them so that at least three grade levels were involved in every group, more often four grade levels. The groups were charged with generating ideas no matter how silly, impossible or expensive. The only thing worse than a bad idea, I told them, is no idea at all.
Ideas emerged from movies to monsters to kung fu. One girl didn’t care what we did so long as she got to do a ballet number. The one idea that struck most everyone’s fancy was the story line from Around the World in Eighty Days.
So now we needed to adapt Jules Verne’s novel to our needs and we formed a writing group. I really didn’t want a script with blocking and memorized lines because I thought they would interfere with these kids’ strongest points, imagination, spontaneity, creativity, enthusiasm. In other words, I didn’t want to do a lot of directing.
The group roughed out a story and we selected the countries we would visit for a variety of reasons. We chose Russia so our ballerina could dance. We chose the United States so the kindergarteners and first graders could stage an Indian raid. We chose Spain because we had a Spanish dancing class, England because that’s where Verne started and ended his story, and Africa for no reason at all.
Because we had no theater, we built our sets in different classrooms. That way they could be put up permanently and the audience could go from set to set under the direction of student “tour guides.” About twenty students threw themselves into set building projects. They built Africa and Russia on the second floor, the USA, Spain and England on the first floor, and a portable Indian teepee for the playground outside. They acquired their own materials and designed and built their own sets. Good thing. I’m terrible at designing and building sets. It turned out they weren’t very good either and sometimes the sets wouldn’t nail together or tumbled down as fast as they put them up. But they kept at it and found solutions. Where they found them, I don’t know, because they didn’t ask me.
The acting group had to first get used to improvising. We did some of the beginning drills, pretending we were flowers opening, apples falling from trees, bacon frying in a pan. I gave a few hints on movement and voice projection, but not all that much. Then we started on our play, the story for which had by now been written.
We began daily rehearsals. Everyone involved acted several different parts each day for two weeks before I cast anyone. There was so much interest in the show among the parents that we decided on four different performances. I cast the show in four different ways so everyone got to do four different parts. In one show Passapartout, the valet, was played by three small second graders who had worked out a comedy routine. In another the valet was played by a French boy who had enrolled the previous October speaking only French and Spanish. By June his English was acceptable but heavily accented. He said all of his lines in French. I think I was the only one who didn’t understand what he was saying.
The kindergarteners and first graders were making their costumes and weapons and practicing a dance. They were going to tie their captive to a pole and dance around him. The only difficulty we had with them was persuading them to release their captive so he could be in the next scene.
An eighth grade boy assumed the role of stage manager and took it upon himself to be sure that the set was ready and the actors in place on time. Some of our props had to be hand made and weren’t always successful. We had a hand lens for the detective, but it always bent in the middle so we never used it.
The students interested in music had dwindled to a precious few. Our orchestra consisted of a clarinetist, a guitarist and a bongo player who massaged Moroccan drums, tin cans and other bangables. They furnished most of the music to start the scenes, although the dance music was provided by record player or tape recorder.
As opening neared, the remaining students were pressed into service as furniture movers, tour guides and “expediters” whose job it was to get the parents away from the punch bowl and into the correct room so they could see the play.
Here is as much script as we ever had.
Scene One—London, a pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. A newspaper reader recounts a story of the robbery of the Bank of England to other patrons. This leads into a story about whether it is possible to circumnavigate the world in 80 days. There is a heated argument. Phileas Phogg bets 20,000 pounds he can do it. He and Passapartout, his valet, leave with a bag of money, their traveling expenses.
Scene Two—Spain, a café. Guitarist: Pasodoble. Phogg and Passapartout are on stage admiring the dances from the Spanish dancing class and eating oranges, the peels of which they put into a bag which is an exact duplicate of their money bag. Enter detective, Hemlock Bones, who explains that Phogg and Passapartout were seen leaving England with a bag of money which he thinks is the loot from the Bank of England robbery. Bones steals the wrong bag and exits vowing to dump the contents on the bank manager’s desk.
Scene 3:--Africa, outdoor bazaar. Drummer: solo. Bones enters muttering something about soreheaded bank managers and is about to make his arrest when he is fed a native delicacy and collapses. A witchdoctor performs an emergency laporotomy in his clinic and removes all manner of items from the detective’s abdominal cavity including cans, bottles, lengths of hose. The doctor’s clinic was made of branches and leaves in the center of the room. The front of the clinic was covered with a sheer and a light set up at the rear of the room so we could project this high drama in silhouette form.
Scene 4:--Russia, indoors. Bones enters clutching his abdomen and is about to arrest Phogg and Passapartout when a smuggler asks him to hold a mysterious package. Police then drag the protesting detective off to jail. Afterwards the ballet was performed as well as a Russian folk dance created by four girls in the Spanish dancing class. One of the girls had a hissy fit and dropped out, so the dance for four was done by three. One of the remaining three girls could actually do kazotskies, which amazed us all. That helped make up for the missing dancer. Sometimes one of the dancers also acted in the same scene. Then they would improvise a way to change from policeman, or smuggler to dancer.
Scene 5:--USA, outdoors. Clarinet: Do You Know the Way to San Jose. Actors enter on a train. Just as Bones is about to make his arrest, the first graders and kindergarteners, who have been hiding in rooms all around the set, stage a raid and kidnap him. To attack they had to work their way through the legs of the parents who were standing between them and the USA set. The train collapsed before it’s final performance, so the actors formed a conga line and shook cans of gravel for sound effect.
Scene 6:--London, pub. Orchestra: Around the World in Eighty Days. Phogg wins the bet by arriving just as the clock strikes 12. (Sometimes we had someone off-stage strike the chimes. Once we had someone dressed in a clock suit hit himself in the head with a mallet. It was up to the clock in each performance.) Bones enters and is about to finally make his triumphant arrest when the newspaper reader announces that the thief was caught. It was the bank manager. Bones faints and all of the Indians and other participants enter over his (or her) recumbent form. All bow and exit.
I had forgotten all about this play until I reviewed my Spain notes from over thirty years ago. I really liked this show. For one thing, I didn’t have to do much work. Whenever some kid asked me if something was good, I’d reply, “Let’s try it and see.” Also, I never knew what was going to happen. Each performance was brand new.
As I think about it, this was a good unit. I’m sure the kids learned something. I had no lesson plan with goals, objectives, evaluative criteria, none of that. But I’m sure they learned something. I just don’t know what.
The parents loved the show. Some of them saw all four performances. There were lots of compliments on how creative the children were. Honey Pettis was pleased. How French.
Copyright Ken Harris 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
David Taff
David Taff
© Ken Harris 2009
Although I taught sixth and seventh grades at Sunnyview School, a first grader, David Taff, a seven-year-old with all the confidence of a winning politician, used to drop by my room in his free time to have a chat. We talked of many things and his vocabulary was so sophisticated and his observations so acute that I sometimes forgot that I was conversing with a seven-year-old boy.
David's visits dropped off a bit in the spring because a marble craze hit Sunnyview. Everyone played. Boys, and some girls, walked around with their bags of marbles dangling from their belts. At recess about half the students all you could see of them was their rear ends as they knelt in the dirt and flicked glass balls at other people's glass balls. Every now and then someone would show up with a ball bearing for a shooter, a “steelie,” and great would be the outcry of indignation.
But one lunch period David showed up at my desk without his bag of marbles. I asked him, “David, have you lost your marbles?” (Pretty clever joke, huh?)
David replied, “No, but I thought the interest in marbles would soon peak, maybe next week, so I thought I'd sell out while the market is up.”
I thought David was an American until his sister showed up for kindergarten. She didn't speak English at all. She only spoke Swedish and Spanish, the two languages in her home.
I imagine we all work for David now. We just don't know it.
© Ken Harris 2009
Although I taught sixth and seventh grades at Sunnyview School, a first grader, David Taff, a seven-year-old with all the confidence of a winning politician, used to drop by my room in his free time to have a chat. We talked of many things and his vocabulary was so sophisticated and his observations so acute that I sometimes forgot that I was conversing with a seven-year-old boy.
David's visits dropped off a bit in the spring because a marble craze hit Sunnyview. Everyone played. Boys, and some girls, walked around with their bags of marbles dangling from their belts. At recess about half the students all you could see of them was their rear ends as they knelt in the dirt and flicked glass balls at other people's glass balls. Every now and then someone would show up with a ball bearing for a shooter, a “steelie,” and great would be the outcry of indignation.
But one lunch period David showed up at my desk without his bag of marbles. I asked him, “David, have you lost your marbles?” (Pretty clever joke, huh?)
David replied, “No, but I thought the interest in marbles would soon peak, maybe next week, so I thought I'd sell out while the market is up.”
I thought David was an American until his sister showed up for kindergarten. She didn't speak English at all. She only spoke Swedish and Spanish, the two languages in her home.
I imagine we all work for David now. We just don't know it.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Sunnyview School
Sunnyview School
© Ken Harris 2009
In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.
The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.
Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.
The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.
The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.
We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.
It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?
The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.
So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.
We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.
We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.
In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.
© Ken Harris 2009
In September, 1974, Sunnyview School had around 115 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. For the elementary grades we followed Calvert School’s curriculum. Calvert School, an accredited day school in Baltimore, Maryland, also furnished materials for home study students, and this decades before the concept became fashionable. High school was done by correspondence through the University of Nebraska. In this way a certain continuity of curriculum was established since the instructional staff itself hailed from Finland, Spain, Scotland, England, France, Canada, Northern Ireland and the U.S. Some of us had teacher training while others had only their availability to recommend them.
The main two-story building at Sunnyview School housed classrooms for first- through eighth-grades. The school office sat on the ground floor where director Honey Pettis and two clerks kept things going. Two principals also kept offices in the building, elementary school principal Jane Barbadillo and high school principal David McConnell. However since Barbadillo and McConnell both had full-time teaching duties, those offices were seldom occupied. Otherwise the building had classrooms for first-through eighth-graders.
Kindergarteners had their own small magic kingdom to the south, separated from the main building by a field of monkey bars, rings and slides. West of the main building lay the swimming pool and the high school class rooms.
The buildings themselves were made of el cheapo hollow clay bricks, made so light you could carry eight at a time. You could probably drop one on your foot with no more than an “oh, damn.” Nothing like the humungous bricks we’re used to in the States. And it wasn’t just the school buying the cheapest commodity they could. This was how bricks were made in Spain. Once in place, workmen covered the bricks with a rough, stucco.
The same el cheapo bricks that formed the buildings also formed the walls surrounding the school, but without the stucco. The bricks were set with wide air spaces between each one. In such a way about fifty percent of the wall was pure hole in the wall so that air could freely flow through without blowing over the barricade. It was just the sort of barrier an enthusiastic kid could ram his motorcycle right through. In fact, that is what one student did the year before we arrived. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, since that would have been unmanly, with the result that he significantly lowered his own I.Q. He didn’t help the wall any, either.
We had no central air or heating. Joanne and I never found the heat oppressive, but, man, it got cold. You always hear about Sunny Spain. Nobody talks much about Warm Spain, especially in winter. We would have all frozen if it hadn’t been for Maguire. Maguire was the school cat, black except for a few white markings. He was in charge of maintaining a mouse-free environment in the kitchen and pantry. In winter he doubled in brass as a hand warmer. Kids smuggled him into class rooms and passed him from lap to lap during the long, boring lectures of which teachers are so fond. Whenever a kid looked directly into a teacher’s eyes, expression bland and inscrutable, you knew he or she had Maguire in hand.
It was totally illegal for us to work at Sunnyview School. We didn’t have green cards. None of us on the educational staff did. I don’t think the Spanish government even had any green cardstock on which they could print any. But we had our cover stories. If the authorities were to raid the school one day, we were to sit in the back of the room and claim that we were only parents, there to observe, while the real teacher had just stepped out. Since we had two children at the school, our cover story might have worked. But how impressed were the authorities going to be if they found six rooms, six observant parents and zero teachers?
The situation was silly. But I trace it to the fact that the Spanish government didn’t like foreigners with their foreign ideas and values. They didn’t trust their influence. We were there during the last year Franco was alive and the first year of Juan Carlos’ rule. But if the government didn’t really like foreigners, it really liked foreign money. Lots of it.. So long as we brought in yankee dollars, pounds, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, we weren’t in much danger of deportation. All the same time, they made it almost impossible to live in the country legally. You were always breaking some law, even if it was having three friends over for brewskis. They were setting it up so that it would be easy to get rid of you if they wanted to.
So even though we sensed that the government didn’t really care, Honey Pettis wanted us to go through the pretext of applying for work permits. This led us to one of Spain’s most noble type of citizens, the gestor (hess.TOR, not jester). Although it seems like a joke, the gestor is a fixer. He fixes things between people and their government. Even when they’re not broken, he fixes them.
We went to the gestor and presented him with our teaching credentials. He was very impressed with Joanne’s. He admired the quality of the paper, the impressive seal and signatures. After much praise, he put both certificates in a folder and kept them. I thought Joanne was going to swallow her tongue.
We never got green cards, and maybe that’s why I can sympathize a bit with the plight of the illegal alien here in Arizona, working without a green card and hoping he can lie or run fast if he gets caught. Oddly enough, the gestor got us Spanish social security, which qualified us for government funded medical treatment in Spain. Since the United Kingdom had a reciprocal agreement with Spain, we were also entitled to government health care when vacationing in England as well. We got our credentials back from the gestor when we were about to leave Spain, almost two years later.
In Spain it’s not so much what you achieve as the motions you go through.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
First Night in Torremolinos
First Night in Torremolinos
©Ken Harris, 2008
Welcome to Spain. Bienvenidos a España. Give us $400, por favor. It was the overage from Los Angeles come to haunt us all the way across the Atlantic. Joanne got steamed all over again. She’s still steamed, come to think of it. But it’s early days yet. This happened in 1974 and it’s only 2008. Anyway, we showed the kindly TWA representative our receipts and he released us just in time to make our flight to Málaga.
All my benighted life I had been mispronouncing the name of this city, putting the accent on the second syllable rather than the first. Perhaps it’s because I had never seen it spelled properly before, with an accent over the first “a.” In the States we aren’t given to tildes, umlauts, or other accents. Anyway, I had misgivings. I wondered how many other words I was going to have to learn to pronounce over again.
Our future boss, Honey Pettis, met us at the Málaga airport, piled us into the Sunnyview School van and drove us to our new home, Torremolinos (tor.ray.mo.LEE.nos). Honey was French and her first name was Huguette, but she despaired of her American husband, or any other American for that matter, learning to pronounce her name properly, and she said she preferred “Honey.” Since she was running an American school and many of her parents were Americans, the nickname just made things easier all round.
Honey took us to an apartment on the first floor of a beachfront apartment building. We rested for a bit and then walked to the Pettis residence, also beach front, where we met the entire Pettis family, Chuck Sr., Mike, Chuck Jr., John and Sultan, the German Shepherd who liked to carry large rocks in his mouth.
On returning to our apartment we were briefly confounded by the buttons on the elevator. If we were on the first floor, why did we need an elevator? Because in Spain, and in all of Europe from what I understand, the first floor is on the second floor. The ground floor is the piso bajo (pee.so BÄH.ho) and is clearly marked on the elevator button with a PB. The floor above the piso bajo has to be the first floor, doesn’t it? You could start numbering with the second floor, but that wouldn’t be very logical now, would it?
We unpacked enough stuff to get to bed and I don’t think it took anyone longer than thirty seconds to get to sleep. It had been a long day. We slept soundly until around 2:00 in the morning when a drunk began serenading the neighborhood with music from Jesus Christ, Superstar. Well, not the duet and chorus numbers, but the solos. And the man had a magnificent voice. Badly as we needed our sleep, Joanne and I were glad that nobody interrupted him until he was through with his concert.
Old habits die hard, and Joanne and I were awake as the sun rose. Somehow coffee, bread and butter had materialized in our apartment and, as the sun came up behind our building, we sat on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean taking our breakfast and thinking, “You know, this could work out.”
©Ken Harris, 2008
Welcome to Spain. Bienvenidos a España. Give us $400, por favor. It was the overage from Los Angeles come to haunt us all the way across the Atlantic. Joanne got steamed all over again. She’s still steamed, come to think of it. But it’s early days yet. This happened in 1974 and it’s only 2008. Anyway, we showed the kindly TWA representative our receipts and he released us just in time to make our flight to Málaga.
All my benighted life I had been mispronouncing the name of this city, putting the accent on the second syllable rather than the first. Perhaps it’s because I had never seen it spelled properly before, with an accent over the first “a.” In the States we aren’t given to tildes, umlauts, or other accents. Anyway, I had misgivings. I wondered how many other words I was going to have to learn to pronounce over again.
Our future boss, Honey Pettis, met us at the Málaga airport, piled us into the Sunnyview School van and drove us to our new home, Torremolinos (tor.ray.mo.LEE.nos). Honey was French and her first name was Huguette, but she despaired of her American husband, or any other American for that matter, learning to pronounce her name properly, and she said she preferred “Honey.” Since she was running an American school and many of her parents were Americans, the nickname just made things easier all round.
Honey took us to an apartment on the first floor of a beachfront apartment building. We rested for a bit and then walked to the Pettis residence, also beach front, where we met the entire Pettis family, Chuck Sr., Mike, Chuck Jr., John and Sultan, the German Shepherd who liked to carry large rocks in his mouth.
On returning to our apartment we were briefly confounded by the buttons on the elevator. If we were on the first floor, why did we need an elevator? Because in Spain, and in all of Europe from what I understand, the first floor is on the second floor. The ground floor is the piso bajo (pee.so BÄH.ho) and is clearly marked on the elevator button with a PB. The floor above the piso bajo has to be the first floor, doesn’t it? You could start numbering with the second floor, but that wouldn’t be very logical now, would it?
We unpacked enough stuff to get to bed and I don’t think it took anyone longer than thirty seconds to get to sleep. It had been a long day. We slept soundly until around 2:00 in the morning when a drunk began serenading the neighborhood with music from Jesus Christ, Superstar. Well, not the duet and chorus numbers, but the solos. And the man had a magnificent voice. Badly as we needed our sleep, Joanne and I were glad that nobody interrupted him until he was through with his concert.
Old habits die hard, and Joanne and I were awake as the sun rose. Somehow coffee, bread and butter had materialized in our apartment and, as the sun came up behind our building, we sat on our balcony overlooking the Mediterranean taking our breakfast and thinking, “You know, this could work out.”
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