This is the first instalment in Miseducation Misadventures, a series looking back the madness, craic and nonsense I encountered as a secondary school teacher in Ireland.

This article deals with the thing nobody tells you about in teacher training, the thing that nobody ever sits you down and explains to you: The Spanish Lads.

Maybe there’s an official name for this phenomenon. If so, I’ve never heard it. Because my experience is weighted toward boys schools, in my head this thing is simply called ‘The Spanish Lads.’

Who are The Spanish Lads?

The basic idea is this: sooner rather than later in your teaching career, you will walk into a new classroom to find among your twenty-five students one or two, maybe as many as three, four or more Spanish Lads. Nobody has told you they will be there, and nobody will ever tell you why they are there, or what you are supposed to do with them. They are a mysterious presence in schools; every staff member assumes that someone else knows what the story is with them. But you will notice that other staff members scold these students for talking to one another in Spanish.

How long does a Spanish Lad stay in Ireland? Not for a few weeks or a term but for an entire academic year, observing the strange rituals of the Irish education system like a latter-day Francisco de Cuellar stranded among the Gaels. Somebody somewhere has decided that this is the best way for them to learn English.

Staffroom chatter will soon reveal the other angle: schools that don’t have enough students have an incentive to take in a crowd of Spanish Lads so as to boost enrolment and get more funding. It’s possible that some of the jobs I had wouldn’t have existed if not for the Spanish Lads – so I owe them.

There is no one type of Spanish Lad. They have wildly varying standards of English and levels of homesickness. Some work hard, others are messers. One might be a class clown with cross-cultural and intergenerational appeal; another might burst into tears if you scold him. In short, they are every bit as varied as Irish Lads. I heard a second-hand story about one who ran some kind of online revenge porn racket. I knew of another who was not in a position to run any kind of online racket, because the woman who generously described herself as his host did not let him use her Wifi.

Maybe someone involved with the Hiberno-Iberian Student Placement Committee, or Armada 2000, or the Kinsale Project, or whatever is the official name for The Spanish Lads, will think this article is unfair. I haven’t reached out to them for comment – I haven’t even tried to google them – partly because I don’t know what they are called, but mainly because the point of this article is to show what this thing looks like on the ground for a teacher. My only obligation here is to be truthful with regards to what I encountered myself.

Two Juans

The Irish Lads often ignore the Spanish Lads due to the language barrier. Sometimes the Irish Lads will liven up a few tedious minutes by teasing the Spanish Lads: a class consisting of seven Dylans, five Jacks, three Haydens and seventeen Oisíns will find it hilarious that two of The Spanish Lads are called Juan.

In large parts of Ireland, Juan and one are pronounced almost the same. There was one Juan I knew who mostly dozed through class. An Irish Lad (the kind of Lad who is delighted with Of Mice and Men because he thinks it gives him a loophole to say racist words) used now and then to ask him, ‘Which Juan are you?’

Juan responded not with words but with a look of drowsy contempt which struck me as dignified and noble.

Where Spanish Lads exist in sufficient concentrations, they form a parallel school community across the wide 12-18 age range. When the Irish Lads push, they push back, and teachers get a headache trying to avoid being enlisted as a referee by the two Lad Factions while also making sure the school’s anti-bullying policy and code of behaviour are observed.

Sink or swim

For a while I worked as a resource teacher, giving extra help to some Russian and Georgian lads with their language barrier. It wasn’t nearly enough but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. I don’t know if The Spanish Lads get this kind of support as a rule, though in another school I was very briefly assigned to help a small group of Spanish Lads with their English.

Leaving aside extra support, teachers are supposed to cater in their lesson plans for kids who don’t have much English. But that does not apply to the Spanish Lads. Teachers often get saddled with extra responsibilities but no extra resources or time. With the Spanish Lads, it’s different. We are not even given any responsibility. We are just supposed to pretend the language barrier isn’t there. If you think this makes things easier, then you’ve never been a teacher. The problem with a ‘sink or swim’ approach is that a certain number of kids just sink. Of those who sink, a few suffer in silence but most chat, bicker and mess, and that gets in the way of you doing your job.

The stupidest situation I ever encountered was with a 5^th year English group. There were around 15 in the class, four of them Spanish Lads, (edit: no, there were actually 5) and around four other kids with English as an Additional Language. Bless my younger and more energetic self: we slogged through a novel, a movie and a heap of poetry. You can run a poem through Google Translate and come into class with printouts in five different languages so that the various nationalities can check the vocab, can have some kind of understanding  of what’s going on. But it’s not ideal, and a novel is a lot tougher. In that context, it’s not strange at all that the Spanish Lads’ attention wandered and that they often disrupted the class, driving me up the wall.

And all the pious scolding, warnings, write-ups and detentions I dealt out were based on a false premise: that there was some normal desirable situation from which this or that kid was deviating. In reality, things were a mess from the outset.

For the record, it was a handful of the Irish kids who gave the most grief in that class – the Spanish came a modest second, but they really didn’t help.

I know I would be sincerely happy if I ever somehow ran into any of my former Spanish Lads. The problem is rarely the kids themselves. And I think that 5^th year group did benefit from my teaching. But any small benefit came at a stupidly high cost. It was a waste.

Why do we have schools?

The Spanish Lads are just one example of the things that are wrong with the education system – and here’s where I’ll get more general, and expose some of the themes I’ll probably be dealing with again in this series. What’s teaching all about? Why do we do all this?  

• So that we can get paid.
• So that those who are not yet old enough to work or to spend money are confined in institutions all day, out of danger and out of trouble.
• So that parents can go to work.
• So that industry and the state (and Canada and Australia and Switzerland) have a labour pool made up of people who can read and write and do sums.
• So that all those responsible, from school management up to the Minister, can say without technically lying that they are meeting the state’s obligations to provide free secondary education to all.

…And if thousands of kids are just sitting there having their time absolutely wasted, it’s the fault of the kids, or the teachers, or the parents, or vaping, or the internet, or whoever banned teachers from assaulting kids.

If I was cynical I’d leave it at that – all those bad incentives and impulses built in, and the threat of authoritarian ‘solutions’ that would just be a burden of brutality and stupidity on top of all the dysfunction that’s already there.

But the less-bleak truth is that the system we have is the outcome of a compromise between all that crap and the good intentions of educators and our unions, of parents and students.

There’s also a powerful animating idea of universality and public service that’s always there underneath it all, even if it can get hidden under layers of rubbish. No teacher would phrase it like this, but in our modest way we bring liberation to young people – give them tools to reach their own understanding of the world, open the way for them to imagine and to achieve great things, provide them with a social environment that’s broader and more exciting than the home but kinder than the adult world. Some teachers get sick of it and quit (like I did) and some fossilize themselves in bitter cynicism. But for most, a sense of humour mediates between the good thing we’re trying to do and the crap conditions we have to do it in.  

Another less-bleak truth: there are probably thousands of former Spanish Lads and Girls walking around Iberia today thinking that beor, shift, shades and fuist are the Queen’s English. I guess I’m proud that I was part of whatever made that happen.

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Footnote

More than once, politics has come up with The Spanish Lads. Two little second-year students got really mad when I taught about the Conquistadors’ brutality toward the native Americans.

In that 5th Year class where I had four Spanish Lads, one day all the Irish lads were gone, maybe it was to do some project, or maybe for the ploughing festival. The Spanish Lads turned the chat to politics. I learned that I had a Francoist on my hands – thankfully just one. Two others were staunch Republicans and the fourth was a Catalan Nationalist. The brief but heated debate which followed brought the usually taciturn Georgian student out of his shell. He interjected to school the Francoist, telling him how communism meant free food, free electricity, free everything. Two Spanish factions fighting and a tough Georgian communist intervening – it was almost too much for my history-teacher brain.