poetry

Miseducation Misadventures: The Spanish Lads

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.

On the question of God, Woman & Identity in Brainy’s “Negritude”

A guest post by Bestman Michael Osemudiamen on Oluwatunmise Esther’s poem ‘Negritude’

The first time I met Negritude Philosophy, I was still in high school. Then, I came across
Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “I will pronounce your name”— a part of the WAEC literature syllabus
for 2007. At that point, I was a little unclear about its historical fermentation. I had read it and
rewrote it for a girl I admired— my first unconscious attempt at poetry. Senghor’s poem centred
around a black female character “Naett”— a re-emphasis of the African identity as doting to any
observer. Now, it is 2022— five years after. And, history has grown: there is my strive for
clarity, consciousness, and the human voice in every piece I encounter. And having heard Brainy
(Oluwatunmise Esther), for the first time, read her poem “Negritude”, that night at Sage Hassan’s
reading birthday party, I was critically attached.

The cover image is from Wonderlane on Unsplash

Three things had happened: while she read, I was unclear about how she had thematically woven
the god, woman, and identity questions in such a brief performance on such a broad title as
Negritude. I needed a feel, so I asked for a hard copy, and here I am much concerned about how
we push history and ideas through time: how do we reopen, define, or redefine the relevance of
Negritude in the 21st Century of globalization and imperialism? The answer is barely linear— a
cartography of debates. Something I hope to write about someday. However, Brainy’s title becomes the past, present, and future merged into a glance: “Negritude”— a movement towards reawakening black consciousness both in Africa and in the diaspora.

In stanza one, the reader meets an exposition— the link to the philosophical stance of the title
itself: “let’s talk”. This expression, repeated at the beginning of the first three lines, is the
foundation upon which the subject matters are raised: the experiences to be shared by two
gender-unspecified poet personae “you” and “me”, towards the “dazzling skin colour seen as
threat” and “about being black”. It is only from stanza 2 do we see the identities behind those
unspecified pronouns: “black woman”— a resonance of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s “Black
Woman”. Here, Brainy’s feminine metaphor may or may not necessarily be an address to a
woman after all. It could encompass the gendered persona and make the subject African. But,
gradually into line 6 of this stanza, we are left at a crossroad: “I know you’re clueless of what
classic/creation of God you are, moulded from the finest clay”. Now, I was forced to pause and
ponder:

If “God” there refers to the image of the woman, like the black woman not knowing she’s a
classic creation, there won’t be a need for her to be moulded from clay as both God and Woman
are one and creators. Thus, no one is clay— as a creator cannot be the clay: he/she/it is outside
the subject of creation.
If “God” should be separate from the black woman, that is, the woman as a creature and the
“God” as a creator, it becomes a little ambiguous. What God is creating what woman? Is it the
Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Christian, or Islam God? That is, does it subtly deny the multiplicity of the

African deities? Why does she have to be created when in the preceding lines, lines 3–5, we are
told she should not see herself as less of a goddess: “black woman…/you’ve [been] told that being
black makes you less of a woman, makes you less of a goddess.”

And 3: if the black woman is a goddess, created by a “God”, does that not make her less? A
contradiction to the thematic relevance raised earlier about not being less of a woman or less of a
goddess. And, if this is the case, the “black woman” is merely subjected to a patriarchal order
where “God” or “Men” reign supreme— a devastating and biased history of things. A case, I am
sure, Merlin Stone’s “When God was a Woman”, Christena Cleveland’s “God is a Black
Woman”, and other radical feminists would not agree with. In fact, in prehistoric times, there
were goddesses before the making of gods. In pre colonialism, in Igbo culture, for example, we
had Ani, Ala— all of which are women and greater in all sense of the Igbo traditions. The
appearance of a Chukwu, with no clearly defined altar, was an attempt at the unification of other
personal or communal gods under a supreme being of the sky— a father figure, not a mother
figure as Ani possesses— modelled after patriarchy, economic factors, and possibly,
Christianisation. In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it is clear that the chief priestess was
never undermined— despite the toxic masculinity of Okonkwo, he submits. Also, after the
tragic death of Okonkwo, we notice how his impurities will not allow him to be buried under the
Earth Goddess, Ani. Not Chukwu. Why? Every deity is placed or created within the cultural,
occupational, and geographical nature of the people, which is mostly femininely defined— a
byproduct of human’s inability to understand natural phenomena. Hence, the Igbos worshipped
Ani or Ala as Earth Goddesses because the society tilts towards agriculture. In other places close
to the river, where fishing is a major occupation, we see the worship of a Sea Goddess, not a God— the representation of fertility, protection, and a means through which its people survive
like Olókun, Yemọja, Mami Wata, and so on. So, where do we or in what context do we place “I
know you’re clueless of what classic creation of God you are/moulded from the finest clay”?
Thus, it will be sad and a slap to African history if the “God”, here, refers subtly, unconsciously,
or generally, to the Abrahamic religions— a defeat to the philosophical and ideological purpose
of the title itself: Negritude.

However, before eurocentrism, the evolution of human societies has been classed between the
oppressors and the oppressed— Africa is not exempted. This means that while Brainy celebrates
womanhood, she fails to identify the class status of these women both in pre-colonial and post-
colonial Africa. That is, the image of a ruling Goddess (or god) is or may be structured after the
image, dominance, and ideology of the existing ruling class— women or men— in each epoch of
time: matriarchal (or patriarchal), matrilineal, feudal or not — black or white. Such is the reason
behind the birth of heaven or afterlife: the ruling class’s idea, both in the formation of customs,
tradition, and rituals, to preserve their reign over the lower classes forever— like the Egyptian
pyramids of preserved bodies of Kings and Queens; then, how Wole Soyinka, too, dramatically
presented this cosmological narrative through his “Death and the King’s Horseman”, where the
Eleshi was meant to die so he could accompany the king through the phases of the afterlife.

Aside from the God question, Brainy presents her women and Negritude from a point of skin— a
product of her reconstruction of beauty and identity: “This is a poem for every black woman still
cringing in her skin”, “Black woman/Tell everyone who cares to hear/ that your skin is a
constellation for starry nights”; her reflections on the Transatlantic Slave Trade: “poem for those shipped across the seas/ whose offsprings still bear the harsh tags placed on them”; and the
pathos of her past— a nostalgia: “They forget we are the wisp of air preceding the rise of a
storm”, “We black women come from a race of fighters”.

Beyond these revolutionary turns and eulogies, Brainy’s poem should be read with a critical eye:

“making love to a black woman is riding on some good life”— Here, we are forced to ask:
does Brainy imply that good life is making love to a black woman? Is this relevant in the 21st-
century global worldview of humanism— maybe in the science of love-making? In fact, who
becomes the subject of that “making” in terms of her poem’s contextualisation? Does it not defile
the literal or metaphoric essence of her “black woman”? Or, does it not indirectly support the
exploitation of the black woman if making love with her is “riding on some good life”— that is,
if black woman, throughout, had metaphorically meant Africa?
“We are not some gruesome paintings of God”— earlier, Brainy had told us that her “black
woman” is a “classic creation of God, moulded from the finest clay”— this line, if we pay
attention to her earlier premises, does not achieve any effect at all as the women cannot and will
not be in, anyway, the “gruesome paintings” of God. Except, by “gruesome”, she challenges the
racial stereotypes and gender discrimination of the black woman just as how Buchi Emecheta
presented Adah in Second Class Citizen— women are humans, too. But, to accept this supposed
interpretation is to defeat the essence and perfection of Brainy’s “God” as these “gruesome”
paintings, wherever it comes or appears, are his— if the black women are not gruesome, who,
then, is or are the “gruesome paintings of God”?
“Tell them if God had a begotten daughter, she would be black”. While these lines achieved a
powerful plot effect, the “God” in Brainy’s “Negritude” is unveiled, defeated, and short-changed
after a model of masculine, maybe patriarchal, Christian doctrine, not the African religions.

In the end, Brainy’s poem and Negritude suffer from a post-colonial effect of indoctrination and
cultural imperialism while maintaining a strong appraisal of the women’s struggles and
movements in Africa and diaspora: “Black woman, I dare you to raise your heads and shoulders
high like the Queen you are/The Queen of Negritude”.

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Bertold Brecht, ‘Questions from a worker who reads’

More school resources here for you today: material on the poem ‘Questions from a worker who reads’ by the great Bertold Brecht.

This is a poem I’ve never seen in a school textbook but which I’ve found brilliant and thought-provoking for a group of 14-15-year-olds. But really this would work with any age group.

Below is the text of the poem itself plus a presentation that should occupy the class for an hour or so.

bertold-brecht-presentation Download

questions-from-a-worker-who-reads Download

School Resources: ‘The Sun’ by Benjamin Zephaniah

This fantastic poem was a lot of fun to teach as it provoked debate and discussion in the classroom. There are plenty of clips online to help fill in some of the background on the issues that come up in the poem – from Northern Ireland to nuclear war.

The 1919 Review

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