Me Escuela en Miranda de Ebro, Spain

The way students are placed in school is on a point system. If students are poor they get a point, if a student has a sibling in the school they get another point. Then parents pick the top three schools they want their children to go to and students are put in the schools of their choice based on the number of points they have. Therefore, many of the parents who are well off get mad that because they work hard they are not able to pick what school their children go to. This also means that sometimes siblings do not get placed in the same school. In most schools there is only one class per grade, a headmaster (principle) who also teaches in the school, and many of the teachers move around to different classes to teach.
My school is not like many of the other schools where girls are teaching, and it is very controversial in the city. My school is located in the city of Miranda. In Miranda there are nice areas and then there are very poor areas. Many of these areas have a large immigrant population. There are gypsies (like in the Hunchback of Notre Dame), Portuguese, Moroccan, and other cultures that come to our school. Therefore, parents do not want to send their students to the school because they think these students make the school less effective in teaching students.
It does make for a diverse classroom, almost like America. There are even students in my class who don’t speak Spanish, and here I am trying to teach them English!
One thing I have noticed is the lack of classroom management. Students are yelled at when they are being loud and they quiet down for a couple minutes, the teacher yells again and the cycle repeats. Teachers will also have conversations with you in front of the class while the students go crazy and then yell at the students for being yelled at. This makes it very difficult to teach a class. Teachers also put students with disabilities and students who do not speak Spanish in the back of the classroom with out a notebook or work to do☹. Many of these things have been hard to see but it has also been great to see the opportunity I have to make a difference in the way of teaching. I am going to try a move these students to the front when I teach and introduce grouping into the classroom.