Education, or lack thereof

CEIP Pasamonte, the bilingual public elementary school that I work at in the Moratalaz neighborhood of Madrid, does not have document cameras like the Seattle School District. We have one printer for the whole school that rarely works. Our internet connection is spotty. We do not have overhead projectors. We do not even have white boards.

We do, however, use old-school blackboards. The prefix "black" makes me laugh, because they are hardly ever black because no one ever cleans them. And we do not have new erasers, so each time you wipe down the "blackboard" it makes it even more of a mess. Our blackboard in my 3rd grade class is so bad it shakes when you write on it, and it has streaks of green plastic stuff running down it (that chalk can't write on, so it creates a bit of a confusion when we write across it). The state of our chalk supply is also in crisis. Ramón sends kids down to the office to get a box of chalk, "box" being the operative word. The kids return with two pieces of chalk, three if they are lucky.

From this information, one would gather that I work in a poor school that doesn't receive much funding.

So you would be as puzzled as I am to find out that just the other day, a truck load of furniture pulled up outside of CEIP Pasamonte. Good, I thought, maybe they will actually get something that works, like a new chalkboard that isn't about to fall off the wall.

I thought wrong. What they did unload was brand spanking new furniture for the front office. A new workstation for the secretaries. New cabinets for their files. I asked Ramón, what was wrong with their old furniture? His answer-according to the principal was "the office is the first thing parents and community members see when they arrive and we want to give them a good impression".

What did they do with their old furniture? It was moved to the staff room, and was left up for grabs for the teachers for their classrooms. How thoughtful of the principal and the deputy head (or "Devil Woman" as one of my co-worker refers to her).

Just another case of how our incompetent principal puts appearances ahead of education.

More to come, I have only just skimmed the surface.