By Devin from Northwestern University.

(Devin is a junior who is spending the academic year in Seville. You can read this entry and many others on her personal blog, http://maravillasevilla.tumblr.com.)

On my study abroad applications, I wrote repeatedly about how I wanted to study in Spain because I wanted to learn about a different education system. Yes, this was to an extent just part of the fluffy stuff that we all write in application essays to make them sound better, but it was also true. Education, not just my own but the system itself, has always been very important to me and it is likely that I will spend some portion of my adult life teaching. I knew that study abroad would give me the opportunity to observe a different university system from the inside and I also hoped that, by being in Spain, I would also be able to learn about primary and secondary school education.

Well, as fate would have it — and due to the actions of our extracurricular activities director, Rocío — I’ve had the opportunity to experience Spanish secondary education from the inside as well. While many people on our program intern at colegios [a word which can refer to any school in the K-12 range] in English departments, I wanted to work with a history department (maybe because I have a propensity for seeking these out-of-the-box experiences). Rocío asked her friend, María Ángeles, who teaches history at the Bachillerato [trans. 11^th- and 12^th-grade] level to take me under her wing and luckily for me, she agreed.

So that’s how it came to be that one morning in November, I found myself walking down a street filled with orange trees in the eastern part of Sevilla, headed to the Colegio Santa Joaquina de Vedruna. My first day in the colegio was, frankly, terrifying. I spent a few hours following María Ángeles through meetings and classes, attempting to understand and answer her questions to the best of my ability and take in all of the new information. Never have I felt so out of place, so much like a goldfish in a bowl, stared at and incapable of doing anything to make myself look less conspicuous. I was amazed that the students seemed to regard me as a professor — I certainly felt more like them than a like professor — but I was one of the few out of uniform.

I spent a lot of my first day comparing this school to my own school experiences. Of course, there were some very obvious differences like the fact that all grades are housed within the same building, or the uniforms (something which I was thankfully spared from). But there was also a feel to this colegio which was entirely different from what I experienced during my education. The teachers seemed to spend a lot more time on the simple enforcement of rules, on making resistant students actually work, obey the dress code, and behave reasonably. Still, I know that the minimal misbehavior and chaos I witnessed there is nothing compared to many schools in the US, so I’m guessing my reaction had more to do with the fact that I spent almost all of high school in honors classes. What struck me even more, though, was the fact that the teachers, at the end of each period, had to change classrooms, while the groups of students remained in the same room all day. To me this arrangement seemed so obviously wrong: it robs teachers of time and focus, and robs students of the chance to change scenery throughout the day. It also made me think of the teachers I was close to in high school, how they all had their rooms decorated extensively, and how so many students came to find them there, before or after school, and how none of that would be possible here. I have always believed that my high school education was one of the greatest gifts I ever received, and my first day at the colegio made me even more grateful for it.

When things started to get interesting, shall I say, was during one of my later visits, when some of the other history teachers found out that they had an American student among them. You could all but see the gears in their minds turning together, and one of them blurted out excitedly, “Let´s have her teach the American Revolution!”

I agreed, of course, feeling simultaneously excited and daunted. I did not at all feel prepared to take on this task, seeing as the American Revolution is not my area of expertise and I hadn´t had any academic training in the Revolution since 11^th grade. As one of the professors quickly reminded me, however, by nature of being American, I already knew more than any of them. A dozen ideas where already running rampant in my head, and although I knew that this US history level was not going to be anywhere near the level of discourse I was engaging in at NU, I wasn’t quite ready for the surprise that awaited me in the textbook that I glanced at that morning.

I was going to be teaching this lesson to students in the 4^th year of ESO — which would be equivalent to 10^th grade — and in this year, they were studying world history. In their textbook, I found a small section, about half a page, dedicated to the American Revolution. Part of a larger section on liberal movements. Seeing this was sort of a shock to my system — I was taken aback that the Revolution could possibly be shoved in this tiny box. On first read, this probably makes me sound like some sort of über-patriotic, nationalistic, self-important idiot, but I don’t mean to say that I think Spanish students should be spending weeks learning about the American Revolution. Nonetheless, after living for 20 years in a world where the American Revolution was consistently present in some form, and after spending years immersed in American history, this came as a shock to my system. I won’t even get into my reaction to the complete nonexistence of my field of expertise over here.

Despite this bit of intellectual whiplash, I dove into my preparations, determined to present my history to Spanish teenagers in a way that only an American could. While looking at their textbook taught me some new things about the Revolution, things that Europeans teach and we generally don’t, I also infused the presentation with my love of my country and tried to give it the flavor of the many lessons I had on the Revolution during my life. I spent about two weeks preparing a PowerPoint presentation, pouring over websites, typing things like “Hessians” and “bullets” into my Spanish/English dictionary [Note: the former does not translate well] and trying to choose the most essential things about a 20-year period to squeeze into a 50-minute presentation. As someone who is notoriously long-winded, this was quite the challenge, but I made it happen.

Then one night I got an email asking me to come in to the colegio to make the first presentation, the next morning. The short notice was probably better for me, because it gave me less time to panic. I have never been comfortable with public speaking, and the idea of doing an entire lesson in front of a class of Spanish teenagers, in Spanish, was only slightly less terrifying than the prospect of being dropped into a tank of sharks. The next morning, the professor, Immaculada, is trying to turn her class into a pliable audience, reminding them of the amount of hard work I put into the presentation, advertising that an American had come to talk them, in a way that made me sound part visiting guest lecturer and part sideshow. My nerves made my Spanish a bit rougher than usual, but I survived my presentation. More than that, the students seemed interested in what I was saying, or at least interested in taking notes for their exam. When I finished, I received a nearly thunderous round of applause, and a number of complements on my Spanish. Over the next week, I did the presentation for three other classes, each one memorable for different reasons. There was the student who suggested that North Dakota was one of the thirteen colonies. (I suppose I should be amazed he even knew that North Dakota existed.) There was a group who was confused by my interchangeable use of the terms ‘colonists’ and ‘Americans’. I found myself constantly stepping back and reminding myself that this was all brand new to these students, and trying to leave them with some little thing that they could remember about my country, something to know about us other than what they learn on MTV or the Internet. And then there was my final group, a class of nine students who in total may have taken about three sentences of notes, despite the prodding of their professor. But I suppose, as someone who wants to be a teacher, I should get used to dealing with that as well. Every class I taught, however, I experienced that same adrenaline rush that other professors had told me about. And so now, when I think about teaching, it’s no longer a career I could accept, but rather one that I truly desire.

During the rest of my internship, my opportunities to work with American history will likely be limited, but I plan to continue observing and learning from Spanish secondary education system, because I know that it can give me a unique perspective that I could never gain from any student teaching experience in the US. I will continue to question what Americans do well, what Spaniards do well, and what we could all do better, because, de verdad, el colegio nunca termina — there is little in life more important than education and, good or bad, what we take from high school we carry with us forever.