Back to School

Ginger Gerald explores the whole world of Education for your children when you are overseas. Quite a serious topic - and some big and important decisions to take - but also a few funny, moving and outrageous tales to tell. Covering a plethra of different systems and a few different countries - what are the considerations and, more importantly, once you´ve made your decision - what is the reality for the kids themselves?  Listen into this Educational special to find out more - and to enrich your life!

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Transcript

Today we are going “Back to School”. We´re going to talk about where, why and even if your kids should go to school at all when you move and live abroad. For many of you listening this is, has been or will be a big and stressful question. I´ve been listening to a couple of pods recently where this very theme is debated at great length and in great detail by a bunch of clearly very learned folk (like myself), and they consistently consider the selection of a school for your child to be the most important decision you have to take when moving to live overseas. Well, is that really true? And how do you know that the school or schools you select will turn out to be the right ones a few weeks or months down the line – let alone years. Maybe you´re the super organized type of parent who creates a lovely spreadsheet with all of your requirements and criteria, you give them all a weighting and then develop a formula to mathematically select the perfect Educational Institution? Or maybe you just like the colour of the walls! And who´s to say that one person´s selection criteria is any better than anyone else´s. Maybe the “success” of your child at school (however you choose to measure that) is more down to your own attitude and your child´s approach to engaging. If making friends and picking up the language is the most important factor – then choose one that does loads of sport, music or drama. If the most important thing to you is the bit of paper that gets you into Uni – then look for the more scholarly ones.  

Now it´s one thing to select the school or schools, but the reality of what goes on at these schools when your kids actually get there is a completely different ball game! I´ve a few Ginger Gerald special tales today to make you laugh and cry – and maybe even make you wish you´d stayed in Stoke on Trent after all.

So how did Ginger Gerald and family deal with this particular hot topic. Well, let´s start by saying that we (well our kids) have experienced a fair few different schooling régimes in their time: UK schooling, both primary & secondary, public and private sector; Mexican schooling, primary and secondary; Spanish Secondary schooling, US online Middle School and UK home studying for A levels. So a bunch of different educational solutions at different times and for different reasons – no one size fits all approach from us! 

In terms of the selection process, sometimes you actually don´t have too much choice – which maybe makes your life a bit easier and takes the pressure of the Big Decision.  For example there´s only one school anywhere near where you live, or only one of them has any spaces left ……….. or there´s only one you can afford!

The first and probably the biggest decision we had to make was to select a primary school for a 5 year old and a secondary school for a 13 year old when we knew we were moving to Cancún. State schools were out of the equation as non-Mexicans aren´t allowed to attend them. And Cancún, at that point, wasn´t just a Spring Break playground in the Sun for the Americans but it was already a thriving and rapidly expanding city of 600,000 inhabitants. Nowadays the City of Cancún alone has well over a million inhabitants. So, a young and quickly growing population meant that schools were popping up all over the place like wildfire – and offering a great opportunity for someone to make a buck or two! So we had quite a few schools to look at – all were similarly priced and most in the same area of the City; many had primary and secondary on the same campus (a big plus for us) and most were pretty small – just one or two classes per year. All of them at least claimed to be Bilingual (meaning that some classes were taught in English and others in Spanish) even if the English bit was not very developed yet. 

So we set up a bunch of appointments when we visited Cancún before actually moving out there (if you can´t remember all the stuff we talked about in the very first episode of Ginger Gerald called D Day – then look it up and give yourself a gentle reminder). We didn´t have a car so we grabbed a taxi for the day…..and off we went with pen & paper in hand to score our potential learning centres. And of course the 5 and 13yr olds came with us – which, thinking about it now, must have been really, really scary for them. Anyway, we knew it wasn´t going to be an easy day when the directions to our first school appointment were: “take the main road out of town and after a few kilometres, you´ll see a building site on the left – turn right and we´re down there”. Google maps hadn´t got things so well covered back then. So off we went into the Bronx and found about 25 Building sites on that main road and eventually, after tons of wrong turns, death defying U turns, panicky phone calls and stopping to ask people who had no clue where any of these “new” schools were – we finally made it to school number 1. Which was also a building site. Now I know that schools need to use the Summer holidays to do their building work – but half of the schools we visited seemed to be missing a roof or a wall or both! And the chances of them actually being open and ready to give classes was, at least in our minds, somewhat questionable.  One school we went into had a beautiful outdoor swimming pool and a full size football pitch - but no classrooms (to be honest I was quite keen on that one). So we re-ordered the priorities of our selection criteria and the top one became: make sure the school is actually built (or at least almost).

It was a pleasant surprise when we arrived at schools that were actually built, and didn´t just need our registration fee to help finish off the plastering of another classroom, and at those ones we were shown round, we sat down and asked all the right questions (like can the English teacher speak English? Have you had any children who speak no Spanish at all? What exams, homework, courses, curriculum do you follow? How much does it cost and when does term start?

We were under quite a lot of time pressure so we pretty quickly narrowed it down to 2 or 3 which we then reduced to our Target Solution: one single school complex which had a Nursery & Primary school on one side and a Secondary school on the other. Both small. Both followed US & Mexican educational systems. Both had the most lovely uniforms. Decision taken. Payment made. Job done……now, what were they really going to be like?

Well, classes started at 7am. And if you arrived late (by late I mean one second past 7am) then you weren´t allowed in. The gates´d be locked and there was no negotiating.  Which meant no school for the kids that day. Now we didn´t live next door to the school and driving in Cancún at the best of times felt like taking your life into your own hands, so I felt I needed a bit of a buffer to try to guarantee that I would never arrive late. So, from Monday to Friday for 6 long years, our alarm was set at 5.40am. We woke up, breakfasted, left home at 6.20am and arrived at school at 6.50am. I didn´t think that Ginger Gerald´s new and better life in the Caribbean would start quite so early in the day…..and the poor kids were always shattered!

The Primary school was a bit of a mixed bag but overall I´d say there were more positives than negatives. EJ learnt to speak Spanish very quickly (the brain´s amazing at languages at that age), he loved his football and the food & dressing up every time there was an excuse for a party (the Mexican´s are famous for loving a party). One year he was even selected to light the Olympic flame for the School´s Sports Day – Health & Safety wasn´t quite at the same level as in some other places.

Speaking of safety…he´d not been there very long when he came home all excited and told us he´d spent part of his day playing games under his desk. “Why did you do that son?” we inquired. “Oh, there was guns going off next door so the teacher told us to play under our table for a bit – and to be quiet!” Sure enough, next door had been raided at gun point – not entirely unheard of in those parts – but a bit of a shock to the system and a stark reminder of the reality we had chosen nonetheless!

As for the Secondary school – well, that wasn´t such a positive experience. Teachers tended not to stay around too long – the reality of living and working in Paradise didn´t always live up to their expectations. And as some of the staff didn´t really want to be there, the quality of everything dropped. Some of the teachers were simply careless (one dropped an entire set of exercise books into the Caribbean on her way home from work one evening) and some of them were just nasty (outrageously one of them wrote letters to her ex-pupils when she left telling them how they´d all end up as whores living above their parents´ garages ….…..weird and very disturbing). And it wasn´t unusual for teachers to get the students to mark their peers´ homework and even exams – in return for “credits”

One of the selling points of the school was its success in obtaining US University entrance for its alumni. However, not surprisingly that didn´t extend to getting accepted at a UK University as a UK student. So to help our daughter´s chances, she decided to take a few extra, higher level Spanish language exams which the school, for some reason, didn´t or wouldn´t offer. So off we trotted to Mexico City one January for her to sit this all-important exam. I´m sure you all know this but Mexico City is at 2000m above sea level so it´s very cold in the Winter. We tipped up in our Caribbean shorts and flip flops – much to the great amusement and horror of the entire queue at 6.30 in the morning (oh yes, the exam was at 7am – it all happens at 7am!). Everyone else, of course, was wrapped up in their coats, gloves and scarves. Anyway we lined up, M´s name was on the list so I wished her good luck, left her to her exam and I went in search of a coffee – feeling quite pleased that despite our stupidity in terms of clothing selection – at least we had found the right place, at the right time and we´d been allowed in. Quite an achievement Ginger Gerald – give yourself a pat on the back. Then the phone rang. “Dad I need a cassette recorder. I haven´t got one and they´re kicking me out”. What a bunch of absolute barstards I thought – I swear I checked a dozen times with the Organizer exactly what she needed to take with her and on my phone I had at least two emails from the Chief Examiner proving she was in the wrong. But there she sat, cool as a bloody cucumber, in complete denial and refusing even to read her own email to me! But as I am sure may of you will know, and the rest of you might find out, it´s not always about what´s right and wrong. “No cassette player no exam” she said. And no exam, potentially, meant no Uni for M! Now Mexico City´s big. It´s very big. But not so many shops selling Cassette Players at 10 past 7 in the morning. Angry, frustrated and really upset, we were just about to throw in the towel and admit defeat when the rather elderly school caretaker, who´d been keeping an eye on us since we turned up in our inappropriate beachwear, told us to follow him. Curious, we went with him to his tiny but very cute little house at the corner of the posh International School complex, he rummaged around for a while in one of his cupboards and then emerged with a vintage, but fully functional Cassette Player for M to borrow. Wow! She took it, ran back to the Exam hall and argued her way back in – and passed the exam with flying colours! Oh and did get into Uni by the way!

There are a few elements of this story that I think many of you´ll be able to relate to, not specifically connected to schools necessarily but any type of admin (I´m assuming you´ve all listened to my last episode “Blumming Bureaucracy?). The top 2 lessons for me are: 

Firstly, never expect things to be the same as you´re used to at home – they aren´t. 

And secondly, there´s always a hero around the corner – but you never know who it is going to be!       

Given our far-from-ideal Secondary school experience, it´s perhaps no great surprise that EJ didn´t follow in his sister´s footsteps when it was his time to move up. Instead we opted for an online American Middle school which he could do from home or wherever he happened to be; it was all project based and discovery learning – it was fantastic - and he still got to play footy with his mates at their “traditional” school. But bear in mind that EJ was beginning full time tennis academy at this time, so he had plenty of social interactions with his fellow tennis gang. I know that online schooling´s not the right choice for every child, or every parent and very few of our friends understood the decision at the time and thought it was the wrong thing to do. But it´s certainly an option worth considering in certain circumstances and even moreso nowadays in the global World we live in  – the service, resources, content, platform and communication were second to none, and it worked perfectly for a while for EJ - and for us.

Then we moved from México to Spain so yep, time to try out yet another Educational system. At the time we were weighing up the options it was a bit if a grey area as to whether “home” or “online” schooling was actually legal or not in Spain, although it was fairly widely practiced. But the obvious option on the table for us was to go for a “tennis + secondary school” package. Now that all sounds very posh and super expensive but the reality was a little different. School for EJ was a big, old, bright green, rather prison-like building in the centre of Palma de Mallorca. Classes were taught in Spanish & Catalan which added another little linguistical challenge. And classes, for EJ anyway, were from 8am to 12 noon (so at least we got a lie-in!). At 12 noon the “tennis kids”  were picked up in the oldest of vans imaginable, whisked off to the Tennis Academy for a quick lunch then they were on court from 2 to 7pm. So pretty long and tiring days from Monday to Friday. At school, the “tennis kids” stuck out a bit like sore thumb. Firstly, there were only about 8 or 10 of ´em (in a school of maybe 1000 kids), and they were mainly foreigners, they wore tracksuits all the time, they tended not to smoke or do drugs (which definitely made them a bit of an exception) and, of course they only came for half a day much to everyone else´s annoyance. So making friends was a bit tricky here as there were no other school activities they could really join in with and everyone was jealous of them.   

Anyway, in terms of the education style itself it was the total opposite of the lovely, cosy, pressure-free online US Middle School system. Here it was much more serious and a lot less fun. More time was spent doing exams than was spent actually teaching anything, and to do well at school you had to memorize everything and then regurgitate it all onto a bit of paper. So if you´d got a photographic memory you were a fantastic student. If not – tough! EJ got by for the 2 years he was there and managed to obtain his Secondary School Completion certificate without having to resit a year (which is a really common things in Spain) – but not without a little bit of help. His physics teacher actually said to him “I´ll mark your paper up a bit to make sure you get a pass so you never have to take a physics class ever again”! Nice guy! Not quite as much help from his English teacher who once famously said to him in front of the entire class: “you may have an English accent but I am the one with a degree in English”!! oooooh! Oh and then they both got stuck in a lift together…………..

So we move to the final chapter – at least for now – of our Educational experience trail. The demands of tennis training and competing don´t really sit well with traditional 6th form schooling, so a flexible and online option was definitely the way forward. The question was what system? What subjects? And if your whole life is tennis why even bother – you don´t have to? Well the sad truth for potential pro tennis players, and for so many other young sports people, is that unless you are in the top 1 or 2 hundred in the World, then there is no way that you can finance yourself. And of course, you´re only ever one sprained ankle away from the end of your budding career. So – online, independent studied A levels was the option we went for and with the tremendous help of the lovely Palma College, and a great deal of commitment and discipline, EJ did himself proud and came out with 3 excellent A level results.

So that´s a wrap for today folks. It´s turned out to be a bit more serious than sometimes – not quite so many funny and embarrassing stories – and some slightly concerning ones. I think I need a bit of a lie down now.