How I Spent the Day with Fifty-five Twelve-year-olds

This past week I got suddenly invited to go on a field trip with my school to the big city of Vigo for the day, to see a theatrical production of The Portrait of Dorian Gray in English. And so, at the crack of dawn (quarter past nine in the morning) I found myself on the bus out of town with the bus driver, two other teachers and fifty-five middle-schoolers. Oh, God.

waiting in line

The bus driver dropped us off on some main drag near in Vigo and a vague idea of where the theatre was. The timetable seemed to have allowed for some getting lost, because even after a couple askings for directions and doubling-backs we found the theatre entrance about a half hour before the doors opened. For lack of anything better to do, we herded the kids to a plaza across the street where they wouldn't be blocking the foot traffic, while the teachers snuck off one by one to get a coffee pick-me-up at the cafe next door.

The play was about what I was expecting it to be. Nice, but nothing to write home about (so why am I writing this post??). A couple Argentinian dudes with decent accents, a British girl, and a local guy to do the lights. There was a rather painful Q&A session at the end where the actors invited the kids to ask them about the play, English, acting... 

Silence. 

In the end the actors ended up talking about themselves anyway, and asked the kids some comprehension questions about the play. Which they were calling the Picture of Dorian Gray. I don't know if this was a problem with the English-->Spanish-->English translation, or simply the name of the theatre version of the story, but that asshole part of my brain really wanted to ask.

Now, it just so happened that the day of our excursion was a strike day, and there was a demonstration going on in the town center in Vigo. Right near where the theatre was. Because of the demonstration, police had closed down the main drag, and the bus driver couldn't get through. One of the teachers used this delay as an opportunity to buy ice cream for everyone, which turned out to be not the best idea, because we then had to go running around trying to get back to the bus, avoiding protesters, television crews and police blockades. In the process we lost four students, including one little boy on crutches with a broken ankle. Let's just say thank god for cell phones. 

For lunch we stopped at the little town of Baiona, unleashing our terrors upon the unsuspecting restaurant owners. I went with the other adult to a more secluded, pricey place away from the children, and played along with everyone else when we said that we would be on the road again in an hour and a half. 

Just short of three hours later we were counting heads on the bus, headed up the hill to look at some petroglyphs. The bus wound its precarious way through the one-lane track that lead into the mountains. At one point we ran into a truck wanting to go down into the town. The driver quickly changed his mind and backed up at full speed until a driveway presented itself where he could back into.

At the top of the hill we were met by a very Galician, very energetic man who, after getting various degrees in history, anthropology and goodness knows what all else, discovered he still wasn't really all that qualified for any jobs, and wrote a book about petroglyphs instead. 

Xosé, the author, told us a little of what he knew about the people who had lived here around five thousand years ago, picked up from the scant traces they had left behind--some carvings on stones, some burial chambers called dolmens, and perhaps a few linguistic remains left in the names of places and plants. 

The petroglyphs and the people who made them pre-date the Romans and the castro-building celts. They were most likely a stone-age society that had some concept of astronomy (many of the carvings look like solar calendars) and placed some importance on stags and the hunting of deer. They had horses and dogs and bows and arrows, and must have had some way to accurately cut into stone.

Xosé brought with him some butcher paper, and got the kids to make some rubbings of the petroglyphs, which I hope are in the school now, and not still in the back of the science teacher's car. 

It was getting to be dark out soon, so after making the rubbings we ran back down to the bus so as to get back to Baiona again before all the coffeeshops were closed. 

By this point I was getting to be overwhelmed by the seething mass of children and took the opportunity to go for a walk by myself and take some photos.

Now, it may have sounded like I don't like my students, or children in general, but that's not true. My students this year are (by and large) good kids. They are enthusiastic and happy to be in school, and I'm happy to be there with them. But fifty-five of them, for twelve hours... I think you get the picture.