Yippeeee! Only a few days to go till Tenerife schools are in!

Having had the week from hell (or to be honest the last thirteen weeks from hell)  I am prepared to admit that mothering is not my forte. Love them to pieces as I do, I find my two darlings in concentrated doses makes me go more than a little round the bend. How I envy those unruffled women who glide through parenthood so smoothly while magically keeping their homes clean and sparkling at the same time.

In comparison at the end of each day my hair is standing on end and I am having palpitations at the scary thought of the mountain of clothes to be washed toppling over and suffocating me in the middle of the night. Then having finally said my last goodnight and waiting half an hour for the inevitable squabble and squawk to die down in the kids bedroom I can then enjoy a precious nugget of silence before Tito starts baying his silly head off at some innocent person out walking their dog past the garden gate.

Having never been a religious person I am more and more drawn to the vow of silence.

But I digress. Back to school or at least back to the subject of school. Oddly where in the past the little ones were taken in a day earlier so that they could get settled, it seems this year that the intake for both infantil and primaria is on the same time at the same day. That can’t be right, surely?

With one set of buildings on each side of a main road and a janny (a janitor to those who do not speak Scottish) who seems to take great delight in ramming the gates shut if you are a nanosecond past the 9.10 am while galloping from one school building to the other, there will be utter chaos on Tuesday.

There is also the matter of the subsidised school books. At third year in Primary, my daughter is entitled to have her text books paid for by the cabildo but what a holy mess they made of that last year.  The list of books was not handed out till the last minute and there were not enough books on the whole island to cover the demand.  If this is your first year dealing with the state school system in Tenerif e you can get an idea of what to expect by reading  The Tenerife TexBook Fiasco and Tenerife Textbooks – the Saga Continues.

So with crossed fingers and a song of hope in my heart I am skipping off down to the school reception this morning with my babies in tow to find out just WTF is going on. Tra la la.

My own two kids go to state school in Tenerife and have done since entering pre-school at the age of three. Overall, my impressions of their experiences have been good. The eldest, my daughter, had a difficult start as we had not been successful in getting her settled in a Spanish guarderia (nursery) for the months before she started pre-school. She had’nt been immersed in a totally Spanish environment up to that point and it took about three months for her to find her feet.

My son had been in a Spanish guarderia first and had watched me drop his sister off at the Infantil section of her school for the previous two years. He sailed through the doors on his first day without a backward glance at his snivelling mother.

Now both are fluent English and Spanish speakers and are happy at school with many friends and a real fondness for their teachers. My daughter at only eight is showing a proficiency in French which she is picking up from her myriad French relatives who descend upon us on a regular basis.

My situation is obviously different from those who move to Tenerife or elsewhere in Spain with older kids in tow. What with the stage of the education process that they are at and the squeaky onset of puberty the pre and early teens are tricky enough to negotiate without throwing unnecessary hurdles at your child after all. What is the best solution for getting your kids settled in the Spanish education system if they are entering after the primary years?

Graham Hunt of Houses for Sale in Spain and author Nick Snelling discuss the options and the choices they made for their children in an interesting audio interview which I’m sure will be very helpful to those facing this decision.

Well that was interesting. One bolt of lightning and kaboom. Lights out from one end of Tenerife to the other. That certainly inspires confidence in the island’s infrastructure in the event of a real emergency doesn’t it.

This past few months we’ve had a bit of a survivor thing going on anyway watching Les Stroud struggle to feed himself and get a fire started  in various extreme, exposed and uninhabited parts of the globe.  We’ve snorted at Bear Gryls ridiculous efforts to be rugged before nipping off back to his four star for the night and marvelled at Ray Mears’ effortless ability to stay warm, dry and fed in the most unlikely of places.

The 80’s series of Survivors in which 98% of the world’s population is killed off by a deadly virus  attracted our attention for a while. The acting and sets seem a bit jaded now but in a lot of ways it can still hold its own next to last year’s version which finished on a cliff-hanger so all we know  is that after surviving plague, kidnap and a murderous politician, Abbey has now being taken into custody by some mad scientists who are quite willing to kill her to crack the secret of her immunity … oooohhh.

Anyway, you’d think with all that I would be quite well prepared to deal with a couple of electricity-free hours wouldn’t you? I could’ve practiced my skills with my fire key and flint stick, rustled up a few rabbit snares and picked some wild berries and edible leaves. I could have but I didn’t.  Instead I patted my unconscious computer and wandered past the kettle a couple of times before resigning myself to the very mundane task of cleaning my desk. Under piles of to-do lists and Extremely Important Papers! I found my lost ipod shuffle and a bowl of unused sugar sachets. Here’s a picture specially for John who recently cast doubt on the existence of my sugar sachet Spanish stash.

I also walked the dogs and sat for a while watching the clouds gathering in the distance. Though we were anticipating a wild night it didn’t come to much more than a downpour in the early hours of this morning and the sun was out again by the time I took the wee ones to school this morning.

Even so, half the little guy’s class didn’t show up and his teacher led in the fila muttering under her breath about those who were afraid of a little bit of agua.

Carrying on from the first installment of the great Tenerife Textbook Fiasco, my dearly beloved took half the morning off work to come back from Los Cristianos and queue up for the charged card with which we were going to receive my daughter’s subsidised schoolbooks.

At the same time he was handed the card he was also given a list of books to buy. There are seven in total. 4 are to be bought by the family and 3 are subsidised by the government.

Okay, all down hill from here, we thought, skipping to the nearest bookshop. Just a week or so ago the lady in the shop had relieved me of €133 for the papers, crayons, pencils and what not listed by the school for both children and had promised to have Sami’s books ready. (He is still in infantil so we pay for all his books). When asked about his books she shook her head sadly and muttered something which clearly blamed her deadbeat husband for forgetting my boy’s schoolboooks on his last foray to Santa Cruz.

Okay, okay, so can we just get the books on the tarjeta so my husband can get back to work? He gamely presented the card and she recoiled as if electrocuted. Quite clearly she wanted nothing to do with this tomfoolery and by now, I heartily agree with her.

We were directed to another local shop where the shop assistant told us she only had the Mathmatica book and if we wanted to get the whole set, we’d be better to go to yet another shop. (I am not talking about a huge town here by the way. The village that I live in is about the size of an average Sainsburys’ carpark.)

By the time we arrived at the third bookshop, there was quite a queue ahead of us. Everyone in it had obviously been on the same wild goose chase and tempers were fraying fast. There were three women behind the counter and each customer they served sooner or later threw a hissy fit. Oh oh, I thought, this doesn’t look good.

Sure enough, at our turn we were told that the books were not available. Not in her shop, not in the South and not in Santa Cruz. Of the seven books we are supposed to buy (in cash or by charged card) only two were in stock and the rest had to be reserved and we can go back later in the week… which as the school administrator refused to give me the card means more time off work for my husband.

What I don’t understand is why one bean-counter in the education department didn’t sit down with one bean counter in the respective publishing companies and said we have x number of children in the first year of primary, x number in the second year of primary, etc. For primary one each child needs book a, book b and book c, for primary two they will need book d, book e and book f, etc.

The whole lot could have been packed up and dispatched to Tenerife where it could have been divided up by the schools and the books handed to the kids in their first week back at school.

We are now in the third week of school and the saga continues.

Okay, this just doesn’t make sense to me but what do I know, right? The kids schoolbooks this year are to be subsidised by the government by way of a charged card which parents can then use to go to the nearest bookshop and purchase said books.

So does the teacher, who presumably has paid enough attention to the kids in her charge for the last two years to be able to identify the parents or guardians of the children in her class, maybe usher in one parent per family and have them sign for the card?

Uhm, no.

Does the parent or guardian receive the card in the mail? After all, the ed. board knows very well which children at each school are in which year and will require which books.

Aaah. Too simple.

Can the parent go with ID and completed form counter-signed by the kid’s teacher to the school secretary and pick up the card from there.

Now you are just being silly!

Does the school require an unseemly mob to gather en masse in front of the secretary’s office and demonstrate their skills at queue-jumping, elbow thrusting and scowling all to be given a number whereupon they must move venue to stand in front of the admin office and wait for the number to be called?

You got it!

Extra points are given to those parents who diligently take their kids to school every day, attend the parent-teacher meetings and follow the kids sheepishly round town on the school parade days but who are inexplicably not included on the register of parents. Instead of the afore-mentioned skills, a nifty turn in foot-stamping can be practised at the point when they are told that the flipping charged tarjeta must be picked up instead by the father who is always at work and never has the time to attend the school for anything.

Here’s a crazy thought. Seeing as how the books are to be paid for anyway, would it not benefit everybody (except perhaps the local bookshops) if the government subsidised the full value of the books and paid the amount directly to the schools which could then deal directly with the suppliers thus scoring a significant discount for buying bulk. The money saved can be added to the schools’ funds and used in whichever way it is needed.

Nah. That’s too logical. It would never work.

After a very, very long summer, I am delighted to report that the kids are back to school. The little guy was so happy to be going back that he ran and skipped all the way down the road and must have covered twice as much ground as Hania, Bampa and I.

At the grand old age of seven, Hania was much more dignified although she broke into a huge smile when her best friend Eva showed up in the school yard.

As we had to first install Hania in her new fila before taking the little one over to the pre-escolar building, Sami was late to line up. There was a long line of kids in front of him but that did not stop him elbowing his way through them to give his beloved teacher, Francy, a huge smacker.

Francy looked to have her work cut out as the new children under her charge included a pair of identical twins who seemed determined not to let go of each other or their mother and dug their heels in screaming.

In contrast, Sami marched into school with a huge grin on his face and I coincidentally seemed to get something in my eye just as he walked by me waving and shouting, ‘See ya later, allligator!’

Shortly thereafter Bampa and I were installed in our usual schoolday morning spot with a cafe con leche and a crossword each. After the doldrums of summer, the town is back to normal and I expect I wasn’t the only one to breathe a huge sigh of relief that we are finally back to school (and peace and quiet).

One thing that stands out for me about the school my kids go to in Tenerife(and presumably then the state schools in general) is the number of outings they take the kids on. In this last school year my kids have visited Agua Park for the dolphin show, Aguilas Park for the bird show and each of them visited Finca Carreton where one rode a donkey and the other a horse and they returned with an eco-friendly ‘fly trap’ that they’d made and a seedling for them to grow at home. My daughter also went on a nature trip to Red Mountain in El Medano.

In previous years my daughter has also visited the firemen, the airport, been to a movie and to a El Quimpi where she met farm animals and engaged in several activities including baking a cake.

A couple of times a year there are also occasions to dress up and march through the town or have a village celebration. This year the Canarian Day events were curtailed by the teachers strike but in previous years kids and teachers dressed up in traditional Canarian outfits, danced and sang and the whole town turned out to watch them and join in their celebrations. Around carnival time, the school again dresses up and this time parades through the village in fancy dress.

On the day of the fancy dress parade, you can practically get bulldozed to the ground by the number of parents galloping alongside their beloved bairns taking pictures. Having recently read a few weird tales in UK newspapers about parents getting into trouble for taking pics of their own kids in the park, I think this is a good example of why life is so different in Tenerife.