There were tens of thousands. Most have retired or don't have much left to do so. There is no official record that specifies exactly how many there were or how many remain, since their figure has been intertwined with others, but Comisiones Obreras estimates that in 2014 they were still around 10,000 and that now, probably, they do not reach a thousand. Between the end of the 1990s and the first years of the century, a large number of teachers from the old Basic General Education (EGB) joined the new Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO) ―maintaining their previous civil servant level and a lower salary―. They could only teach in the first cycle, in 1st and 2nd of ESO, which corresponded to the missing 7th and 8th of EGB. Since then they have formed a team with the secondary school teachers, contributing, through their previous experience in schools and their training in teaching, to cushion the shock that the kids experience when they go, at 11 or 12 years old, from school to high school. And now they are disappearing.
The transition from primary to secondary school is a critical moment for students not only in Spain, but in much of the world, says César Coll, professor of Developmental Psychology and Education at the University of Barcelona, for various reasons, starting with the Personal development. “It coincides with the time when adolescence begins to manifest itself in all its force,” he says. It also represents a great change in educational approaches. And a spatial leap from school to institute, at least in public education – private education usually concentrates in the same center, at least, education from ages three to 16. All of this translates into a drop in enthusiasm towards school, and a sudden increase in the repetition rate, which in the public school goes from 2.2% in the sixth year of primary school to 9% in the first year of ESO; while in the private sector the rate rises much less between these two courses, going from 2.2% to 3.8%.
“In primary school, the structure is much smaller, the children know almost all the students and teachers and they have a tutor with whom they spend most of the time,” says Marisa Fernández, 54 years old, a Geography and History teacher at the institute. Bovalar public, in Castellón, who previously worked, for 10 years of her career, as an EGB teacher. “Here, on the other hand, they mix with children who come from other schools, they have 10 or 11 teachers and they see their tutor much less. Every hour a teacher comes in who does things his way. One wants a checkered notebook, another with stripes, another wants them to write with a blue pen, another a black one… There are many things when they are used to a line of work and the feeling of knowing everything. “Some adapt, but others have a terrible time.”
After teaching for 35 years, first at EGB and then at ESO, Emilia Soriano will retire at the end of the year, at 60, at the Font de Sant Lluís public institute in Valencia. Like Fernández, she began teaching in preschool, then in primary school, and finally in the first and second years of secondary school, where she has attended the transition crisis for two decades. “At school they were the oldest and when they get here they are the youngest. They coexist with those in their second year of high school, who are very old, and in centers like ours, with those in Vocational Training, in which there are also adults. Just that physical issue impresses them a lot,” she says. “And at school, they may go to the gym, but the teacher goes with them. Here we send them to the music classroom, to the laboratory… The first months we always find some lost ones.”
The change in educational stage also almost always implies a sudden educational turn, which is explained not only by the difference in content, but also by the teaching profile. “Those who belong to the secondary school body are more specialists in knowledge than us,” says Beatriz Burruezo, a 57-year-old teacher, who stopped teaching at EGB 24 years ago to do so at the Sanje public institute, in Alcantarilla, Murcia. “And we usually have other skills. It's as if we know better why they don't understand something, or how to accompany them in the process of learning something, instead of expecting them to do it all at once.” César Coll, who was one of the authors of the Logse, the law that established the current educational structure in 1990, affirms that secondary school cannot be singled out for the crisis faced by kids. “I think that in primary school we have to start demanding a little more. Make boys and girls aware of the importance of effort, of getting involved, of doing things well, which in secondary school is given as a requirement that is not discussed and in primary school I am not saying that it should not be done, but perhaps it is not done. enough”.
Non-educational reasons
The joint work of primary and secondary teachers can be very useful to facilitate traffic, believes Coll. When the great Spanish educational reform was being prepared, in the eighties, it was considered, in fact, to unify all compulsory schooling, from 6 to 16 years old, in the same center, as was done in the Nordic countries that were between the referents of change, explains the professor. The main reason was “to guarantee the continuity of pedagogical approaches.” The issue was studied in depth and ended up being discarded, but not for educational reasons, but for infrastructure. Reconditioning all public centers to accommodate these 10 levels – not to mention that it was also necessary to respond to the stages of preschool, high school and vocational training – was considered economically unaffordable.
The last EGB teachers are leaving the institutes. But at the same time, in a smaller proportion, teachers who studied Teaching, then completed a secondary master's degree, and accessed the stage after passing an opposition continue to enter. Zarach Llach, 34 years old, History teacher at the Bovalar Institute in Castellón, is one of them. “What I always knew was that I wanted to dedicate myself to teaching, the specialty I preferred I discovered later.” One of the differences that those interviewed in this article agree on pointing out between teachers and secondary school teachers is the starting vocation. The majority of those who study Education degrees have it, while among those who do not it is less common. Llach is aware that his foundation is less solid than that of his other classmates who studied History, and that is one of the reasons why until now he has not wanted to teach high school classes. But the many hours dedicated to studying methodology during his degree have also given him, he adds, some tools. “I think it has helped me so that when a class doesn't work as it should, I think about what I can do to make it go better, focusing not only on the student, but on what I can change.”
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