School starts tomorrow

....after a trip to the immigration agency, complete with expensive immigration lawyer. Sad to say the kids will be missing their first morning of school, but we've heard from others that it can take 6 months for "regular" visas to come through...so off we go.

In any case, here's the scoop on the kids' school (note I said school singular. All three will be going to the same place!).

a) My cousin managed to find us the only Jewish school in Madrid, and possibly all of Spain -- Center de Ibn Gabriol. Jon visited almost a year ago and liked it quite a bit, especially in comparison to other schools he'd seen. Spain has a mix of public and parochial schools, and public/parochial combinations called “concertados.” Most concertados are Catholic, which wasn’t a good fit for us.

Also, during his visits, many principals responded to Jon’s “What makes your school special?” question with a resounding “There’s nothing special here. Nobody’s special. We’re all just very, very average.” Imagine using that in the U.S. to attract parents! Jon also reported that the instruction appeared very rote and programmed from an early age – e.g., first graders taking notes and doing recitation.

This makes us feel very lucky to have found Ibn. Gabriol school – we visited (see below) this week and think it’s going to work well.

b) Even better than that, they feed our children good, healthy, Spanish meals! No more packing lunches. And no more wondering why Nora’s cafeteria is a) hanging pictures of bunny rabbits from the ceiling suspiciously close to Easter b) teaming up with Nickelodeon for “character week” in the cafeteria – e.g., “Sponge Bob fries” and
“Dora beans” (“character week”, by the way, coincided with “turn off the tube” week this year – I kid you not).

c) We have spent the last couple weeks assembling pieces of the uniform they will wear. Uniforms are very standard in Spanish schools, and ours are very cute—we will post pictures when I procure a connector cable for my camera. We have also spent the last few days scavenging our neighborhood for the very specific list of school supplies they will need. It was not a process that went well; we’re still without certain kinds of folders and notebooks. We're also slightly mystified by the 4 textbooks we had to buy for Seth. We haven't yet laid hands on them -- when we do, will report on the curriculum for 3-year-olds.

d) Their school happens to have a view of the mountains to the north of Madrid that would make any real estate agent drool. Or at least, it makes Mommie very, very happy to have to take that walk every day.

e) We visited the school twice last week, first to meet the kids’ teachers and then to purchase uniforms. Here’s the report:

Nora’s teacher: A very sweet woman in her 50s, covered Nora with hugs and kisses the minute she saw her.

Nathan’s teacher: A younger woman, very lively and engaging with Nathan.

Seth’s teacher: An older woman who appeared shocked that Seth sleeps from 9 pm – 8 am (as in, “How do you get him to sleep so much?”) and also that Seth only graduated from diapers in May. In the U.S., he was about average (2 years, 8 month) for potty training (sorry, for the p.c. parents, “potty learning”) but he’s on the later end for Spain.

Seth’s teacher conducted an interview with us about him, mostly in Spanish (!). We were lucky to have the words hit (golpear), throw (tirar) and yell loud (gritar con fuerza) in our vocabularies, so we could describe some of his finer personality traits. Unfortunately, our limited Spanish vocabularies didn’t include “ear-splitting scream” – they’ll have to find that one out on their own.

Even in Seth’s room, a lot of the instruction is provided by “specialist” teachers. So there is a specialist who teaches Hebrew, another for Judaic studies, a third for English, and one for math.

In Seth's class, there's also a "Shabbat turtle" puppet who comes out on Shabbat and is allowed to go home with one lucky student each Friday. The idea is to take pictures of the Shabbat turtle doing Shabbat things around your house, return pictures to school, and receive a nice bound book of those pictures a few weeks later. The Shabbat turtle is going to be sorely disappointed by the Shabbat activities in our house -- we just barely managed to purchase 0.39 E candle holders + candles Friday.

g) General sociological observation: In the U.S., we’re up to our ears in paperwork at this time of year – each kid has a sheaf of forms that need to be filled out that cover every contingency. In Madrid, nada (unless Jon filled out some that I don’t know about). We’ve also noticed that there’s rarely anything formally written down at this school – we had to go in and ask when to drop off/pick up the kids (8:45-4:30), whether to send in snack (yes), and a host of other things.

First day of school is tomorrow, as Nora reported. We’ll send the update (plus the update on Spanish immigration) then.