Internship: Teaching Assistant en El Real Conservatorio Superior de Música

Today I started my internship in the Real Conservatorio Superior de Musica here in Granada. Conservatorio is a very well known and highly ranked Music University, the students are all extremely talented and must audition to get into a very limited amount of positions. My Programa de Praticas professor placed me in the Conservatorio because I was the only one in our class who played and instrument and could read music, thank God for that because I can tell I’m going to love it here!

The Conservatorio is a 15-minute walk from my house down streets in a popular shopping area of the city; the streets are always filled with people with lots of bags   going from store to store or window-shopping their way down the alley.  I continue down the street and a few plazas later I am at the Conservatorio. You can hear the music as soon as you walk past the first set of doors leading to the auditorium, as I walk down the hallway I listened to a soprano hitting her high notes and further down a classical guitarist reviewing his sheet music. In addition to the beautiful assortment of sounds filling the air the building, built in the 16^th century, has striking and unique qualities as well. The courtyard is filled with plants and has vines dripping down from the higher levels hitting just above the bright and sunlit stones of the main floor. There are also columns with detailed flower motifs, and finally two mall towers encased by arches that are decorated with glazed ceramic spheres. I can't do much more to describe it, but its quite the sight to see!

Now for the good part- the students!! I work with 4 different classes throughout the week, but today I got to meet the students from 2 of them. The title of the class is “musica en ingles” or something similar. The majority of students are between 18 and 24 and they are all brilliant in some aspect of music. One of the girls was a singer, another a dancer, all of the boys played different instruments, it was cool to hear them explain it all to me. Since they are all at different levels of English I had to do a lot of clarifying because of the words I used to describe my major/hometown/family etc. I felt like somewhat of a celebrity because none of them had been to the United States before and they all had so many questions! There were a lot of things I had never stopped to spend time thinking about myself, some questions I found frustrating, and others comments were a welcome comic relief:

• ·      They asked me about the weather and I explained that Winona had to cancel classes some days because it was dangerous to be outside. They couldn’t believe it!
• ·     The concept of a car driving onto a frozen lake and then drilling a hole in the ice to fish was incomprehensible. “Why?” “How?” “IS THAT SAFE?!”
• ·     “Why can you drive car and join military before you can drink?”
• ·     “I don't like the methods of anything in the US” “ Have you ever been there?” “ No” “okay”
• ·     “Is it true that everyone in America has a gun?”
• ·     “What is the difference between a democratic candidate and a republican?”
• ·     “How do you say ‘la playa’ in English” “Beach” “…but then what is ‘bitch’”?
• ·   “What do Americans think of Spain?”
• ·   "Does the Simpsons accurately depict America?"
• ·   “Why is everything so big in America? The houses, the cars, the people..?”
• ·     "Do you speak French as well because you are close to Quebec?" "no"
• ·    “We love your accent” 

It felt a little surreal to be the foreign and interesting person to them, just as they all were to me. It was a crazy experience to be able to describe a culture that has become so innate and ordinary to me, while watching their eyes light up as they noticed the blaring differences.

I’m incredibly excited to be their teaching assistant. With 5 classes taught only in Spanish, a Spanish host family, and living in a Spanish country, speaking in English for a few hours a day and being the one who is fluent has been a nice turn of events. J