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My name is Lander González and I am a 24-year-old recent graduate in primary school teaching. I will speak about an experience that I had two years ago when I was working in school, they asked me to teach Basque to a student that had recently arrived from Japan.

The difficulties that I had I believe that most people would have experienced at some stage when it comes to a completely unknown language. I had to go through thousands of dictionaries and translate a load of different useful words in order to improve communications between the student and myself.

The student was 10 years old and although he spoke a bit of Spanish, it was very difficult to teach him without using the odd bit of Spanish, and so I decided to learn basic Japanese words like greetings, friendly phrases, colours and numbers. With the intention of bit by bit teaching him the most basic Basque words and their Japanese translations.

Truthfully they were the worst months of my life because I had to work as much inside as outside of the school, but the gratitude which I obtained both for the school and for the boy and his family, made the effort and time spent teaching him worth it. Furthermore, now I also have a very simple base of Japanese in a way that if suddenly I decided to learn it I would already know the basics.

On the other had I would like to also mention another experience that I had last year, with a 7-year-old boy for whom I did private tutoring in Basque. The child had a lot of difficulty learning the language so the mother came to me for help. The problem came when I tried to meet with his Basque teacher to formulate a joint plan of action in which I go over the things he learnt in class. However, the teacher clearly saw me as some kind of threat or as a sign that her classes weren’t good enough and this made me look very stupid when trying to teach the student. Despite all the inconveniences, and the little help that she lent me, I still elaborated a plan so that the boy could acquire simple vocab and grammar so that he could reach the level of his classmates. And I certainly achieved it because the boy passed all of his subjects.

What I want to say about these two experiences is that at times our work ends up being difficult, for different factors which are out of our control. But despite these factors, we should never surrender as from the difficult situation you will take something positive. And that’s why I encourage all the teachers from ELE that are having a difficult time to raise their heads and be stronger than ever before. Because what we have could seem like little, but in reality for those people that we help it means the world. I wish you the best for the future and good luck in your respective jobs.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

Lander González