End of an era

We are told  that Ana, who has taught Spanish to Pamela and me for five years will not be appointed to teach us this year.

That is sad because Ana is an excellent teacher. As ex teachers ourselves, Pam and I feel that we are in a good position to judge on such matters. Ana has the patience, knowledge and understanding necessary to encourage her students to want to learn. Believe me, after 34 years in the job with nearly twenty years of senior management experience, those are not qualities that you find in every teacher. 

Whether we will have a class or not this year remains to be seen. Last year Bigastro received only a fraction of the subsidy that it normally gets from Valencia to run adult education in the town. The size of our class is such that the council may decide that it not viable to offer a class teaching Spanish to foreigners any more.

That would be a huge blow to Pamela and I because we regard learning the language as vital to our lives here. We feel that we have made good progress, however we know there is a lot more for us to learn and without the constant practice that we got from the class we will loose our command of the language.

I know there are other classes in other towns and there are also private teachers who we could go to but we enjoyed visiting the Auditorium twice a week for our lessons. This may sound sad but it was one of the highlights of our week.