LA CATALUNYA BUIDA

Personalized classes throughout primary school, but many bus hours during secondary education

The Gósol school forms a single support group, as it has two teachers and 15 students

Laia Vicens
4 min
Classes personalitzades a primària  però hores de bus per fer l’ESO

GossolHalf a year ago, she did not even know how to place the town of Gósol on the map, but now Gabriela has lived there for four months with her two children, after "turning the covid into an opportunity": she was left without a job at the cocktail bar she ran in Castelldefels and left her 900-euro-per-month flat to take over the grocery store in this small town in Berguedà at the foot of Pedraforca, and rent a four-story house with a garden and barbecue for 700 euros. She fell in love with the house, and to make the final decision she asked the City Council for four things: what happens when it snows, if internet and Amazon get there, if there is a doctor and, above all, if there is a school.

And yes: Gósol has a school. It is called Santa Margarida, and after the Saldes school closed due to lack of students, it is part of the Alt Berguedà rural school zone (ZER) together with the schools of Vallcebre and Sant Julià de Cerdanyola, tiny villages like Gósol connected by a curvy road, now all snowed up. Gabriela's son is one of the 15 students at the school, who form a single support group with the two regular teachers who work at the centre and the five itinerant specialists (the ZER schools share the English, music, PE, special and values teachers). That's why when one of the teachers tested positive, the entire school had to be in lockdown (and shut down).

"When I got here I thought: 'How will I manage?' I felt that I could not reach all the children. Last year I was alone in class, with 12 children from P3 to 6(th) grade (5 to 11 years old, roughly) each with their own needs", Carla, the director, explains. This year they have two classes, one for children, from P3 to P5 -although some children who are a bit older also go there-, and one for primary school, from 1st to 6th, which they can even expand when the specialist teachers go there. On Thursday at noon, the five students in 4th and 6th grades (there are no 5th graders) do math while the 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders do English. This is adapted, of course: the little ones paint the animals the colour that the older ones read to them. "The elephant is grey", says a 3rd grader to a 1st grader, who barely knows how to read Catalan.

Hours and hours to get ready

Seen from the outside, they look like private classes, and it is inevitable to think that for teachers it is a luxury to teach here. Behind this image, however, there are many hours of planning - "I have never programmed so much" Carla says - and many others of sharing educational practices and experiences that are successful with the teachers of the other two schools in the ZER. "At university they told us about interdisciplinary groups, but you never consider that you can have students from P3 to 6 in a classroom", she says. Eva, the English teacher, confirms this: "The most difficult thing is to graduate learning by levels. In the three schools there is a different age distribution and you have to adapt to each reality. And being able to help them all is difficult. I have to prioritize". Also Berta, the first internship student who has taught in Gósol, was surprised: "They have to change their material and projects every year so that they are not repeated”.

Distances make everything difficult in rural schools. Many school trips are not done anymore because the bus is too expensive and students get dizzy on the road, to the point that many wear a change of clothes when they go on excursions. School teachers also suffer from the town’s isolation: Eva and Carla, who live in the region, drive more than an hour each day from home to school and from school to home, and one of the substitute teachers comes from Vic. In total, an hour and a half by car just to get to work. "There are always people who come but what is difficult is that they stay", says Carla. Therefore, one of the great problems of rural schools is the great mobility of the teaching team. In Gósol there is no teacher who has a definitive teaching position.

This remoteness also conditions the lives of the students. Like Lucía's (one of the few students who has been in Gósol's school from P3), who will have to get up next year at 6 in the morning and will return home after 4:00 p.m. to go to the highschool in Bagà. Or Pol, from 2(nd) year, who explains that what he misses the most about Barcelona is "playing football at the Europa camp”. Of the 15 children at the school, only two brothers do extracurricular activities: skating, in Sant Julià (40 minutes by car) and football, in Guardiola (30 minutes). Without football, Pol has discovered other ways to have fun: "In Barcelona I had a toy store next to my house, but here I can ride a tractor”. A 4th grader who is new to the village also quickly lists the advantages he has found: "Here I can go out to play in the yard with the snow, Carla takes more notice of me, there is no noise from the cars and I can see good sunsets and hear the birds sing”.

No internet or daycare

The school has immediately noticed the impact of the pandemic, with families who, like Gabriela, have taken the opportunity to flee cities. And there are two drawbacks for young people who want to settle down: there is no daycare - "having a child means that you won't be able to work until they are three years old”, Carla says- and the fact that the internet fails a lot because the optical fiber. "During lockdown, we made video calls one family at a time, because if we connected at the same time, it wouldn’t work out" the director recalls. In order not to get their fingers caught, they have already prepared the booklet "Lockdown Activities", with exercises for each of the 10 days of quarantine.

Although at first she found it difficult to adapt, Carla now assures that she "would not change being a teacher in Gósol for anything". "It has more positive than negative things: I get to know the children more, there is more communication with the families and the learning is personalized", she says. Like Gósol, who called for students five years ago, the 278 rural schools in Catalonia seek the difficult balance between guaranteeing their survival (at least 5 students are needed in order for the school to stay open) and at the same time taking good care of all children. "If the school grows a lot, the department will have to invest more money in teachers, because with two the only thing we can do is survive", Carla warns. Next to her, five students continue doing maths.

stats