A QUALIFIED ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHER
I never planned to be a language teacher. It was the result of circumstance.
I graduated with upper second honours in Marketing. Not bad, I thought for a kid who’d failed the 11-plus selection exam for high school and left school aged 15. I was 25 and married when I was accepted for Strathclyde University in Glasgow. After graduating in 1977, I went into Retail Management.
Move on ten years to one cold February night and my wife and I made the crazy decision to sell up and go to live in Spain, complete with three kids. How we got there is a story for another day. It took a year to sell our house so we made the move in the spring of 1986. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy to find work; Spain was still not in the EEC. Work permits were extremely difficult but teaching English as a foreign language looked hopeful. My wife was a qualified primary teacher.
A few weeks before heading off, we went down to Manchester for a crash course on direct-method language teaching. So we each had an authentic looking certificate from the Linguarama School. At the end of the first summer in Spain we had a healthy number of students of all ages. The fact that we were native speakers was more valuable than any certificate. That was until we wanted to set up our own school in the town centre.
Any private school (acamemia) required a licence to open. (Licencia de Apertura). The director of the school needed to have adequate qualifications. I had to acquire a transcript of my entire university course, subject by subject and have it all translated by a sworn official translator and then it had to be sent to Madrid to be officially homologated.
In the meantime, I was allowed to open the school, having completed all the application documents and paid the licence fees. I got a temporary piece of paper that said my licence was “En tramite”. Madrid took over a year to reply and the answer was that my degree did not homologate to any corresponding Spanish qualification. By now our school was up and running. A lot of our students were family of people who worked in the town hall even though they still hadn’t granted a licence.
Somebody suggested that maybe I could go to the official language school and obtain the certificate that you see above. The CAP was the certificate of pedagogic aptitude that was required by all teachers who wished to teach in secondary education. It was usual for young Spanish graduates to do one year post-graduation to obtain this certificate. It was also possible to try the final exam without doing the course but while the majority completing the course passed, the open entry was much less likely to achieve pass level. That was in 1991 and I have never met any other non Spanish person who passed.
However, I trotted along to the town hall planning office and they accepted my CAP. As I’d done it in Girona, it came in Catalan. I got a visit to our little school from a lady who insisted that I install emergency escape lights, a fire extinguisher and disposable towels in the toilet.
That year English became obligatory in all secondary schools so the demand for support classes exploded and we had to find bigger premises. This time the licence for the new place was just a formality.
Over the years, my certificate decorated the entrance to our school and I never gave it much more thought until the other day when I came across a mention of the CAP in the internet. In 2008 the system changed and CAP became MFPR (Master en Formacion de Profeserado). So my old CAP certificate is the Spanish equivalent of a Masters in the teaching of English as a foreign language. So I dug it out of the “various” file and took a photo for this story. I have another story planned about the adventures we had along the way.
For now I am Robert Grieve Black (BA Hons Strath, MFPR English). I don’t think there’s space for all that in my profile. Anyway, for the people who matter now, I’m either Bobby, Dad or Grandpa.
