Students in strange places

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Photo: Byron Browne
Liberal Arts & Science Academy students in Valencia, Spain during the festival of Las Fallas.

December 15, 2011

By Byron Browne

Leaving a corrida de toros — a bullfight — before the closing ceremony, is considered, in Spain at least, bad form.

It’s just not cricket.

However, as my students and I watched this corrida and after the matador had driven his estoque (the killing sword) between and into the bull’s shoulders and the blade, very badly, and it had emerged through the side of the animal, I decided that a few of my students, for whom this was a first corrida and was in danger of quickly becoming their last, needed more the comfort of their hotel than the savagery of the arena. We left.

And dinner that night consisted only of salad, bread and vegetables for a couple of the students who had had their fill of meat that day.

This episode had been one of our first experiences during our most recent trip in March 2010 to Europe with students.

My wife (Angie, a Spanish teacher at my Austin, Texas, school, Liberal Arts & Science Academy) and I regularly travel overseas with students at spring break.

Because I teach Latin, we often travel to Italy. We have also created wonderful trips by combining Greece and Italy.

The past couple of trips, though, in an effort to conjoin our studies, we have traveled to Spain. In this way, my wife’s students can practice Spanish and experience the cultural aspects they have been studying while my own students can view those ruinous bits of Roman aqueduct or ancient city wall that still stand stubbornly amid the modernity that has collected around them.

Indeed, during this trip while in Barcelona, as the Spanish students took another walk around La Ramblas, my Latin students and I headed underground to view the old Roman city which hides directly under the new.

There is every argument to be made for taking students to far and strange places.

Beyond the technical (as a Latin instructor, I am constantly doing battle with the Spanish, French, and German teachers for students and their enrollment in my classes), there are few experiences that will quiet a teenager more quickly than being dropped square into a country that doesn’t speak their language or adhere to their customs.

All the hubris and vanity let loose and fall into the nearest gutter as soon as the student first asks for a Coke and is given a snorted laugh in return.

Sounds cruel, I know, and sometimes it is. But, most often, that same student will return home an entirely different person than when he or she left.

Further, the opportunity to view the world from a different screen is worth almost any price. (Well, almost any price. The cost of crude oil last school year, when it was translated to jet fuel, kept all of us home.)

To come to understand that our town, friends and family are just a small part of a much larger whole is a lesson no one can teach. To watch as puerile sentimentality evolves into more fully formed contemplation is a lesson no textbook delivers.

Photo: Byron Browne
All of Valencia, Spain, participates in the annual festival of Las Fallas, with this neighborhood having a boat theme.

During no part of the Spain trip did this transformation produce more effect than when we visited Valencia.

Because St. Joseph’s Day (Father’s Day in Spain) was the coming Sunday, the city was participating in the annual festival of Las Fallas, the little torches. (The term comes, ultimately, from the Latin word for torch, fax, and its diminutive, facula.)

The story of this festival’s origins is a simple one.

In early spring at the equinox, carpenters emptied their shops of the wood scraps that had accumulated during winter. Carpentry being a much larger enterprise in the Middle Ages than now, the scrap heaps were large and many. Burning the stuff became a way of both dismissing winter’s cold rigidity and welcoming spring’s thaw.

No literature, picture nor video can adequately describe the celebration. Day and night almost equally are punctuated by the explosions of fireworks, great and small. Splintering orange, white trails follow rockets above while the ground is peppered with the detritus of spent, shattered shells. Everywhere, everyone is involved with either setting off these firecrackers or buying more at the corner market. Our students, of course, were in line constantly during our time in town.

The event culminates, in true Iberian fashion, twice.

The first is a raucous cacophony called La Mascleta. This is an enormous, timed detonation of thousands of firecrackers that are large enough to fill a sock. These hang suspended from an iron grill in the center of town. Every day, at 2 p.m., during the week there is the exploding of these miniature bombs.

However, the last episode had enough concussion to rid the city of any rodent problem for months. The smoke afterwards clouded several city blocks.

The second and grand finale is termed La Crema. The ninots (Catalan for puppet) sometimes called falles, the wooden and pâpier-mâché statues that have replaced those ancient heaps of wood are, at midnight, torched all over town; each neighborhood spends the entirety of the year creating their own, unique version.

The evening culminated in one of the most amazing fireworks shows I have ever witnessed. The spectacle was magnificent and the memory of it, the telling of its happening, had matured well into mythological status by breakfast the next morning.

When I was 19 years old, I traveled to Paris for the first time. It was my first trip overseas. The father of the friend I was staying with told me one evening after dinner that it was good to see Paris as a young man because I would, “… take the city with me everywhere I went” from that time forward. He was right, of course.

I suspect our students take all their overseas’ experiences with them wherever they again travel. And I know a few who will probably tell a pretty grizzly bull fight story when they stop to recollect such things … later.

Byron Browne teaches Latin at Liberal Arts & Science Academy, a magnet program high school operated by Austin Independent School District in Austin, Texas. He is also a freelance writer.

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