Archetypes and Stereotypes and the American School System

When you grow up overseas, your visions of American life are mostly formed by what you have seen on-screen. As a kid who had actually been to the US, I often found myself having to correct people's incorrect, Hollywood-created opinions. I would shake my head and smile at the Spaniards who thought that America was either some variant of Malibu opulence or a ghetto survivalism, that American cuisine was exclusively pizza and hamburgers, etc. These stereotypes were easy to make into movies and theme parks, but they were inaccurate. In many ways, Hollywood works almost exclusively with archetypes and stereotypes. I had spent so many years refuting these gross over-generalizations  that I was genuinely surprised when I arrived in the public school classroom that I will be teaching in this year.

For someone who never went to school in America, it feels strange and surreal to enter a public school building here. It feels like you are on the set of a movie or television show, because that is the extent of your experience with that setting. It is as if you have somehow stepped into an odd archetypal form of school.  Suddenly you are on the set of "My So-Called Life," "The Wonder Years," "Dawson's Creek," or "Mean Girls." It is hard to put my finger on what differentiates a Spanish school building from an American one. Sure, you have the obvious things like the lockers in the hallways and American flags in each classroom, but then there are other things too, like the fact that all Spanish schools are built with the same basic brick architecture, while American buildings are made of drywall and cinderblock, and the ceilings are lower here. And, in my Spanish school, the walls were pretty much bare. The reason for this is that when I was a kid, the students would stay in the same room and the teachers would rotate through the building. While this eliminated the time that it takes to get all the students from class to class, it also meant that teachers didn't have their own rooms and therefore the rooms weren't personalized or cared for in the same way as they are in the US. American rooms are covered with posters and resources. A few days ago, I found myself in the teacher's shoes as I brought in class materials, put up posters, and tried to decide what desk arrangement I was going to use.

In the end, perhaps that is the oddest part of it all. It seems unnatural for my first experience in a stereotypical school building to be that of a teacher. Most people experience this whole thing as students first. I find myself baffled by the most basic elements of American school: detention, fire drills, the cafeteria, tardies, standardized testing, classroom procedures, etc. I am teaching grades (6 & 7) that I experienced in the Spanish public system. We had none of these things. It feels surreal to be speaking to other teachers about how we will handle issues that, until know, were just a product of Hollywood's fancies to me. Do you know that mix of disappointment and satisfaction that you get when a foreign stereotype is proven true? That is, in a sense, part of what I feel. But the added aspect of having to embrace it as now being part of myself... feels... surreal.

I am not sure if the surreal factor will grow or diminish once classes start and the students come into the building. I will probably be too busy to stop and think about it. But for now, wandering the empty public school building feels like walking onto an abandoned film set.