Being Back in the States

So being back in the States has been great thus far and I've had some time to think about my time teaching abroad. In writing the Letter to Future Teacher and attending the workshops for my upcoming P2, I see some major differences in the education system here in America and the education system in Spain. At times, I was very critical and judgmental comparing the two systems, but I really shouldn't be. Even at the university, the Spanish students and the American students treated school very differently and learned in very different ways but it was learning all the same. We have to be open minded by how a certain culture approaches education in the same way we have to be open minded by how a culture does anything else. Learning some of the strategies in the Read Aloud Training Session and the Classroom Management Sessions, I realized that a lot of the stuff we were learning would not really be appropriate for the Spanish classroom and the Spanish students. A classroom in Spain is managed much more freely without as much "organization" as we American students would handle it. There is not the same dynamic of the "ELL students" in Spain because basically everybody is an ELL language learner and there are some other students who are learning Spanish as a second language with English added to that. I am learning how to see things more clearly for the way things are, rather than how I think they should be.