The puzzle in the classrooms

In classrooms, today, there are different challenges, or puzzles. These different challenges and puzzles need different solutions and ways of solving them.

—The world is getting hotter, and the Mediterranean even more so. In the past, having air conditioning was considered for the "soft" or "nouveau riche." It has been a long time since that was the case, to the point that in London, on the underground, there wasn't any and now they are rushing to install it. In classrooms, there must also be some, just as there must be heating: it wouldn't occur to us to say that babies (or big kids) should come with hats and gloves from home.

—Catalonia has embraced a large influx of immigration. Diversity (that overused and worn-out word) is too immense for a single welcome classroom. A child who does not speak Catalan (nor Spanish) will learn it in a year at a public school, as I have been able to verify with some of my daughter's friends when she was little. But ten children who do not speak Catalan or who have individual plans cannot be attended to in a class with only one teacher, who if they dedicated six minutes to each individual plan (less than a visit to the doctor) would spend the whole hour and would not be able to attend to either one or the other.

—Jokes are made (a self-interested joke) about the teachers of the past as authoritarian and boring beings, but the teachers my generation had were vocational, intelligent, wise, friendly, and discovering teachers. In my heart are Joan Ruiz Calonja, Quim Sabé, Miss Isabel, Manuel Fuentes, Rosa Ribas and Jaume Dantí, Rere Grau, Montse Bassa... By degrading those teachers "as authoritarian" we do not elevate those of today, some of whom—we have seen them on TV—are hyper-emotional.

—Some sociologists, psychologists, and pedagogues who speak on TV analyze what happens in classrooms as a motivation problem that teachers and parents do not know how to solve. They ignore that the lack of reading comprehension comes from many sides. From screens, also from the lack of resources to teach the language to newcomers in a hurry. They ignore that students are not all beings of light.

—Parents used to say: "If you have to hit him, hit him." Now they write notes to the tutor with emojis, cry if the child fails, and threaten to leave. They do not feel like users; they feel like customers.