"Damià Pons was the 'blind' professor, but he made you think"

PalmaWhen I started school I was three years old and I was the smallest in the class, because we are from November. The first memories are of the Franciscan nuns of Bunyola. I especially remember Sister Antònia: a small, plump woman who never raised her voice. I have no memory of punishments or bad words. I went to school happy, without fear.

Then I moved to the national public school, which we knew as 'l'escola des Pins'. I did all of my EGB there. It was a completely traditional school, very based on memorizing. Repeating, studying, and repeating again. Even so, there were teachers who tried to do different things. I especially remember when we did theater: those moments broke the routine and made us feel that school could be something else.

I also remember Mrs. Cecília Martí, the sixth-grade tutor. She had a choir at school and put enormous enthusiasm into it. We rehearsed in the afternoons. Honestly, I didn't like it much, but over the years I've understood the value of that effort, that way of building community.

The school was a fairly orderly place. The schedule was from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. There were about thirty students, boys and girls together from the beginning. There was a lot of respect for the teachers. A respect that was not questioned. What the teacher said was gospel, and at home, if there was any problem, parents sided with him. I never saw physical violence, but I did see a certain authoritarian tone, especially from sixth grade onwards. Dry comments, orders given in a bad way. Nothing that could be argued. It was also a school without resources for diversity. If a student had difficulties, they simply failed. No one considered what was behind that zero.

In terms of language, we lived in a kind of contradiction. At Pins, classes were in Spanish, the books too, but we, in the playground and among ourselves, spoke in Mallorcan. It was the natural language. At the nuns', however, Catalan was spoken.

From school to high school

The big change came with high school, at Joan Maria Thomàs. I came from a small environment, a single line, where everyone knew each other, and suddenly I found myself in a huge center, with five or six groups per year. There you were no longer "Miquel", you were just one more. The relationship with the teachers was much colder. They didn't know who you were, or where you came from. At school they knew you from childhood, there was a more personal approach. In high school, this was lost. Nevertheless, I had no problems adapting or making new friends.

It was also in high school where I began to truly become aware of the language. Until then, Catalan was present, but in a diffuse way. From sixth grade on, we had taken that strange subject of "Balearic Language", with a book and very elementary content. But it was all quite superficial. In high school, on the other hand, I had teachers who made a difference. One of them was Damià Pons, whom we called "the blind professor" because he rambled a lot. With him, Catalan ceased to be a secondary matter. There was demand, rigor. He made you think. I also remember Joana Maria Romaguera, along the same lines. With them, the language gained weight and meaning. But not everyone experienced it the same way. There were classmates - even Catalan speakers - who showed rejection. They didn't understand why they had to study it. It was a strange resistance, as if Catalan were an external obligation.

Looking back, my educational experience is a mixture of order, routine, and small moments that changed everything. Teachers who passed by without leaving a trace and others who marked me forever. And, above all, the feeling that, despite everything, there was something within that school that made me want to stay. Because, in the end, if I decided to become a teacher, it's because at some point I saw that it could be much more than memorizing and staying silent.

'My School Years'

is a series by ARA Balears that reconstructs what education in Mallorca was like decade by decade through first-person testimonies.

*Text compiled from the interviewee's testimony