"At Molière we work on individual thinking, analysis and deduction".
28 March 2017
Former pupil and current Molière father, Hugo Peñalosa Madec has returned to the school to send his daughters to school. He finished in 1984, when our school was located next to Pikolín and the courses finished 3ème. After his time at Molière, he did the rest of his studies to go to university, where he chose technical engineering and then went on to obtain a degree in Engineering in England through an Erasmus scholarship. To all this, he added a degree in history, "but that was just for fun," he says.
We talked to Hugo about his professional life and everything that his time at the Molière has brought him on a professional and personal level.
What has been your career path? As an engineer I worked for the Swiss company Sulzer in Zurich, and my intention at that time was to continue working abroad. I even considered moving to Hong Kong, where I spent a short time, as I had two good friends there and there were good job opportunities. But when I least expected it, I ended up returning to Zaragoza for love (I had just met the woman who is now my wife...). Here I didn't feel very comfortable in the industrial sector and I finally decided to take the competitive exams for secondary school teachers. Today I work for the Department of Education of the Government of Aragon in a public adult education centre, where I am the secretary as well as a teacher of mathematics and technology in secondary education and administrator of the online course programme. Mentor Classroom.
Why did your parents choose the Molière? My parents enrolled me in school because my mother is French and in my house the two languages lived together on a daily basis. My mother spoke French to me from birth, and I spent every summer at my grandparents' house in Brittany, where I only heard French and Breton spoken. Choosing Molière was a logical choice and allowed me to spend my childhood immersed in French and Spanish culture, an opportunity I can never thank my parents enough for.
How do you think studying at the Molière has helped you in your profession? Studying at the Molière was decisive for me in the world of work. In addition to French, we ended up with a good level of English, and I believe that learning several languages as a child makes it much easier to acquire others. At university I studied German and then Italian, and it is clear to me that the job opportunities I have had have been closely related to the languages I speak. There were many engineers like me and better than me, but very few could bring several languages to the table, and that was decisive when it came to being selected for job interviews. And obviously I wouldn't have been able to study or work in other countries if I hadn't spoken several languages. In the specific case of my current job, languages did not play a direct role in getting a place, but they were decisive in getting a good placement, since the qualifications I had in each of them gave me a good score for the lists. In a competitive examination it is also important to know how to make the most of the resources available to you, and I believe that my time at the school played a role in a large part of these resources. On the one hand, at Molière, learning did not consist of simply memorising lessons, but rather individual thinking, analysis, mathematical deduction, the search for cause-effects, etc., were worked on a lot. On the other hand, memory was not neglected, but the way to exercise it was through the recitation of poems or texts in class. I believe that all of this together awakens the mind, helps to find solutions to problems more easily and allows one to use one's abilities to the full when faced with a professional challenge or a demanding test.
And as a person, what training in values did it give you? At Molière, academic training was important, but training as a person and as a citizen was just as important, if not more so. Not accepting dogmas or preconceived ideas, but arguing, discussing, deducing, is part of the French tradition and I believe that the teachers tried to put it into practice with us. Secularism was fundamental, based on tolerance and respect for religion, but without introducing religion into the classroom. I remember a discipline based on respect and politeness, which was helped by the fact that the French "tuette" is not allowed when addressing a teacher or a stranger, for example. From school, and also from my home, I have a very strong civic sense. I think it is very important to take care of the public, to make good use of the resources made available to citizens, to vote, to participate in society, not to ignore collective problems, etc., and it is an attitude that I want to pass on to my daughters.
Now that your daughters are studying here, what do you like most about the school? The school has changed in some ways from the one I knew, which was small, family-oriented, where parents were generally very involved, and in most cases were Francophiles or had some connection with France. The current school is different, very big and sometimes it may seem to have a somewhat elitist touch, but I think that in the main it maintains a similar educational line. My wife and I are very happy because our daughters are well cared for, they receive a lot of love and are very happy at school. The fundamental values don't seem to have changed much since my time: secularism, the integral formation of the person and not just their academic training, respect for people and society... In addition to immersion in both cultures, we really like the promotion of creativity through art, especially in Maternelle, the fact that they don't have to learn to read and write too early, but that in the first years they try to develop that creativity. We also like the fact that from the beginning the children's autonomy is worked on and they get used to going on trips with their class, for example, to be without their parents for a few days.
What are your fondest memories of your time at the Molière?
Any anecdotes? I have very good memories of the teachers in general. Of M. Baccali, with whom I took my first steps in reading and writing. Of Maite Oger, our CP teacher, who took such good care of us that it was like having a second mother at school. From Mme Valls, who taught us English very well and who I remember used a very modern "audiovisual" method for the time, based on cardboard figures with Velcro that she attached to a felt screen. From Jean-Luc Guiraud, our profe from gourds and physics in secondary school, who transmitted our interest in science through very experimental teaching (even though we did not have adequate facilities or a laboratory), and he kept us up to date with scientific and environmental developments that were still almost unheard of at that time. And, above all, I remember Paul Chopin, our French teacher, very fondly. He was a very cultured person, with a wide range of interests, who could give us a grammar lesson, bring us a painting to analyse in class, talk to us about a medieval tapestry or show us a video of a play by the Comédie française, and always with a very sardonic humour (he used to call me "mon cher Victor", after Victor Hugo...). I remember Solange García, whom I hardly had as a teacher, but who was a great person, José the cook who, instead of telling us off, would give us a piece of fruit if we stuck our noses out of the kitchen door, Helène Zubizarreta, the school secretary, always smiling... and many others. And what is unforgettable for me is when the school moved to the premises on the road to Logroño. It was a big house in the middle of the countryside, with fruit trees, hedges and bushes to hide behind, and grass that was sometimes almost as tall as we were. I remember us being feral, like village children, climbing up to the albergeros and eating the green, sour fruit because we didn't have the patience to let it ripen. When I think back on all that, I think we were very lucky.
