Pandora's box

Our initial optimism at starting a comenius project was seriously dented when we started to see the volume of material that was out there on the web. Hundreds of projects that people have posted, thousands of documents about comenius. A seemingly endless list of institutions and EU departments that had something to do with it. It was daunting to say the least.

Our first meeting with Joan Serra at IES Joaquim Bau was a very positive and successful one if a little intimidating. He was very straight with us and immediately told us that a project meant an awful lot of work. Tons of paperwork and a long series of problems. We had already found a couple of pages where we had been looking for partners in a potential project and we had soon seen that what everybody was after was a project that someone else would coordinate and that was already up and running. Having sent a couple of hundred e-mails and having received only a few replies we were toying with the idea of coordinating a project ourselves. Joan's reaction was immediate, "don't even think of doing it," he said. It is too much paperwork for people who have not seen a project before. He explained to us that in his first contact with Comenius he had just participated in a project that was coming to an end, his school hadn't actually been involved but they had been invited by an English school to participate in a teacher's visit as observers. Then in the first official project in which they participated, along with their tame English school, they had just been partners while the English school had coordinated and it was only in that moment that they had actually taken the plunge and started their latest project as coordinators. He was very definite about the problems we would face if we wanted to coordinate a project and we left his school resolved to resume our search for a project that already had a coordinator.

I soon decided to create a new e-mail address, comeniusiesroquetes@hotmail.com, precisely for the purpose of mailing potential project partners. I was taking the addresses of people with project off the page we had found and mailing an average of fifty or more mails a week. I received replies to about 40% of the mails I sent. Over the next few weeks I actually got quite friendly with some of the people I was exchanging mails with.

Then we had the meeting we had arranged with Núria Estrada. Anna couldn't attend the meeting so I went alone. We talked over what we had discovered up to that point and how we were finding all the material. She kindly steered me in the right direction and gave me a few pointers as to where I should be looking for things that turned out to be very helpful. Curiously enough she also said that she saw no reason why we shouldn't coordinate our own project if we wanted to and that it shouldn't have been a lot of work really. That did make me puzzled in light of what Joan had said, of course now I know why but then it was strange.