Fast Forward Almost Seven Weeks (Working in France)

[This is the second part of my long overdue update.]

As much as my time in France is feeling more like a paid vacation, I do technically work here, as well. I’m teaching at two collèges (middle schools), one of which is about a 20min walk from where I’m living (collège D), the other which is about a 10min walk and then a 10min bus ride (collège S). – Just FYI, collège is 4 years long (lycée/high school is only 3 years) and includes what we would call 6th through 9th grade. In France, it’s more like a countdown to finally being out of school, so 6th grade is 6ième, but 9th grade is 3ième. Just for clarity’s sake, 7th grade is 5ième and 8th grade in 4ième. Ok, got it?

I’m working 12hr/wk with a total of 8 different teachers in 20 different classes and 1 club. At both schools I’m working with their Euro classes for 4ième and 3ième, ‘Euro” roughly designating those classes as having a more advanced level of English. At collège D, other than the Euro classes, they have prioritized my time with the 6ième and 5ième. Meanwhile at collège S, I will be working with all of the 3ième students in the school and the only contact I’ll have with younger students (other than in 4ième Euro) will be through the club, which will be reserved for 6ième. Clearly, the two schools will be very different teaching experiences and I’ll be interested to see if I come to prefer working with one level over the other.

I officially started work Monday, Oct 3rd and the first two weeks were an observation period in which I sat in on classes and got to see how a typical French classroom is run. Discipline, classroom procedures, etc. Many of these observations morphed into “Interrogate the Assistant” which included such personal questions as “What’s your address?” What’s your phone number?” and the classic “Have you got boyfriend?” You must imagine all these sentences in cute French accents to get the full effect.

I then had one week of “real” teaching were the only lesson plan I had to create revolved around Halloween. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a really fun lesson to prepare and teach, and the classes I did it with really seemed to enjoy it. They especially loved looking at the pictures of my family, myself, and my friends in costume, and they really got into the game of guessing what people had dressed up as. For the other classes I worked with that didn’t get the Halloween lesson (Too bad for them!), the teachers had asked me to work with small groups or one-on-one with students to encourage them to practice what they’ve covered recently in class.

I then had nearly two weeks of vacation, haha! I pinky-promise to write more about that later. I even took pictures! :D

I’ve now been back working for a little over a week, and I haven’t had to prepare anything new yet. For the most part, the teacher’s are still running “get-to-know the assistant” exercises which incorporate the grammar or vocabulary that they’ve been covering in class recently. To be fair, for 6ième, who are just beginning English, basic personal questions and responses are about the extent of their conversational English, so it’s not really a surprise that I’d still be doing that sort of stuff with them. It’s pretty adorable when they are so proud to show me that they can introduce themselves in English. (: Additionally, my schedule had not been finalized during the observation period and there are some classes I’ll only see every other week, so there are a few classes that I am only just now meeting for the first time. I’ve had a couple requests to do lessons on Texas/Houston next week, and I’m so wishing I’d brought a cowboy hat and boots right about now… (But honestly, who am I kidding, I doubt I could even have fit another pair of socks into my suitcases, ahaha.)

I think I said this would be short in the first half of this update…but yeah, maybe it wasn’t. And there’s still so much I haven’t even mentioned! Especially just about life here in France. With only 12hr of work each week, the majority of my time isn’t spent at the collèges... I know these posts mostly contained a lot of information, but I hope to be able to share more interesting details or moments now that I’ve kind of established what my life is like here.