How did this happen?? Time has flown by so fast, I can't believe I only have two work weeks left until the Christmas holidays.
Well, today was a rough day at work. Let's talk about it.
It's not that any of my classes went poorly exactly, it just didn't go as smoothly as possible and then, there was that one class....that just...ow.
Class #1(4è Euro) - I get to Collège S. about 15 min before my first class. I want to print out some song lyrics that the kids can use to follow along as they listen to the song introducing today's topic (Texas, that's right y'all). The printer doesn't work, again. In fact, I don't think it's been fixed since the last time I tried to use it and it didn't work. This is an aggravating problem since I don't have a printer I can use where I'm living. Anyways, the show must go on, I go to class. We listen to the song in class, with me trying to show them the lyrics on my computer, and we get through it. They really get into singing the chorus, so the song situation wasn't a fail, but we have to hurry through the rest of the lesson since explaining and talking about the song took a lot longer with them not having lyrics sitting in front of them. So not awful, but more strenuous than it really should have been.
Class #2 - Not really a class, but rather the English club for 6è that has a different group of about 10 kids each week. (Extracurriculars aren't really offered at French public schools. i.e. no official sports teams, choirs, bands, etc, but they do offer interest clubs during the second half of the hour and half long lunch break.) We sang "Old MacDonald had a farm" and they had a blast. The lyrics aren't complicated so it was easy to write them on the board. They were excited to show me all the animals they knew the English word for, and we had a fun time figuring out what sounds all the animals make. By the way, what does a rabbit sound like? The kids could make a noise for it, but I had no idea how to write it..
The first club I held was little bit shaky, and I had no idea what to do with 6è students. However, these last few ones have gone really well, and I seem to have gotten the hang of it. In fact, I rather look forward to doing club, as it's meant to be light-hearted and fun, and it's a good pick-me-up at the end of the week.
Class #3 (3è) - This particular prof has asked me to do one-on-one oral evaluations of all of his 3è students (4/5 of the 3è English classes at the school). He prepares a visual prompt for the students and fills me in on what they've been learning/what I should listen for/how I can help them/etc. and I speak with each student for roughly 5 min. This means I speak to about 8 different students during a class period (about 1/3 of the class). So a few weeks ago we did the first round with one particular exercise/prompt and I talked to the first 1/3 of each class. This week we did the second round with an updated prompt. On one hand, oral evaluations make my job really easy, since I don't have to prep lesson plans. On the other hand, oral evaluations can be very taxing while I'm actually doing them. Plus, it gets realllly repetitive after awhile.
This class was the third one that I did oral evaluations with this week, and was about par for the course. A couple really good kids who knock my socks off with their awesome English skillz, a couple really "not good" kids who I have to sort of handhold through the exercise, and the rest of them somewhere in between. So this class was pretty normal.
Class #4 (3è) - So. Well. This is the class that did me in. It was my last set of oral evaluations of the week. And man, it was brutal. It was rough times all around. Every single student, one right after the other, was a really "not good" kid...or worse. I've been told that classes are meant to be balanced, it's against French law to sort kids into classes based on their level, but man, classes like this make me wonder... The second class I did evaluations for this week had mostly really good kids, or those middling ones leaning more towards really good; this was the total opposite.
My task of listening for grammar, listening to see if they could construct sentences on their own using what they'd recently learned, quickly went out the window. Even getting them to understand how the exercise worked was a challenge. Let alone going through the process of urging them to say something more than "Yes" or "No." I would create their answer for them, get them to repeat it after me, pose the exact same question again, and continue to get blank stares. Sad blank stares. I'm sure I didn't enjoy those moments any more than they did. I want them to do well. It was the exact same exercise that was given to their peers, and completed (overall) successfully, but it was clearly beyond their current capabilities.
*sigh*
That was a long hour.
Class #5 (3è Euro) - This class was neither particularly good nor particularly bad. The frustration came from already knowing that it wasn't going to be a stellar lesson, but being locked in so that I really couldn't do much about it. Why is this? Because I had already taught this lesson to the other half of the class last week... The way this particular class works is that I have half of the class each week and I repeat the lesson so that each half of the class has covered the same topic with me. In fact, the prof has specifically voiced his expectation that I do the same thing for each half of the class. So even if I wanted to shake it up, and do something different each week, I'm not supposed to. I haven't really been bothered by this restriction up to this point, in fact, it seemed great, fewer lesson plans to make, yeeeahh. And, of course, it makes sense, having the whole class be on the same page and all.. BUT, this lesson has been a bit of a thorn in my idyllic life of fewer lesson plans = better in all possible ways.
I told the prof that I would be covering Thanksgiving (makes sense, last week it was Thanksgiving), and he approved my suggestion. Without telling me that these kids had covered the Thanksgiving basics last year. Arrrgh. I had prepared a pretty straight forward lesson. Heck, some French kids think Thanksgiving is 'American' for Noël/Christmas. Seriously, they do, they don't understand that it's a completely separate holiday, and in November. So, I got to class last week and quickly discovered that they already knew 90% of what we were going to cover that day. And they were bored out of their minds the entire class. I understand that school can be boring, trust me, I know, but I would have prepared a completely different lesson had I known that they had already learned all of this. Blah.
Unfortunately, I was kind of limited in how much of a makeover I could give the lesson for this week's class since they had to have a comparable lesson to what was done last week. I fiddled around with how I started the lesson, trying to make it more initially engaging, and then shifting the lesson's focus from learning all about Thanksgiving to reading comprehension and speaking/pronunciation, while using a short text that just happened to be about Thanksgiving. But I guessed correctly in that it still wasn't going to be most successful lesson I've ever done.
Live and learn, I suppose.
It was a long day. And I was tired by the end of it.
I am now happy to report that I am relaxing with a glass of wine (a Bordeaux) and a scented candle (lavander), while my space heater (newly-purchase, YES!) makes my room warm and cozy. And now that I've shared (aka processed via dumping it all onto the internet) my day, I'm thinking it's about time for bed. No work tomorrow, so I think my snooze button will be getting a work out come morning.
Bisous
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