A new schedule

Hello Everyone!

As I mentioned in my last post, my teaching schedule changed on Monday. This means I had my last class with most of my classes last week (except for one of my favorite classes, with which I’ll be working all year). It made me think I should leave all the time – I got tons of hugs and adorable drawings from my CE1 class (my youngest class, approximately the equivalent of 1st grade), and 3 of the students in my oldest class wrote an entire skit in English and put it on in front of the whole class - I was so proud of them!

I started at my new school on Monday, and unfortunately it was kind of a rough day – I showed up for my morning class only to find that the teacher hadn’t prepared for me to be there, so all I did was introduce myself to the class (which took all of 5 minutes), then turned around and went home. This is an hour-long round trip on foot! So, I was already kind of frustrated when I made the trek back out there after lunch for my afternoon class. Unfortunately again, there had been some miscommunication as to when I was coming/when I was supposed to be there. The older classes are in the middle of national testing, so they were sitting down to a mandatory exam when I arrived to do English – and the teacher told me they’d already done English! Needless to say, I was pretty furious that I’d ended up wasting 2 hours of my day fruitlessly walking back and forth between my apartment and this school, so I told them I was going back home and that if my afternoon class asked for me, I wasn’t going to be there. I was scheduled to have another class later that afternoon, but as there was no teacher’s name on my schedule and no one seemed to be able to give me a hint as to which teacher it might be with, I decided I’d had enough of the disorganization and just wrote the day off!

Luckily, yesterday was much more successful, and I actually got to go to all my scheduled classes! Ecole Brossolette, my new school, is literally right across the street from one of my old schools (Ecole de Mouesse), but it’s VERY different. It seems to have a different demographic of students, and most of the teachers strike me as pretty different as well. I guess it’s too early to make observations like that, but that’s how it seems at first glance.

Today was my day off, so Lizzi (my friend with whom I’m traveling during our February break) and I took care of some of the preparations for our grand adventure. We went to the train station to make some reservations, and it seems so much closer now that we have some tickets in hand! In case I haven’t written about it before, I’m going on a big trip with Lizzi during our 2-week break in February, and I’m REALLY excited about it. We’re starting by taking a night train to Rome, then going to Florence, Venice, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich before returning to Nevers.

Before that, though, there’s another exciting weekend coming up next week. One of our other assistants, Eva, has a mother who actually grew up in Nevers, and her family still has a house in La Charité sur Loire, a small town nearby. Lizzi and Eva, who live together, have the same birthday (oddly enough), so we’re going to the house in La Charité for the weekend at the end of January. I think it’ll be a nice way to celebrate a few birthdays and to see yet another small town in the environs of Nevers, so I’m really looking forward to it.

I hope you all are doing well, à bientôt!

[Finally] Starting work!

Dear friends,

I started work on Monday, and I can already tell that this year will be something to remember! First of all, the French school system is VERY different from the American system, and French children are actually quite different from American kids as well. Even though I’ve only been in the French school system for two days, I’m already starting to see where the French bureaucracy and national obsession to detail comes from… Or maybe I’m seeing the result of French bureaucracy and a national obsession to detail – either way, it’s very interesting. Today, for example, I was in a CE2 (Cours Elémentaire 2 – the students are about 8 years old) English class at one of my schools. We were working on asking “getting-to-know-you” questions like “What’s your name?,” “Where are you from?,” etc., so the teacher asked them to make a table so they could record the responses of their classmates. I kid you not, every single one of the nineteen kids in the class got RULERS out of their pencil cases to draw their tables. I’ve also never seen a French person underline something freehand – they always get a straight edge or another piece of paper so as to be able to draw a perfectly straight line. Quelle absurdité!

I am also learning that certain phrases, which I always knew to be uniquement et typiquement français, are learned and utilized from a VERY young age. If you were to ask me for the two most typical French phrases, I would respond with 1) “C’est pas grave!” and 2) “Ah bah oui!!” If you spend any amount of time in France, I can guarantee that you will hear both of these phrases several times a day. In the past few days, I have heard 6-8 year-old French children saying both of these, something I find absolutely hilarious.

But a bit more about my actual job, now that I’ve started and can give you a more accurate idea of what I’ll be doing for approximately 10 hours each week (as I posted previously, they’re having trouble getting me to a “full” 12 hours…) I’ve been assigned to work in 4 elementary schools in Nevers, so my time has been split into 2 halves, and I’m working in 2 schools (Ecole de Mouesse and Ecole Claude Tillier) from now until mid-January and then in the other 2 schools (Ecole Jean Macé and Ecole Brossolette) from mid-January until the end of April. From what I’ve done so far, it seems that my job will consist mostly of working with small groups of students (about 4 at a time), playing games and reading stories – en anglais, bien sûr! According to one of the teachers, the kids always love the English assistants, because they never have to do anything with them but play games!! I also get to put together mini-lesson plans about American culture – for example, I have to put something together on how American children celebrate Halloween for my CE1 (Cours Elémentaire 1 – the students are about 7 years old) class next week. All in all, I think it’ll be quite enjoyable, although I have been warned that there can be some discipline problems in the schools to which I’ve been assigned. They’re all classified as ZEPs (Zones d’Education Prioritaire), which basically means that the kids come from more economically disadvantaged homes. Luckily discipline and punishment is not under my realm of responsibility, so I’m not too worried!

The other assistants and I have been trying to make the most of our time in Nevers and in France, so we’ve been doing all sorts of things we maybe wouldn’t do at home – especially if they’re free! On Monday night, for example, I went with 3 other girls to a dance class for which one of the British assistants had seen a flyer in town. When we walked in, we quickly realized that we were easily the youngest people there by about 30 years… We stayed for the whole hour and danced the cha-cha with old French men – I think we were all just trying to keep a straight face most of the time! (Making the story even better: all 4 of us were taller than about half the men there, something they weren’t shy to point out.) While I don’t think I’ll be going back, it’s definitely an experience I’ll remember (and laugh about!) for a LONG time!

I only have 6 days of work until my first vacation starts, when I’ll be going to Liverpool to visit my cousin for a week. Until then, a few of us are going to Bourges, a town about 45 minutes away, on Saturday – I don’t think I'll be trying to find any parks this time!

A bientôt!