Br-r-r-r!

16.10.09

It’s a very chilly morning here in Aiguillon as I update my blog. It’s Friday, i’ve only had one class (very early this morning- 8:15 to 9:10) and I’ve done my grocery shopping. Before a lunch of a ham and egg sandwich on a freshly baked baguette, I’ve decided to heed to my sister’s request and give you all another friendly French update from le Sud-Ouest de la France.
I’m easing slowly into my classes and I’ve finally had two rooms assigned to me so I don’t have to keep running around to the Vie Scolaire at the last minute before the class starts asking someone which rooms will be available. I have one room in the collège and one in the lycée. It’s nice to be able to have only ½ the class, instead of taking on anywhere from 20-35 students at a time (what a hassle!) But I think the longer I teach the easier handling bigger groups will get. Some of my sections are as small as 6 students, some as large as 15. Yesterday I had two new classes, one 4ème and one 2ème. (The school system here goes a bit backwards- collège, or middle school in American, goes from 6ème me up to 3ème, and lycée or high school, from 2ème to 1ère to Terminale). Terminales, however, aren’t necessarily more advanced as I mistakenly thought in the beginning- just because they are older, that doesn’t mean their oral English is more advanced. They are the ones preparing for the BAC (a big oral exam they take at the end of the year that our job as assistants helps them prepare for.) I’ve been trying to find lessons to fit each age group, but due to this initial confusion I have to get a better feel for my classes before I can do any sort of real mapping out for the entire school year. Right now the most energetic, talkative students are my 4èmes, who are mostly 14 & 15, and they seem genuinely very interested in where I come from and what the American culture is like. As soon as you get to the lycéens, however, you get into passive teenager territory and you start getting blank, uninterested, glazed-over stares and lots of side conversations in French. However, I plan on countering this by finding interesting games that will really involve them and get them going instead of sitting and being bored beyond belief. I plan on doing at least one photo-lesson (where I show them a political cartoon or advert and they have to respond to it) every class period, followed by a game of some sort to get them talking. I haven’t had to really discipline anyone yet (hoping that this will be the case for the length of the school year) but in case there are a few delinquents, I have a few different strategies up my sleeve.
Firstly, each student is required at all times to have with them their carnet de correspondance with them- it’s a little booklet where teachers can write down notes about the behavior of the students, and it gets shown to the student’s parents when they’ve done something or behaved inappropriately. Some other assistants have used the “pull out your carnets and have them on your desk!” tactic before, and it seems to have worked- so if worst comes to worst, i’ll do the same.
Secondly, if they get way out of hand, I can request not to have the same students again, and they’ll just stay with their normal english prof while I take my normal sections without them. But I think that would be saved for the more severe cases- so far most of my students are pretty chill and haven’t given me any cause to worry.
I’ve been printing out lots of different role playing activities and dialogues that I want to incorporate with each level of my students. This weekend i’m going to separate the harder ones that require a bit more vocabulary knowledge from the easier ones that have some vocab already given. I have all day tomorrow (Saturday) to plan, after Amy and I get back from Agen. We’ll be going to the big bookstore downtown and I’m going to buy a US map as well as see if I can find any good plays in the English section to use for monologue presentations and the like.
Now to head to the lycée- the fun part about my apartment is that I don’t have Wifi installed here, so I get to take my laptop with me to the school every time I want to update my blog! (cries)


post script- the pictures you've been seeing are only a small sample of those i've been taking during my stay here. Check out the rest of the album on my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22880874@N05/?saved=1