Escuela!

This week was the first full week of classes at the lycée, though I use the word ‘full’ rather loosely since we are in France. I will not be working Tuesdays, due to some odd French idea that teachers should have one of the five weekdays off. I thought that was the point of a weekend, but I’m just a silly, overworked American, so what do I know?

Monday we had an orientation for all the language assistants in Ile-et-Vilaine (my region of Brittany). It was in Rennes, so in theory I had it easier than a lot of people to get there. Of course, that doesn’t account for my ability to get amazingly lost. It turned into quite the adventure, and the moral of the story is this: do not, ever, trust google maps in France.

Okay, so that’s actually a bit of an overstatement, since I’ve been using it to much success until this point (as have many of the other assistants). However, it just so happens that they place Lycée Victor et Helene Bausch over two metro stops away from where it should be. And, Brittany being Brittany, it was of course pouring rain. Naturally. That’s okay, it wouldn’t be a real adventure if you weren’t dripping wet and rather cold in addition to being lost. It turns out we were at least a twenty minute walk away from the school. The entertaining part was meeting all the other lost assistants along the way. I met Patricia, from Argentina, Carmen, from Spain, Rachel, from the US, and a good dozen other people whose names I have since forgotten. Once we made it to where the school was supposed to be, we got led astray because the bus stop for the school was actually at some government building that resembled a school, so we wandered around there for a while first. And when we found the school, we ran into another big group of lost assistants wandering the grounds lost. There were several buildings to the school, and no one knew what building we were supposed to be in, so we did some more wandering then. One of the guys had asked a teacher for help finding out where we were supposed to be and she just scolded him for being late, so that wasn’t hugely helpful. By this point I was melodramatically wailing that I was leaving Brittany and moving back to Provence.

Eventually we all arrived, at least a half hour late, dripping wet, and very cold. Adventures ahoy! I don’t think we missed too much, and once we got there we just listened to people talk at us all morning. Not so exciting. Lunch was quite entertaining—I sat with one American, one Canadian, one Spanish (is that how you refer to someone from Spain? I think so, but it sounds odd), one Austrian, and one British (that also sounds odd). Yay for multiculturalism! It was a lot of fun talking to people and I liked that French was usually the only common language. In the afternoon, we were divided into groups based on the languages we’d be assisting with, and a teacher from the lycée talked to us about our role. It was really interesting to hear some pieces of advice that sounded contrary to what we’d hear in the US. Our leading teacher told us to never ask the kids for their opinions, because “they have no opinions!” I was taken aback by that, since in the US we usually encourage students to talk about their opinions. We also got a serious lecture about how we should never, ever discuss religion. Apparently even mentioning that the reason the pilgrims came to the US was for religious freedom is off limits and will have kids complaining that this isn’t Catholic school. After an exercise about how to structure a lesson (the two girls I worked with and I made the central ‘document’ of our lesson the lyrics to “Papa Don’t Preach”), we were released.

I decided to go with another group who promised they would get me to the metro at some point. We ended up walking all the way back into the city, but it was nice to move a bit after sitting most of the day. The group was composed of mostly British and American girls, and I met another girl who’d gone to school in Wisconsin (Beloit) who knew one of the girls I went to high school with, so that was quite exciting. Once we reached the center of the city, I hopped on the metro, then the bus, ate dinner with Jean-Paul and Denise, then crashed because I was exhausted from getting up at quarter to seven. I can’t believe I used to get up at 4am several times a week of my own free will. I don’t think I knew what sleep was before I got to college.

Tuesday it was supposed to be sunny. It was not. I went for a run in the rain, which was rather unpleasant, and then I went to run a few errands in Rennes. Much excitement, as you can see. Oh, except Jeanne and Nicholas were over again (yes!) and I showed them pictures of Sue and the Field Museum since they were big fans of dinosaurs. It was fun.

Wednesday was my first real day of work, but it was rather uneventful. My first class, which was a bunch of premieres (second year of French high school, equivalent of juniors since there are only three years of high school over here), was taking a test and the teacher had divided the class in two. I was charged with watching one group and making sure they didn’t talk to each other. Terribly eventful. I didn’t have a class after that, but I went with the same professor to her next class so I could be entertained. This class (also premieres) was much smaller—it only had seven students. I talked with them a little bit about where I was from and tried to get them to ask me some questions or talk to me a bit. They weren’t very chatty, although there was one girl who had a lot of interesting things to say. She’s an exchange student from Ecuador here for the year, and her level of English is much higher than everyone else’s in the class. After that course, I went to a class of terminales (seniors, not the terminally ill) with a different professor. They’re currently reading My Antonia, and I’m excited to work on that with them. Of course, they’re mostly concerned with basic plot comprehension, so I rather doubt I’ll be able to go off on rambles about genre and theme and competing discourses. That’s unfortunate.

My day concluded there, since my school doesn’t have class Wednesday afternoons. I do not understand why. I’m rather entertained by the French work ethic. Last time I was in France I was attending an American-based institute, so we didn’t get a whole lot of holidays. True, we didn’t have classes on Friday, but that’s not unheard of in the college world. Classes were rarely canceled, and I only saw two grèves (strikes) the entire time I was in Avignon. I’ve already had several classes canceled this week, and thanks to the threatening retirement reforms, the French are grèving like there’s no tomorrow. There’s at least one strike and protest (manif) every week, and there have been a couple weeks with two. Also, I’ve just now started work, and there’s a week and a half break coming up in two weeks. They have quite a different view of work in relationship to the rest of their lives, which is both refreshing and irritating (would it really kill a bank to be open on a Monday? Really?).

Thursday I had a later start, which meant I got to go for a run (this time in only a drizzle instead of rain. Hurray!). My first class was canceled, so I ended up eating lunch with Adriana and several other professors, which was fun. Cafeteria food here is AMAZING. I cannot say enough good things about it. They have an impressive variety of cheese and fruit and yogurt and desserts at every meal, accompanied of course by some delicious bread, and the entrées are pretty darn good, too. I was surprised at first that the teachers ate the cafeteria food, but I quickly understood why. I’ll probably be eating at the cafeteria several times a week, particularly because I only have to pay €2,40 a meal. Quite a good deal! My next class was a bunch of secondes. I can’t decided if secondes are more like freshmen or sophomores. They’re the same age as sophomores, but they act more like eighth graders if you ask me. I introduced myself to them and answered some of their questions. Whenever they ask how old I am, I’ve been saying 73. I don’t want the younger ones to know how young I am (the terminales are calm enough to keep my age from being an issue), but messing with them also gives me a second to see how good their English is. You can pick out who can understand quickly by the laughs and the mutterings of “Soixante treize? C’est pas vrai!” You can also see who just nods and is clearly not paying attention. Anyway, several of the male secondes (once they stopped trying to ask me out on a date) decided that I was useless since I told them I didn’t watch much soccer. It might have also been the fact that I told them my favorite movie was The Sound of Music…which is not at all a lie. I did manage to impress them with a picture of Chicago pizza. It got a pretty good reaction out of them, which I thought was hilarious. My last class was another class of secondes—35 of them! Poor French teachers. I just observed that class. They were working on listening comprehension and correcting apostrophe and irregular verb errors.

Friday I was supposed to start early, but my first class had a test, so the professor told me not to come, and the professor of the second class decided he wanted me to come in later and work with a group of terminales later in the day rather than the secondes. I slept in, which was quite nice, and even nicer was the fact that I woke up to SUN and weather in the 70s. Thank goodness. The terminales were a much more expressive group than the last terminale group I’d seen. The first question I got asked was whether or not I’d met Michael Jordan, and the kid who asked that is my new best friend for knowing something about Chicago. There was another kid who was quite curious about my political views, and kept asking me what I thought of Obama, Sarkozy, and politics in general. I decided to be diplomatic and just say that most politicians were better than Bush. It’s hard to go wrong in France if you put down Bush. The second half of the class was spent discussing stereotypes that the French have about Americans and that Americans have about France, which was pretty fun. My last class of the day was canceled, so that was my ‘full’ work week!

Friday evening I went out with a group of about twenty assistants. One of the German assistants who’s teaching in Bains-de-Bretagne wanted to come in to Rennes for his birthday, and his roommate is British and spread the word to all the English assistants. We went to the Irish pub because it was the only place with enough seating for all of us, and it was a really good time. I ended up at a table with mostly Germans and Austrians, and one other American, and it was fun getting to know them. I feel like I tend to meet more of the English language assistants, so I was excited to talk to people from other countries. It was also fun to speak all French since that was the only common language. I spent a lot of time talking to Sarah (German) and Thomas (Austrian)—Sarah’s an assistant in Vitré, and Thomas in Fougères. Thomas is really into movies and the poor thing got stuck sitting next to the girl whose favorite movie is The Sound of Music. He kept going on about various films that were amazing, both international and American, NONE of which I had seen. He made a list of them for me to look into. Sarah has a pretty cutting sense of humor, so naturally she and I hit it off. She says that there are tons of castles and medieval buildings in Vitré, so at some point I’m going to visit her. All in all, it was a very fun evening and I’m sad that I made friends with people who don’t live in Rennes. I do this a lot.

The rest of this weekend will probably be pretty quiet. It’s still gorgeous out, thank goodness, so I plan on taking advantage of that. I need to come up with some vocab on indigenous North Americans (which I can handle) and new technology (which I cannot handle and know nothing about), and that’s about it.

A la prochaine!