Teaching? Kind of...

It’s now the Toussaint (All Saint’s Day is the English translation) vacation, which means that there’s about a 2-week break in the school period.  Kind of like an extended fall break that I was always jealous of other colleges for having!  I’m back in the United States for 5 sets of medical school interviews- more than likely the last of the interviews I will be doing, since I don’t anticipate coming back again before I’m done teaching.  I’m both excited and nervous!  It’ll be nice to be back at home and see friends and family for a little bit, but medical school interviews are nerve-wracking enough without having to deal with exhaustion from the combination of driving hundreds of miles and fighting jetlag.  We’ll see how things go!  I thought I’d do a little summary of how my teaching is going so far J 

Une carte like this would be helpful

As far as teaching goes- I think that I’ve gotten this point across, but la grève is really really affecting things.  I still have yet to meet the vast majority of my students since they haven’t been in class due to the strike (again- either they’re protesting, they can’t get into the school ground because of the students protesting, or they can’t get to the school because of the bus workers protesting) which makes teaching very difficult.  I’ve seen two different groups twice, which meant that we’ve actually moved on to “doing something” other than having me introduce myself, attempt to describe where Wisconsin is (You know where California is?  Not there… You know where New York is?  Not there… You know where Texas is?  Not there…) and answer questions that they have.  (Although at this point, I think I could hit most of the questions they’re going to ask by also informing them in my intro that I’m 22, have no boyfriend, have one brother, was not a ‘pom-pom girl,’ love American football, like France, like French food, and enjoy running, swimming, cycling, reading, and knitting!)  It is interesting, however, to hear some unique questions.  Several that I faced this last week were: Do you like the United States or France better?  If you want to be a doctor, why are you in France?  Why did you pick Carpentras?  What is your opinion on the death penalty?  Do you like Barack Obama?  and How much does medical school cost in the United States?  I thought the death penalty question was a particularly interesting one- I ended up talking to the student after class and tried to figure out why he was curious what I thought and he told me something along the lines of, “it’s bad to kill people, and I can’t believe the US does it so often.”  He was very surprised when I told him that the death penalty isn’t legal everywhere in the US and that only certain states (Texas was the only one that came to mind?) have the death penalty.  I also enjoy when the students introduce themselves to me and tell me their name, their age, and something they’d like to share (hobbies, interesting facts, etc).  I get everything from the motivated students that tell me “I love English” to a more self- depreciating “I speak English very bad” to the jokesters that tell me things like “I like… American girls” or “My dream is to go to the America… wiss you.”  To be honest, part of la grève has been really nice: working with smaller classes gives students more of an opportunity to talk out loud and less of the fear of being laughed at by their classmates, both of which are incredibly helpful for their progress as English speakers! 

One of the lessons that I liked the best this week was working with one of my BTS classes.  These are the two-year vocational programs after the students take their baccalaureate exam at the end of high school, and the majority of the boys in this particular class are interested in going into ‘automated systems’ or research and development in industry.  I introduced them to the “game” (although a 25-year old student was quick to tell me that it wasn’t a game since there was no winner and no penalties…) of ‘popcorn’ which is to encourage students to read out loud.  I pick the first person, who reads two sentences.  When he’s done, he says “popcorn!” and picks the next reader.  They seemed to really enjoy it, and they didn’t pick on each other as much as I had seen them do in the previous class, probably because they knew that they would be chosen next if they were giving someone else too much trouble.  After they read aloud, I read the page out loud to them so they could hear my pronunciation.  And since there was an error in the text, I asked them to listen to see if they could catch where I said something different than was written, which gave them extra incentive to pay attention.  As in many of my classes, there are a wide variety of different ability levels within the class.  Several are extremely motivated and read with a highlighter in hand to mark any terms that they wanted to look up later, while others try to project a “I’m too cool for this” attitude as a front for the fact that they’re much less able to read/speak in English without significant problems.  One thing that’s definitely going to work to my benefit is that the students would much rather spend the class with me than their normal English teacher- as was obvious in this class, because I only spent ½ an hour with each half of the group before swapping.  I’m not sure if the ½ the class for ½ the time strategy is what I’ll be doing, or if it’ll be ½ the class for the whole period, every other week, for the most part. 

The moral of the story is that I think that the teaching is going well when I’m actually given the opportunity to teach.  The students like me and seem to want to learn English for the most part, so the real struggle will be to just get the students in class!  I’m very hopeful that when I return, some of the retirement debate will be finished and the high school students will be done protesting.  A side note is that a student made my day on Thursday because I was walking down the hall and saw that he was wearing the “Kiss Me, I’m a Badger” t-shirt that the bookstore sells for St. Patrick’s Day J  It’s great that 10 or so of the seniors have been to Wisconsin! 

My new home town!

So… that’s my teaching experience thus far.  Other updates?  I visited the Centre d’Allocations Familiales twice (the first time, they were on strike so I couldn’t go in…) but told the woman the wrong thing, so I haven’t been able to get the forms that I’ll need to fill out to hopefully get a grant from the government to help pay for my housing.  I’ll look into it more and hopefully resolve my issue soon.  I also visited the hospital in Carpentras, which apparently offers stages aka internships that allows students to observe physicians over a certain period of time.  I asked what I need to do to apply, and the receptionist informed me that I need to submit a CV (obviously, in French).  I also had the opportunity to do some exploring in Carpentras, and found a wonderful little park that is along the banks of the river that runs through town.  I’ll definitely be spending a lot more time there from here on out!!

I love love love water- this is my new favorite place :)

For now, I’m really happy to be home J  I’ll post later this weekend about my adventure in arriving here- you can look forward to it!  If you’re in the states, let me know if you want to get together in the next two weeks and tell me when you’re free.  <3