I seem to write a lot of my posts about my life in France outside of the Jean-Henri Fabre campus, but in theory, teaching is the reason that I live here… so as I’m getting ready to head back to teaching after a 3 ½ week vacation, I’ve decided that it’d be a good idea to let you know some of my current thoughts about being a Teaching Assistant. To boil things down, I have four main observations:
1) I never really know what my day is going to be like when I leave in the morning.
My schedule has been “set” since the start of November, but I’m fairly certain that I can count on a single hand, actually make that a single finger, (and that might not even be true…) the number of times that my four-week rotation has ended up being the same in real life as it is on paper. I’ve been told not to come to class for reasons including strikes, illness, exams, field trips, and gym class, just to name a few. It’s also not just that classes are cancelled, but that hours where I alternate on “even” and “odd” weeks (or in my most hectic hour, “even” and “odd A” and “odd B”, meaning that I’m with even, odd A, even, odd B, even odd A, etc which has resulted in one class that I met for the SECOND time on February 17) regularly will flipflop based on the needs of the teachers for the respective classes, meaning that I sometimes plan to work with one class but am told somewhere between 2 hours and 2 minutes in advance that I’ll be working with the other class. In other situations, I do end up working with the class that I had planned to work with, but am given 2 students in 10-minute intervals instead of 12 students in 30-minute intervals or the opposite of 8 students for the entire hour rather than individual students in 15-minute intervals, which as I’m sure you can imagine, greatly influences the way that I have to interact with students. One other perfect example of this happened last week, when I came in to school and was told “You don’t have class this week.” I knew I was going to have an extra week off at some point because of the ‘bac blanc’ exams which are practice exams for the end of the year, but had originally been told it was this week. Fully six months into a seven-month position, I still don’t feel at ease with many of my classes and I know by now to anticipate that I may have to change at the drop of a hat.
2) Sometimes the teachers are helpful, and sometimes they’re not.
I should clarify this statement by saying that all of the teachers I work with are nice. For the most part, they’ve been kind and welcoming and I feel that the majority of them appreciate that I’m here. However, I work with 6 different teachers in the 18 different classes I see and they all have different ideas about how having a teaching assistant in the classroom should work. Since there isn’t necessarily a “right” or a “wrong” way to have me in the class and since there is little/no central organization or training to give them ideas of how to best use me, I don’t blame them in the least for each having differing opinions. My interactions with students vary from staying in the classroom and working alongside the teacher as a support system and an “American English” dictionary (After introducing vocab, I’ll be asked “How would you say this in the US?”) to working with students one-by-one in ten-minute intervals as they practice for an eventual oral exam which will require the presentation of a document to working with 1/6, 1/4, 1/2, or even the entire class (varying between 8 and 18 students) for either half an hour or the entire hour. What is frustrating is that I find there are four options: 1) The teacher has a specific idea about what he/she wants me to do with the students and conveys it to me ahead of time and gives me time to prepare, 2) The teacher has a specific idea about what he/she wants me to do with the students and tells me what to do in the 5-10 minutes before the class, giving me no time to prepare, 3) The teacher has thoughts about what would be best for me to do with the students but doesn’t tell me what that is or 4) The teacher trusts that I can come up with something useful and somehow relevant and gives me full reign over planning and teaching. I tend to appreciate options 1 and 4 most, for obvious reasons, and am particularly frustrated with options 2 and 3.
3) Sometimes the students want to learn, and sometimes they don’t.
In my perfect world, all of the students have an adequate level of English speaking ability and come to class excited and ready to learn about whatever topic I’ve prepared. Wait, we’re not in my perfect world? Shoot. That explains things. Realistically, I think that the students that are apathetic act the way that they do because either they already speak well enough to understand what’s going on and feel that the activity is below them (which happens, but rarely) or because they don’t speak well at all and rather than risking making mistakes in front of their classmates, they choose to goof off and not pay attention. (Which by the way, means that they don’t learn anything and hence don’t improve their skills and then end up acting out in future lessons because they don’t understand… and the cycle continues!) I have a high level of respect for the students that genuinely want to improve, regardless of their current level. I think that sometimes it may also be a “Generation Gap” experience even though I’m hardly older than most of the students. Things that I think will be interesting aren’t that fascinating to them, and vice-versa. Maybe “Culture Gap” would be a more appropriate term, as there are things from the US that I think are trivial and they find absolutely fascinating (see earlier posts for their obsession with “pom-pom girls” for example!)
4) Substitute teachers don’t exist.
I’ve saved the best for last because this is such a shocking concept for me. But it’s so normal in France that every time I have a discussion with a French (or Belgian) person about it, they act like I’m silly to think that it’s so crazy, and don’t want to discuss it the way that I do. In my experience in the United States, my teachers were rarely if ever absent (especially in elementary and middle school, which seems ludicrous in hindsight since so many of the kids are carrying around colds or the flu!) and if they were absent, there was ALWAYS a substitute teacher. I’ve never worked as a sub nor have my parents so I’m not directly linked, but my understanding is that there’s a long list of people in the school district that have registered to be substitute teachers and that if someone’s ill, even the morning before class, they can call in and then the subs on the list will be called until someone is able to come in. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe in the state of Wisconsin anyone with a college degree can be a sub- so I could register when I’m back in the states if I wanted to? Anyway, this all sounds like gibberish to French people. If a teacher is gone, class is cancelled and that’s that. (Except at the elementary school level, where Hannah tells me that the children from this teacher’s class are divided into equal groups and added to another class, where they’ll be given some sort of busy work.) The French don’t even consider getting a sub (remplacant) unless the teacher’s going to be gone for at least two weeks. Every single person I’ve talked to about this subject has had some story about either him/herself or a sibling/friend/neighbor who didn’t have class at all for a week or didn’t have French for three months or only had two days of gym class the entire year. Combined with the two weeks of vacation every six weeks and the regularity of strikes, I understand much better now why some of the students in my classes haven’t had a lot of experience speaking English! Apparently there’s been talk about updating the system and having some sort of organized substitute teacher reserve, but the lack of teachers in France has kept the project on hold. I’d love to hear your experiences with substitute teachers (or the lack thereof…). Am I the only one that thinks this is really really crazy?
Enough reflections for the moment. I’m sure I’ll write more about my teaching experience as more ideas come to mind :) xoxo
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