Day One

Okay, this is it - this is the day I actually write about the teaching I came to this country to do. I have to say that, as the person living it, I found today surprisingly uneventful (not that that stopped me from writing a bloody novel). Of course, considering the alternative, perhaps that's a good thing. Since I cover fairly basic stuff ("What is your name?", "Where are you from?", etc.), most of my commentary will be fairly general, and possibly a bit dry for it. If you find it that way, I do apologize.

In a bizarre miracle, I made it to school on time. I woke up at 6, which is altogether too early for France. I got ready, left a note for Martina and Erika wishing them good luck on our first day teaching, and walked to the boulangerie (bakery) to grab a croissant and pain au chocolat for breakfast. 1 euro 55 cents. First victory of the day. I made it to the bus station by 7:10 to catch my 7:30 bus.

So, now that I've truly earned the title of "my father's son," what do I do for 20 minutes?

Oh. That works.

This bus... full of surprises: 20 minutes late, broke down halfway to St-Vallier, and then - for no good reason - unexpectedly dropped me right in front of the school (instead of a sizable walk away) 5 minutes early. Also, sorry to keep pickin' on my father, but I've found the last untapped way to make him hate his commute more, which is by comparing it to mine:

So, for fear that I actually get to the point and talk about working with little French kids, I'm going to take a paragraph or three to explain how a French elementary school is set up. My students run the gamut from 6 to 11 years old (but damned if I'll be teaching them the word "gamut"). They're divided roughly as follows:

CE1: 6-8 years old
CE2: 8-9
CM1: 9-10
CM2: 10-11

Whereas grades in the U.S. are dictated mostly by age, these divisions are a bit more sensitive to skill level. Naturally, they're not going to put a 7-year-old in CM2, even if he is bloody brilliant, but you can think of these levels as school grades with a dash of meritocracy à la those reading groups you had in third grade.

Also, despite my title of "assistant," I run the show. Resources and staff are supposedly tighter in elementary schools than other levels... I can't vouch for other towns in the region, but it's definitely true up in Grasse and St-Vallier de Thiey. I was alone in the classroom for one or two of my groups today. The homeroom teachers split their classes, gave me half for my 45-minute class, and worked with the other half on something else in the meantime (which is actually how we did it in my elementary school). But I also worked with a few entire classes, meaning the teachers were in the classroom to help. In these cases, they did some crowd control and/or used their English to help me demonstrate question-and-answer routines.

"Which question and answer routines?" I hear you ask. Well, not really, because this is a one-sided conversation typed on the internet, but indulge my unwieldy attempt at a transition.

First up today: about 16 CE2 kids (8-9 years old) a bit on the talkative side. I opened with a very simple song whose title is "Hello, my friends, hello." It's an apt title for this song, because those are the only words in it. But it's a song, it's easy to pick up, and it's in English, so the kids loved it. The rest of the lesson was - and they're all going to be this way - pretty straightforward: I taught them to ask and answer two questions: "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?".

I stuck to oral activities: having them repeat the words after me and building up to the full expression, then me asking them their name, then them asking me my name, then them asking a partner, and finally a unified chain where one says "My name is Jean-Claude" and asks somebody else in the room "What is your name?" Then they answer and ask somebody else until we make it most (or all) of the way around. Same with "Where are you from?" During orientation, they discouraged us from doing too much written work, especially not with the younger ones, and I felt most confident relying on myself as an activity for the first day, rather than printing out tons of color-in worksheets (but those will have their day...s).

For sake of simplicity, I planned to teach pretty much the same thing to all five of my classes today. Of course, my second class (CM1, 9-10 years old) was a bit more advanced and required some improvisation. So, I did, taking the opportunity to explore what they knew and what they didn't. CM1 had the same drill, but when they mastered "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?" fairly quickly, I decided to move on to something a little more subtle.

Big difference between English and French: gendered nouns. In French, the "chair" you're sitting in is female. A "name" is male. Fellow English-speakers, I have to say, I don't think you're missing much. But the point is, French students using possessive pronouns ("his", "her", "its") are used to choosing "son" or "sa" based on the gender of the thing possessed, rather than its possessor. So, can I get a whole lesson - and ten minutes of review tomorrow - out of "What is his name" and "What is her name"?

You better believe it. And you better believe the kids did a rockin' awesome job with it.

After those back-to-back classes, it's now 10:00 AM, and I have a half-hour break. I chat with my very nice colleagues, get a request to tutor that I'll likely take, arrange a carpool, and explain for the fifth or sixth time in the last week that, thank you very much, but I don't drink coffee.

10:30 - time for CM2.

These kids blew me away. They knew "What is your name?" and everything in a 10-kilometer radius. I exhausted "do you prefer _____ or _____?", "What is your favorite color?", colors, "Where are you from," and "How old are you?" This was mostly me reviewing and getting a sense of what they've covered. If I had these kids stand in front of the class and do a fairly complicated introduction dialogue tomorrow morning, I have little dobut they'd all do fine. The best part was that they were still into it and understood basically all of my directions, which means I've got license to do something more complicated and fun with them tomorrow. I had dispensed with "Hello, my friends, hello" because I thought it would be too simple for them and that they might be too cool for singing, but a girl came up to me at the end and asked if we would sing a song tomorrow.

And then it hit me. Ladies and gentlemen, The Fabulous Beatles.

I had visited the school briefly last Tuesday as part of orientation week, and I had arranged to get school lunches for the duration of my contract. For a euro fifty, I got couscous with vegetables, tender turkey cutlets in good sauce, delicious oranges, and bread with brie. Victory count: 6.

That was all at Collet de Gasq, an intimate school whose building I rather like, architecturally speaking. My schedule was a bit tight today, so I didn't have time to get pictures. Those will come soon. (I'm also nearly ready to launch my photo album.) I walked over to Emile Felix for a CE1 class (the littlest ones in my domain), which was the bare basics of "What is your name?" Same drill as earlier, but these kids were so small and had glasses almost as big as their heads and they freaking loved it. It was adorable.

Also, I'm taking wifi off the street and one of the kids I taught today just walked by and said "bonjour". Umpteenth victory of the day.

Last class of the day was another CM1 (9-10)... this one was a little dicey, but mostly went well. "What's your name?" and "Where are you from?", pretty basic. The kids were slightly talkative, and though the teacher was there and helped quiet them down a bit, it didn't always help. I did score a few laughs by demonstrating a question/answer with the head from their model skeleton, Pascal.

One day, when these kids have grown up a bit, one of them is gonna' watch Hamlet, and during the Yorick scene, stand up and shout "That's my English teacher!"

That's pretty much it... Oh, parting thought: I'm in a pretty sweet position, teaching-wise, because I have two things going for me: I smile, and I'm American. Apparently, in the mind of the average French child, this is enough to make just about anything I do interesting. And if my lesson's kinda' lame? It doesn't matter to them, 'cause I'm interesting, and I don't sweat it because my speaking English to them is the most important part, anyway.

I'm fairly sure almost all of these kids learned today's material last year. But they're kids - they forget it from year to year. Which is fine, really - my French is good, and I may have started in kindergarten, but I didn't actually learn any of it until 7th grade. What's really key to teaching youngsters a foreign language - and what I can actually do - is presenting them with a native speaker's accent at a young age and (hopefully) making the language classes enough fun that they'll actually want to keep learning it in the coming years.

Of course, it's also a lot about making sure they want to keep learning it in the coming days. And an enthusiastic chorus of "Goodbye!" when I pass them on my way out the school's gate is victory enough for day one.

-Andy



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The link in the first paragraph is a clip from a classic French film, 'Zero de Conduite', which means "Zero for Conduct" (as in an elementary/middle school grade). We watched it in New Wave Cinema a few years back. I still have no idea why.