Although this is rather late, I thought I ought to report my findings from my two weeks of teaching. Right now, I'm back in Englefield Green for my Touissaint holidays with a good cup of tea. So far I've been completely stuffing myself with good old British fare and playing lots of Assassin's Creed on Alex's PS3 (also bought the new one - booyah!).
Perhaps you are wondering how I travelled from Fauville-en-Caux to dear old Egham? I drove nearly 400km in total. I drove to Calais, hopped on the Eurotunnel and then up from Folkestone to the Green. BTW I've never driven for more than an hour and a half before and never driven in England let alone on a motorway after driving in France for over a month! FML! Happily, the drive to Calais was absolutely fine. Roads in France are typically fairly clear except during rush hour but the most cars that I ever had around me on the motorways was about four. I used my trusty Tom-Tom to get me to the Eurotunnel and it took me to the freight place full of massive lorries. I was not impressed. Thankfully I had left plenty of time ahead for me to faff around and get lost but I eventually made it to the Eurotunnel terminal and actually managed to hop on an earlier train.
I had a little nose around in the shops in the Eurotunnel terminal and was horrified to find that it sold Jacob's Creek, Echo Falls, Hardys, Gallo Family next to the amazing French wine. SERIOUSLY?! WHO COMES TO FRANCE TO BUY THAT CRAP?! So I got my car onto the train no problem and it set off. I read War Horse on my Nexus 7 as we went along but then the train stops early and a message goes out saying that there's a 'technical problem'. I pretend to calmly carry on reading but my head is just going 'OMG I'm actually going to DIE here. In this random tunnel under the sea. omgomgomg it can't end this way.' We were delayed for half an hour but I obviously made it here unscathed.
I got to the UK and got onto the M20 and my first thought was 'Why does everyone drive so slowly here?!' (Obvious sign that I'm becoming French). My second thought was 'It's SO. BUSY. HERE.' Still I soldiered on and nothing went wrong until the M25 where I was stuck for an hour in heavy traffic; I was not impressed. Took a wrong turn coming off the M25 and accidentally went to Staines (URGH!) but I made it to the Green safely with my precious cargo of French wine and cheese which I was sorry to say was ponging a bit after sitting in my car for seven hours!
So anyway my first couple of weeks of teaching have gone quite smoothly. I already identified 4e (Year 9) to be the troublesome age group in my school. There are some massive pains in the class; when I speak to the staff about certain kids even the nicest of them struggle to find clean language to describe them). Side note: found it childishly hilarious that one of these awful children is called 'Gaylord', and that's genuinely his first name. Poor kid.
Generally I find that 6e and 5e (Years 7 and 8) are quite eager to learn and love playing little games whereas 3e (Year 10) are a lot more serious. In France they do their brevet (GCSE equivalent) at the end of 3e and then do their bac (A-Levels) for three years instead. It is fairly common in France for kids to re-take years so a lot of people are older than eighteen when they leave school.
So teaching 6e, 5e and 3e went really without a hitch. They were generally responsive and some classes are an absolute dream to teach. There's one class that I like to privately refer to as 'The Angel Faced Class'. It's a class of kids that pretty much all have the most adorable innocent faces and they're all very eager and a general joy. LOVE THEM.
Back to 4e. Not all of them are bad, there are some really sweet ones that really genuinely want to learn and are constantly raising their hands but some just are so completely insolent! shoghaskhtktfit - I don't even have the words to describe how frustrating they can be. There are kids that are brazen enough to throw things at one another right in front of me when I'm speaking to the class. So out of nowhere this amazing teacher voice comes out and starts letting rip and yelling at the class. The stunned looks on their faces are pretty hilarious. It's so obvious that their first impressions were 'Right, she's young, she might not even speak French, and she's a short girl. We're going to completely take the piss with her and she probably won't be able to control us HEHEHE'. After the shouting at the class they were more like 'Okay, maybe we should behave a bit better.' Ten minutes later and they're chatting again. *rolls eyes*. It's quite bizarre really being back in a noisy school after being at university where lectures and seminars are basically silent.
My first classes were all really focused on introducing myself to the kids, for the younger ones it was on a more basic level like my name, age, nationality, number of pets etc. but for the older ones I had prepared a presentation. I found that I connected with the kids when I talked about films I liked like The Avengers and Despicable Me which I learnt is called Moi, moche et méchant in France. I also took questions. They all like asking about Gangnam Style, One Direction and Justin Bieber; I was not impressed. -_- One sweet 6e boy wanted to ask whether I had a boyfriend but didn't have the vocabulary for it and ended up saying 'Do you have a man of your life?' which I thought was so adorable!
Generally they're good kids who want to learn and I'm excited about teaching them. A couple of the teachers have observed my classes and say that I'd make a good teacher - eek! For the rest of my time in the UK I'll continue to relax, eat and play Assassin's Creed before I head back to dear old Fauville-en-Caux for a good boulangerie baguette (man, I miss those things).
TTFN!
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