Starting Teaching...

After my last blog post, it was the school 'half term' which lasted 2 weeks and so, due to lack of money to do anything, I decided to go home. I spent 10 days catching up with friends and family before returning to Lille to begin working properly.

So far, I work around 10 hours a week, the teachers are trying to get me 2 more hours so that I will be doing the full 12 hours that I am allowed to do. I am teaching (assisting) the 'Seconde' classes who are around 15 years old.

Here are some of the main events of the past 2 weeks of teaching:

• Some days, I start work at 8am and so I go for the bus at 25 past 7, so that I can arrive and have plenty of time to climb up all of the stairs to the 4th floor and not be sweating and panting like mad. As I leave this early (and as it is winter time and therefore dark more than it is light), I have seen such beautiful sunrises, it almost makes getting up so early worth it.

• I woke up last Friday to a very annoying buzzing and immediately knew that it was a mosquito. I pulled the duvet up so that just my face was peeking and felt something tickle my face so I smacked it and hurried to turn on the light, only to see that there was a squashed mosquito on my pillow and MY blood that it had been feasting on. I woke up later on with a lovely bite ON MY EYELID and so looked like Quasimodo until I got some cream. -Thankfully it didn't swell up properly until after my classes.

• My first ever lesson, I was given half of the class to go through a sheet about Jamie Oliver, I had no idea what to do and the class were laughing and talking, completely ignoring me. One student started reading out in a silly voice and I was so stressed out I didn't even call him out on it because I was scared he would say it was his real voice.....Since then, it has become a lot easier. I actually enjoy the lessons now that I've stopped taking it personally when they would rather chat to their friend than do the work that I have set them.

• A lot of my classes struggle with my accent, so I end up talking very slow and trying to sound posh, but even then one teacher told me that the students had finished my lesson and been convinced that I was Australian!?!?!

• I was asked to play a game with the students where 2 students were suspects in a murder investigation and had to be each others alibis while the rest of the class were detectives and asked questions, but I got the game wrong and had half the class be detectives asking the other half questions. My 'wrong' version actually worked a lot better than when I tried to play the real game and the students had so much more fun coming up with their own imaginary stories. Their English is amazing, I was walking around each small group to help them with vocabulary and sentence structure and overheard one girl saying 'I was his bodyguard, I heard him shout and so I broke down the door and found him on the floor, he was blue because he wasn't breathing! I hadn't heard anything, but I looked around and couldn't see any evidence of a break in so I felt his pulse and he was dead..'.

• I had a class of 11 students who wanted to move the tables into a U shape so that I could stand at the top and help them with work, but there was one student in my class who is 12 but has been moved up a few grades because he is very intelligent. The class were all picking on him, so he did not want to sit with the rest of the class in the U shape and he sat alone. I tried to compensate for not being good enough at French to tell them to pack it in and so was being overly nice to him for the whole lesson.  Another group of students in this class instead of wanting to talk about their 'ideal school' were cutting up each others pencil cases. Ah, teenagers..

• Whenever I run out of activities, or more often when the class is refusing to take part and I can't think of anything else to do, I turn to tongue twisters. I write something like 'The big bug bit the little beetle but the little beetle bit the big bug back' on the board and each student has a go. They really enjoy it and even after the lessons I hear them telling their friends in the corridor. HOWEVER.. normally the class will then demand that I have a go at a French tongue twister and although I've done the same one several times, I still find it hard: 'Les chaussettes de l'archiduchesse sont-elles sèches?  Archi-sèches ?' 

• Each class that I have for the first time, I ask 'does anyone have any questions for me? About England? Or my life?' and some classes straight away have their hands up 'How long are you in France for?', 'Where are you from?', 'Do you gave a boyfriend?' etc. etc. - although one student said 'a little boy' instead of boyfriend because in French it is 'petit copain' or 'petit ami' which literally translates to little friend. Anyway, the more common response to my question is complete silence, they all stare and shake their heads whispering 'elle a dit quoi?' (what did she say?) , 'je ne comprends rien' (I don't understand) or simply...'Non' (no).

Other than teaching, I haven't been up to much, I've been attending a group called 'Franglish' each Tuesday, where you sit and talk to a French partner for 7 minutes in English and 7 minutes in French and then swap partners. It is interesting, but I find myself having the same conversations over and over in terrible French until I've had a couple of drinks...

The Christmas market is finally being set up and so I'm very excited for that opening very soon! Only 6 weeks to go till Christmas!