All Work and No Play? I Think Not!

First things first, I’m sending a very special birthday shout-out to MARY! – one of my roommates from my college years (oh so long ago) as well as a classmate from high school (which feels like an eternity ago, especially now that I work at a high school). I hope you’re having “all the fun” in celebration of your special day ;)

Well, folks, I’m four for four in terms of meeting my goal of daily blog posts. You’d better tell the Falcons to watch out cuz I’m coming after their perfect record! I wish them well against the Cowboys in a little while. I actually have some male students here in France who know a little somethin’ somethin’ about the NFL, believe it or not. One guy was wearing a Redskins sweatshirt one day, but I don’t think he understood what I was asking when I tried to bring it up. They’re often frightened by my use of English. Two other guys stayed after class one day to ask me why I didn’t support the New Orleans Saints. I was like, “Did you miss the part of my introduction when I said I was from Atlanta?” It’s a matter of principle…

Anyway, look at me rambling in my introduction. Let me get into it before y’all stop reading. Enjoy – ML

Wednesday, October 17 – Hit replay; Spelling names; Lots of lesson planning; 50 centimes; Showtime!

·         Woke up super early because I wanted to gather some post-Presidential debate material to use in my classes.

o   The debate had ended at 4:30 am on Wednesday morning in my time zone, which would have been 10:30 pm on the East Coast in the U.S. So I got dressed at 5 am and started looking for commentary at 5:30 before eating breakfast and packing my lunch. (Keep in mind that my first class on Wednesdays is at 8:25 am about an hour away – if all goes well – in the suburbs. So I’m, like, in my classroom ready to teach at that time, not getting off the bus at the gate of the school.)

o   During the portion of our Fulbright orientation that was specifically geared towards us 6 English Teaching Assistants, an alumna of the program had suggested that we could get around the problem of not having Wifi in our schools by playing Internet videos in advance on our laptops then just hitting “replay” once we were in our classrooms. So, since the Internet signal in my room at the Foyer wasn’t cooperating enough to handle media (as is often the case), I played a bunch of video clips of highlights from the debate in different tabs on my laptop in the common room on my way out the door.

·         Got to my classroom early enough to find out that the videos weren’t going to play. But that was alright.

o   Actually, I work with the same teacher for all of my Wednesday classes (although I only had 2 out of 3 on this day cuz the BTS = associate’s degree kids students were away doing internships), and she likes to split the period with me so that I get to work with every student every week instead of every other week. Of course, this means that I only get to have each half of the class for a maximum of 25 minutes. And let me tell you, that time flies.

o   Class 1 @ 8:25 – «Première» = 11th grade, « Littérature » (=Literature) track = one of the three “general” (as opposed to “technological”) tracks from which students choose beginning in 11th grade; sadly, literature is usually seen as kind of the “cop-out” or “least challenging” option as compared to the sciences (most challenging, supposedly) and social sciences (middle-of-the-road)…and before you start saying “That’s a shame!”
 let me remind you that we have the same perspective in the States, which I can attest to as a possessor of degrees in French and African-American Studies who often receives a certain “look” from those who went to college to get degrees with dollar signs attached; this group of students has actually elected to take « Anglais Approfondi » (=Advanced English) as opposed to taking another foreign language at this level; 20 students in my charge overall, split into 2 groups that I see for 25 minutes each during the period

§  As I mentioned in the 10/10 entry, I didn’t get to do a formal intro with a Q&A session with this group last week because they were too busy trying to understand a Young Turks video debate on the NYC soda ban, and on 10/3 I was at my required orientation session on behalf of the school district. So I spent a few minutes at the beginning just telling these students who I was and letting them ask me their obligatory American-in-Paris questions (see 10/4-10/5 for samples).

§  All we had time for after that was the “What should I do as a tourist in Aulnay?” activity (aka “What do you do in your free time?”) that I first mentioned in the 10/11 entry. This time I added a twist by asking them not only to tell me their names as they gave their suggestions, but also to spell their names in English as I transcribed what I heard on the chalkboard. There were a lot of chuckles (but not mean ones) as students mixed up their vowels based on how they sound in French and blanked on certain letters. They hadn’t realized that they had forgotten something as basic as the English alphabet at their advanced level.

§  It was kind of awkward, though, because the teacher had to come and ask me if I was ready to switch groups rather than me sending the students across the hallway on my own as I had done with her Thursday class the week before when we used this split-class format. I just got so caught up in the moment that I totally lost track of time!

o   Class 2 @ 9:25 am – « Seconde » = 10^th grade, no track selection yet at this age; 24 students in my charge overall, split into 2 groups that I see for 25 minutes each during the period

§  Same as in the other class, minus the introduction, but we didn’t quite get to everyone for the Aulnay activity, which I felt bad about. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given them so much time to talk about their ideas in pairs/groups prior to giving me their responses. Or maybe I talked too much in between their responses, which is highly likely.

§  In any case, l think my journal entry from this evening nicely sums up how I felt about this day: “No debate videos in spite of my early am efforts. But I’m just happy to have found something that’s getting me out of bed so excitedly, even if sometimes it’s frustrating. I want to bring the lessons to life for my students.”

·         Headed to the teacher’s room (as I told you in the 10/11 entry, they don’t translate it as “lounge”) for the better part of the afternoon: roughly 10:30-3:15.

o   Had a quick follow-up meeting with the teacher I worked with on this day (my idea) to see whether the 25-minute format was open for discussion, but she thought it was helpful for the students to see me more frequently PLUS she wouldn’t have to plan her lessons around the alternating breakout sessions with me. In other words, the teachers who send half of their classes with me one week and then the other half the following week have to work hard to keep up with what they’ve taught one group so that they can share the same information with their classmates a week later. This teacher wanted to avoid confusion by teaching all of her students the same material on the same day, albeit in a short amount of time. So I’ll just have to come up with really quick activities!

o   Ate the different components of my lunch periodically as I planned out my lessons for my five classes on the following day using both my laptop to create Word documents and their computers to access the Internet/printers. (Remember that I had eaten breakfast during the 6:00 hour, so I was pretty hungry by 10:30 or so!)

o   Intended to stay through the end of my assigned teaching period (11:35-12:30) because I would’ve felt bad skipping out even though the students were away. I already feel like I’m hardly at work with a 12-hour-a-week schedule, so I’m not trying to cheat the school district out of an hour’s worth of pay. I did not, however, intend to stay until 3:15. That was just how long it took me to do a thorough job of making handouts and thinking through activities for all of the various groups based on what I’d seen last Thursday, especially. And I went ahead and photocopied everything so that I wouldn’t do all that work then show up at school the next day only to learn that the photocopier wasn’t working or something. Then again, they’re working hard enough just to keep the lights on at my school because of overloaded circuits, I think. And it’s already in a ZEP = « zone éducation prioritaire » or what we’d think of as a low-income district. So I shouldn’t pick on them.

·         I was about ready for meal #3 by now.

o   Sometimes I find it works best for me to eat every 3-4 hours, which usually means that I can’t make it for that long stretch between lunch (say, around noon) and dinner (say, around 7 pm) without a light (or not so light) meal in between. I knew that I was going to see a play with some of my kitchenmates this evening (BTW, I explained previously that I refer to the 12 other women who share my kitchen as my “kitchenmates” in order to differentiate them from the 13 other women on my hallway who use the other kitchen – “hallmates”), so I planned to eat dinner (=4^th meal) right before that.

o   That being said, I figured that it would be better for me to eat my 3^rd meal in Aulnay-sous-Bois rather than making the hour-long hike back to my neighborhood in Paris first. It was kind of ironic that I’d asked my students for all of these suggestions about what to do in town and heard about a few restaurants but didn’t really know where anything was other than the stuff that was right by the train station. I found what I think the majority students were referring to as a “Greek” restaurant, the validity of which claim was questioned by my one Anglophone student (from Wales). It might be more accurately called “Middle Eastern” to make him happy; it’s definitely not a fancy place, but a quick-service restaurant.

o   I noticed that the menu was definitely overpriced compared to all of the Middle Eastern sandwich spots I’ve seen in Paris, but I ordered something that fit into my daily food budget: the merguez sausage platter with no beverage since I always carry water with me. It definitely hit the spot.

o   But here’s the awkward part: The total was €6,50 (they use commas where we use periods with numbers and vice versa), and I tried to give the guy €20,50. That was the smallest bill I had, and I thought that giving him the 50 centimes might be a kind gesture. Too bad he dropped the 50 centimes and then acted like he didn’t know what happened. Like he heard it fall and looked around and then shrugged and kept going. It was right there in front of him on the counter. So then he gave me €13,50 as my change instead of €14. I started to head out, but, as I said before, the meal was already overpriced, so I wasn’t really satisfied with letting this guy keep my €0,50. So I turned around and went back to the counter as politely as I could, as if I had been recounting the change on my way out, and asked if I could have the €0,50 back that had fallen on the counter to make the full €14. He was all apologetic all of a sudden and claimed not to have seen it. He offered to combine the change (my €0,50 + the €0,50 that he’d given me) into €1, but I said it was okay. I apologized for the inconvenience, but he said that he didn’t blame me for wanting to be exact. I still don’t know whether or not to give him the benefit of the doubt for dropping the coin in the first place.

My ticket (foreground) and the lounge area outside of the performance space (background)

The classic red curtain, as seen from our balcony seats

·         Naptime before… a spectacular performance of Sister Act! In French!

o   I actually wasn’t sure about what language it would be in when I signed up to go on the whiteboard in our kitchen. I was kind of leaning toward English because one of the other girls asked me to pronounce the name of the show for her in English in eager anticipation of the event. But…no. Once we got there, the other 4 Frenchies started talking about whether they’d seen the American movie or not, and one girl said no and that she was relieved that this show wasn’t in English. Which is when they all started looking awkwardly at me.

o   I really enjoyed the experience, though. It was easier for me to understand the dialogue that the singing, of course, because once you start stringing lyrics together into a musical phrase, weird things start happening with the rhythm of the language, especially to a non-native speaker’s ear. So I was usually a little behind in terms of figuring out what they were singing about. But it was definitely helpful to see a show with which I was already familiar.

I went back for this photo at a later date during the day

o   In terms of the technical specs, I actually thought some of the supporting actors outshone the leads. One of my favorite song-and-dance numbers involved the mobsters other than Curtis (French version of Vince’s character in the American movie), the head honcho. I also thought that the venue was very Broadway-esque and that the décor, music, and costumes accented the show very nicely. It was just a lot of fun for a Wednesday night, even with seats way up in the balcony.

·         Afterwards, late-night snack and conversation with the other girls who had gone to the show.  

o   The one who worked in Cumming was telling everyone about the size of houses in Georgia and wanted to know if mine was comparable to the one she’d worked in. I had to qualify my answer by saying that what she’d seen (she had photos) was rather standard for middle-class families living in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. So, yeah, my house was similar, but it didn’t stand out from the others around it.

o   To be clear, they were enthralled by concepts like having a front and back yard, high ceilings, a finished basement in addition to two other levels, and five bedrooms in the house. But…considering the fact that five people inhabited our house for quite some time, it’s not that difficult to imagine the need for that many rooms (including a guest room). Of course, we three kids were blessed to have our own bedrooms, but I think that the main issue here is that not a lot of people in France have three kids. Plus, they don’t have the same idea of personal space that we do. I think that a lot of them would get lost in some of our metro Atlanta homes just wandering around all of the open space! So I did my best to help my kitchenmates see that this was not a matter of my having a lot more money than they do; it was really about a difference in perspective.