The Gift of an Extra Day - Feb 29 2008

Yesterday, I had one of those days. The type that has you wondering why at every turn you have to be thwarted by ridiculous rules or bizarre opening times. Friday is a busy day for me anyway, with 5 hours of classes - but I was fully prepared for this, and it's not too bad usually. I had arranged with two of the teachers to cover their lessons when they were away, too.

Things started typically, as the bus was late. But, I arrived on time, and gave the lesson as planned. It was the first lesson in a project for my terminales class, and they're designing and labelling a new product, to presented in a Dragons' Den style lesson at the end of term. They had some great ideas and got on well with what they were supposed to be doing.

The next hour I was free, and I spent the time chatting with one of the English teachers.

11am brought a group of 6 students, and we did a dictation and gap-fill exercise about Australia, which had be given to me by their teacher. Again, the lesson went off well.

Lunch time is when it began. As I only had one hour before my next class, I decided to eat at school. The school uses rechargeable cards, which you swipe when you go into the canteen to get a tray out of the machine. Mine just made a very loud noise and got a red light flashed at me along with the messages. "FONDS INSUFFISANTS". I thought I'd go and top-up my card. Only to find that the person in charge of charging up people's lunch cards doesn't charge them up at, yes, lunch time.

A quick trip to the local "centre commercial" - nearly all of which was shut as it was lunch time - rewarded me with an expensive sandwich from a shop which doesn't sell drinks at all. So there was nowhere open to buy something to drink at lunchtime. It's all so logical.

Let's move on to the afternoon. I was getting together some pictures for my "UK Day" display in the library. Now, these need to be printed in colour, meaning a trip to the "copy centre" near the station. I finally got them all packaged up and emailed to myself for collection in the shop later.I was told by a very reliable source that the shop was open until 1830...

My next class was fantastic. The pupils were interested and enthusiastic about reading the copies of The Independent that I'd transported back for them. They were even more delighted when they saw a mention of their region in the Travel magazine. They asked lots of intelligent questions and responded well when I questioned them. They really were a pleasure to teach.

Next, I went in search of the teacher of my new class...who turned out to be absent. Great. I stayed at school for those hours for nothing. Nevertheless, my final class was the terminales for another teacher, a class I would be taking alone. Their ability is very low, and they're not really all that interested in English. When I got them into the classroom I hadn't even shut the door before one of the pupils started messing about, shouting "I love you, misses, I love yoooouuu!" from the back of the room. At least he was speaking English, I suppose. I calmly told him "Thanks, but I'm not interested." The quicker kids in the class started laughing at him, then translated. He shut up for the rest of the time. Then I had to shoo away some of the pupils from my other class, closing the classroom door gently but very firmly in their faces.

I had been given a listening exercise to make them do, featuring a girl with a very thick American drawl. The thing was supposed to be about how much she loved summer camp, but she sounded bored out of her skull. Here's one exchange that did make me smile, though... Noté means "marked" as in, graded.

Pupil : Madame! Est-ce que ça sera noté?!
Me : In English?
Pupil : Misses, will it be noté?
Me : Yes, it will be noté.
Pupil : Oh my Dieu!

Finally, at six, the lesson was over and I went off to the copying place. Which was closed. New opening hours for February.

On the bright side, I really am enjoying being at home for sunset sometimes nowadays.

The First of the Season

The First of the Season
Originally uploaded by Frogzone1

I thought I'd better post some proof of the temperature here at the moment, so here's something I found at the castle on Friday. It's still freezing, too. The snow still hasn't melted from last week. The upside of this is that the building's heating is still on.

I seem to be making some headway with the students, finally. On my way out of the school some of them stopped me to ask if I'd like to play cards and asked me how me day had gone, mocking each others' English the whole time. With a younger class I did a quiz on Australia, which got the class really wound up and competitive - it's nice to have a class who actually want to speak, rather than having to pull teeth just to get a "good morning". Most of these pupils are in the chemistry class I work with are in that class, so I'm starting to get to know them a bit better. It's really horrible not knowing anyone's names.

Tomorrow, as announced, everyone employed by the government - librarians, teachers, civil servants, train drivers, etc. are going on strike.


...so I'm not going to work tomorrow. I might go along to the "manifestation", if I don't sleep through my alarm. After asking a teacher if she was indeed striking in the morning, she said yes, and that we didn't have class together. Then, she said "See you tomorrow!", which I assume means at the demonstration. It's at 9am though. If you're going to go on strike you might as well take the opportunity to lie in.

After school I went to the post office, and walked past a shop full of interesting-looking things, some of them being Matryoshka. Then I looked closer. All the products were labelled in Cyrillic. In Russian. I went inside. It's a little corner of Russia in this small town. The shop owner came over and chatted with me about the products I was looking at, and said she'd love to speak some Russian with me in my free hours if I would also speak some French with her. In the shop I found dill, kvass, kasha and sushka, amongst a million other Russian products I didn't recognise. This place is amazing.

She also didn't let me out of the shop before she'd offered me everything else she had to taste, which included sugary things that were a bit like Wotsits but without the cheese, and also some neon spun sugar which was so sweet it hurt. I was also very lucky to manage to buy kvass, which I was reminded numerous time was "not like any French drinks, you know...". I only convinced her when I said I wasn't French either and I wanted to try it. It's like a cross between lager and cola, but is made from fermented bread. Weird.

Finally, I had Chinese class today, which is still pretty interesting from the Chinese-French front. I'm also getting a very different language-learning experience because the other people in the class are not used to studying languages, and they're generally older than me. As such, it's taking quite a lot of time to get through things, but I think the pace is going to pick up as the teacher seems quite impatient too!

That's all for now, I have to be up early in the morning so I can be on time for the mouvement sociale...

Back home and freezing

So I'm back home after five hours on the train and a week in Marseille. In the last few days in Marseille we went to Aix-en-Provence, which is a lovely town with a wonderful atmosphere. The French say that you can find some of the most beautiful, well-dressed, well-educated people in Aix. It seemed true to me. Everything was so perfect, like a cross between St Andrews and York. The side-streets were actually interesting, not scary, and full of bookshops and bakeries. One bookshop was far bigger on the inside than seemed possible on the outside, and sold beautiful postcards.

In Aix we also found the most French cafe ever, where I had dark chocolate crepes with whipped cream. How come French people aren't fat? I never see anywhere selling beautifully presented salads, it's only ever ice cream or pastry.

Upon returning home, I managed to sign up for language classes. When I walked in to speak to the woman behind the desk and said I wanted to enroll classes to learn...erm... she immediately cut in with "French?!" So much for progress. However, once she learned that I actually could speak some French she was very helpful in finding Russian and Mandarin classes for me, so I'll be doing those on Mondays and Tuesdays. The Mandarin classes have already started and there's one tonight. I'm really looking forward to it, but at the same time it's a bit intimidating - will I manage to improve my Russian and Mandarin from French?