It's a hard not life...

I’ve just finished my first proper week of teaching and I’ve got to say, I love it! Okay so it was only my first week and everything could change, but the majority of kids are brilliant and are really eager to learn English. They see it as an amazing opportunity and a great language to learn plus the teacher always threatens that if they misbehave, they will never get to come into the class room with me again...

My timetable has worked out well: I have Mondays and Wednesday’s off and work Tuesday afternoons, Thursday all day and Friday afternoon. Thursday is the only day I don’t look forward to as I have 7 of my 12 hours on this one day, but even that wasn’t bad this week, it was actually quite a rewarding day. I can see that each week is going to pass very quickly and before I know it, it will be Christmas, and then February half term, and then April and time to say goodbye...(NOOOOOOOOO L)

This week for classes, I started with the basics to see what they know. So I created questionnaires, and did general conversation tasks. At Val d’Huisne, the standard of English is a bit lower than at Berthelot and on Tuesday I found out that the lunch time club didn’t know the difference between England and America- WHATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT?! I’ve found that the teaching here in France is very influenced by America. For example, they teach the date as: Tuesday October 5^th and use American textbooks. The kids also know a lot of American music, films and are keen on basketball, so I’m going to do a lesson on England next week and show them what we’re about. I also taught the parts of the body to the 6ième (the youngest, think they’re about 11) and we finished the class by playing bingo if they were good (a little trick that always works: touch wood).  Next week is the week before Halloween and seeing as they don’t celebrate it here, I plan on doing lessons about it.

Berthelot on the other hand is...there’s no other word for it: disorganised. Alice and I turn up for our lessons and get sent home, which is perfectly fine by us! The two lessons that we have got to take so far, we have done so together which makes lesson planning much quicker. The kids are just as eager if not more so than Val D’Huisne and we played hangman at the end of the lesson today and started off by using the words we’d learnt in today’s lesson. However we then made the mistake of saying ‘okay you can use any English word you know now’ and so the following 3 boys used words such as ‘tequila’ and ‘whisky’. Cheeky gits. But I’m feeling that it will be a pleasure to teach here, they just quite simply need to get their act together!

So this week, I taught a grand total of 8 classes and sat in on 1.  As if the 12 hour timetable week wasn’t easy enough already... To add to this, when you teach, an hour flies by- it almost doesn’t seem like work. I’m already excited for next week and I really want to make sure I fulfil my role and make sure that they can speak better English with a better accent, and a better set of vocabulary by the end of April. Only time will tell if I can make an impact on them...but of course learning the difference between England and America was a good place to start!