First Real Day of Class

Today was my first real day of working with a class, and for Kathryn it was another day of training. My class did not start until 2pm so I had an opportunity to try and sleep a little later. This did not work out so well because some builders showed up at the house at around 8am and started banging around with hammers and cleaning the grout on the outside of the house with drills. Fiona said that she was a little surprised they showed up because they were originally supposed to come last month, and just didn't come until this morning. Hopefully they will be all finished very soon. Since I was up, I got ready and headed towards my school. I arrived at about 12:30pm, and to kill some time I went over to a little cafe and got a big espresso so that I would be in the correct mindset (wired) to speak and understand all the instructions given by my quick-talking professor.

The class I was working with today was the same one that I helped out with last Monday. This time I was prepared. As I mentioned in the other blog, the kids kind of took advantage of me because I was unsure how to begin. So today was all about conversation and oral language skills. My job for today was to speak individually with four of the students about their reports, let them know what I understood and what they needed to do better. I was also supposed to pose different questions regarding the information they were telling me. She started the class off by handing out a schedule of whom I would be meeting with on a weekly basis, then I went over into the classroom next door to wait for my first victim. The first guy that came in was named Benoit and he was the best English speaker in the bunch. I conducted our session by initially having him read/tell me about his two week internship over the summer. Benoit, along with the rest of the kids, had a pretty short report and after only 15min or so I had run out of questions. So I began asking about life, music, sports and anything I could think of. Something that was very surprising is that he is not a soccer fan!! I couldn't believe it. I was under the impression that if a European kid begins growing up not liking soccer they would drown them (or maybe just send them away to boarding school in another country because they were so disappointed by them.) He was, on the other hand, a big fan of American Football. So thanks to our conversation you can tack on one more Bears fan here in France! (One of many more to come).

The rest of the kids I spoke with had varying levels of English comprehension, so a lot of my time was spent repeating questions and simplifying my word choice. Overall it was helpful and informative, but when I was finished the teacher told me that I needed to write up a report detailing the students performance. Well...I was unaware that this was going to be part of the process so I didn't take any notes, plus I'm not a real teacher and the kids were so nervous at first that I have no idea how to grade them. Everyone seemed to do a really good job once I actually got them talking. Benoit of course gets an A+ for agreeing to become a Bears fan! When I finished with my class I walked back to the Centre-Ville and met up with Kathryn and two friends of hers that she had met today at her training session.

She had to get up very early to make it over to the office of her contact by 9am. She made it there ok, and the day was spent learning all of the best ways to control a room full of grade-schoolers. They taught her little games to play like BINGO and that sort of thing. Most of the teaching will be done in French with emphasis on certain phrases and words. Her contact told her that if by the end of the year the kids know 10-15 words/phrases by heart then she would be very successful. Another little tip that she got was to be very confident, not only with the children but with the other teachers. There were a few more hints, or maybe flat out remarks that she will be working in a "rough" area, and that she needed to stay strong . She said it was very tiring speaking in French for the entire day, but she was done by 1pm. She spent the next couple hours hanging out with friends from her primary school group until we met up later in the day to grab a sandwich, baggette and an amazing tartlette de framboise (little raspberry tart), then we took the tram home together.

Today was relatively short (for me) but still tiring. It was definitely a learning experience, and I am looking forward to the rest of the week. Kathryn begins her observation period at her primary schools tomorrow, and is very excited to finally get into the classroom. I also got my schedule set through January, and tomorrow I start again at 2pm and go until 5pm. Should be fun.

-Jor and Kathryn