Differences

Since returning to school after the holidays I’ve had three, almost full weeks of teaching. Of course, because it is France, classes have been cancelled, video conferences haven’t worked and we had a day off for armistice day so all in all we have been eased very gently into working life! I have now worked 6 weeks in French schools and they just don’t run the same as in the UK, here are some of the things I have noticed:

Children can’t read my hand writing as everything is written in cursive so teachers walk behind me and rewrite what have already written – very embarrassing, I need to work on my cursive writing.
They can’t say or write the letter W as it is so rare in French, this makes saying Werewolf almost impossible.
When break/lunch time ends seems to be up to the children rather than the teachers so don’t really on your timetable
The children sit in rows rather than groups and the tables are all different heights, very odd
Talking and group work is discouraged, the focus is on individual work – the teachers HATE it when I play games, oops.

It has actually been great to get fully stuck into teaching and move past repeating the same presentation about Northern Ireland/Scotland! The first week back after the holidays (before Rennes) was spent teaching the children about Halloween and all our traditions. They loved seeing pictures of carved pumpkins as although they eat them here (you see lots of pumpkins being sold by the slice at the Market), they never carve them! I also taught some Halloween vocab and the children struggled a lot with “werewolf” because of the W, some of them didn’t even recognize the letter W when I wrote it on the board! Just show how little it is used in French. They were adamant to get it though and by the time they were leaving for break time (one of many) they were all walking out the door practicing saying “werewolf” – too cute!

Since then I have started into sequences of lessons that will bring me up to just before Christmas which makes life a little easier as I know what I am doing from week to week. I pretty much spend my Sunday afternoons drawing, colouring and laminating flashcards for all my classes during the week but I just keep telling myself I’ll be using these for the rest of my life so I want to make them look nice!

This week, my video conferences worked!! It is a pretty ridiculous set up but the school seems to think that it is worth it so we shall give it a go! it is pretty much like Skype but I also have control over the classroom electronic white board. Unfortunately with the whole not being in the classroom thing it means I can’t play my usual games with the kids and so I am having to come up with different ways to make it interactive, but hopefully with some practice I’ll figure it out and maybe even enjoy it!

As I don’t have enough schools who want to do video conferences to fill 6 hours of my week, I also do some recordings for Karine. All I have to do is read books and phrases which is great until I listen to them and hear my Northern Irish accent, I really need to work on some of my words, especially cow… I get my own office to do my video conferences/recordings in and it looks out on a lovely little park so after I had finished up I went for a wee dander in that autumn leaves.