School Started and Ended

This week was meant to be my first full week of Official teaching, but in true French style I ended up only having to work 5 hours out of my already minimal 12 hour week. Not that I’m complaining!

The week started of well, I had 5 Classes at Davesne, one at each level of primary school. Its quite a small, old building right in the center of town which means it is only a 10 minute walk from my house which is very handy for a Monday morning! Especially as school starts at 8.30 here, and for me who struggles to get out of bed that half an hour earlier makes such a difference.

The teachers and students here are all lovely and show such an interest to learn English. The kids are keen to show what they already know even if it means they all answer “I’m fine” to “how are you”. We will work on that next week haha.

The classrooms are completely different to what I am used to seeing in the UK; there is no sitting in groups of 4 or 6, instead the tables are all in rows to prevent talking. In the UK, discussion and team work is a big part of learning, but in general it is discouraged in French schools and the teachers prefer that the children work individually. My automatic reaction with my classes would be to bring them in and sit on the floor so that they are all close by but none of my french classrooms are set up for this, so we shall have to improvise! It also makes teaching English, where the focus is on speaking a little awkward, but it’ll work out!

My CP (5-6 year olds) classroom in Davesne

On Tuesday I caught the bus to Trelissac where my second school, Ecole les Maurilloux is.This School is much larger with a few classes per Level which means I am teaching one half of the school between now and January and then the Second half of the school between January and April.

Ecole Les Maurilloux

I found my way to my first Class only to be met by a rabbit hopping around the classroom so I swiftly exited the room and closed the door and waited for the teacher to turn up haha. Turns out the class have a rabbit and they take turns looking after him/bringing him home at the weekends, but during the week, he is allowed to roam around the classroom at night/lunch time.

After break I went to find my third class, only to find out that they and my final class for the day where actually away on a school trip so I got to go home early! This pretty much sums up what the rest of my week was like!

I was meant to have 3 hours of Video Conferencing a rural school but when I got home I had an email from Karine telling me that it wasn’t going to work. So all I had to do was go to her office and collect the Laptop they were giving me for the year to do the Video Conferences on, and to be taught how to use it. This way I would be ready to start the Video Conferences on Thursday, but Thursday came around and it still doesn’t work, so I got today off too!

On a non-school related topic, I now have WiFi at home! Such a simple thing, yet it makes such a difference! Sooo happy, it also means we will spend less money on Coffee and Bagels as we don’t need to go and scrounge WiFi off businesses. Our Street is also in the process of getting ripped up (something to do with the water pipes), So our poor WiFi installation guy had to work his way through all of this, plus scale the outside of the building to get the internet cable into our house. All this while there was thunder and crazy rain outside. We were very impressed at his determination and pretty much love him, so thank you WiFi guy.

The current war-zone that is my street. It has caused quite a few stumbles for my clumsy self!

So after a very relaxed First week, were I worked less than half of my prescribed hours, my holidays have started! I now have 17 days (two working weeks + the weekends) off school before I have to start teaching again. I have people visiting me this week and then the following week I am off to Brussels/Ghent – very exciting!!

Est-ce que vous avez du WiFi?

Our free time here is currently being spent looking for an internet connection, it’s crazy that I am complaining about this I know. But when you are away from home and friends you want to be in contact with the rest of the world. It is also our only way to communicate with the other assistants at the moment as a lot don’t have phones yet.

When we decided on our flat we were told there is wifi – it has been a down hill slant since then! We arrived and she told us to move around our furniture as the wifi only works in certain “bubbles” of the room… Turns out there are no “bubbles” of wifi in my room at all. BUT it did work everywhere else in the house, so we managed.

On Wednesday it stopped working for Steff and I but strangely still worked on Lillian’s laptop.. Very odd. We asked her to fix it and her reply was something along the lines of I don’t really care, this happens sometimes. Unfortunately, 6 days later it still isn’t working and we are building a reputation of wifi stealers around town, so today we went to Orange and ordered our own. Only one more week to wait for the technician to come and then we should hopefully have internet! The arrival of internet thankfully arrives with the beginning of teaching so we should be able to sort lessons and what not 😀

For now we will continue to use the Irish Corners wifi, and get evil looks from the staff when we sit on the wall across from the pub..