Reflections

My time as a teaching assistant has officially come to an end.  I still have lots of exciting travels planned before coming home, but I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on my year teaching.  In January, I made my first ever New Year's resolutions, which were basically goals for the second half on my time here.  They hung next to my bed for four months, reminding me of what I wanted to accomplish.  Some of them, like cleaning my room every two weeks, were just way too optimistic, but I would say I accomplished all the important things I wanted to. 

The most important resolutions had to do with learning French: make more French friends, and read more in French.  I definitely made more French friends and although I still haven't done that much reading, more than half of it was in French.  I don't know at what point, but sometime along the way I decided I could start saying I'm fluent in French, which I definitely wouldn't have before.  I hung out with a lot more french people and I feel really comfortable speaking French now.

I also resolved to give better lessons and like my students more.  I don't know if my lessons were better, but they were definitely more fun after the Christmas break, both for me and for the students I think.  And I did really start to like some of my students.  Obviously, you can't win them all--there were some classes that were just as poorly behaved and disinterested in my lessons, but most of my classes were made up of really nice and fun students.  For the second half of the year, I mostly just played games with them as opposed to trying to teach them stuff, which turned out to be a fun way to get them to speak and hopefully once they realized they were having fun in English class, they would be more interested in the actual lessons.  All in all, the second half was way better than the first, and I was pleasantly surprised by some groups of students that turned out to be both interested and interesting.

Unrelated: I forgot to write about this when it happened, but a couple of weeks ago my school had its "Carnival".  Most schools in France do this, and since real Carnival (Mardi Gras) is during the winter break they do it a week or two after the break.  This was the Wednesday after I came back from London and it's basically just like Halloween--the students all dress up in costumes and classes are cancelled between 11 and noon so they can have a costume competition.  I was really impressed by some of their costumes- they were really creative and got really into it.  Here's a photo of me with some of my favorite students in awesome costumes: