Welcome to French High School

Whoa.  WHOA.  I never realized how great and organized my high school was.  I mean, I know a lot of high schools in america are underfunded, disorganized, etc, but leave it to the French not to organize ANYTHING.  Monday's 4 classes went very well.  The students asked me questions about myself, I asked them what there is to do in town, they all laughed.  Tuesday, I was supposed to have 3 classes, starting at 8am.  I went to the room the teacher had told me his class was in, only to find it empty and locked.  I went downstairs to ask the building coordinator what the deal was, she said yes, that was the correct classroom.  I went to the receptionist and she said yes, she had seen the teacher come in that morning so he wasn't out sick.  I then went to the library, computer lab, vie scolaire (sort of like student advisors) and everyone confirmed that the teacher was there and the class should be in one of 2 classrooms.  I walked around the whole school (twice) and looked in every single classroom (of which there aren't many) and every single room had a class in it that wasn't mine.  I finally went back to the building coordinator, reported on my (lack of) progress, and she said "Oh, maybe he cancelled the class and forgot to tell you! The first-year classes get a day off every six weeks!"  At 9, I found the teacher in the teacher's lounge, and he confirmed "oh, i'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you we didn't have class!  Well, at least you get the day off, since my afternoon class is cancelled too!"  And my 3rd class of the day was cancelled due to Anne having a meeting.  So the upshot of this is that I will basically only work a sixth of the hours I am supposed to work.  If that.  I really don't expect that I will ever work all 12 hours in a week.  And I guess I don't expect any of the teachers to tell me ahead of time if we will have class that day.

Yesterday (wednesday) I went to Toulouse all day for the teaching assistants orientation.  All the language assistants for the whole Academie de Toulouse (the Midi-Pyrenees region) had the same orientation, so I took the train at 6:17 am with 2 other english assistants, (one american and one jamaican) the spanish assistant from panama, and the german assistant.  The morning was spent with the school administration personnel introducing themselves for about 3 hours.  We had lunch, then in the afternoon we were given a presentation about the French education system, then finally, FINALLY split up into groups by language to learn some teaching methods.  Of a day-long teaching orientation, 2 hours were spent learning how to teach.  They really can't expect that much of us.  We were let out an hour early, so I spent an hour and a half wandering around Toulouse with Molly, Hadley, and Nandini, 3 other english assistants, and then Molly Hadley and I got back on the train to head back to Tarbes.  

This morning, I had another great experience with the incredibly organized high school I work in (not).  I showed up in the proper classroom for my 9:00 english class, where the teacher decided to split the class up into 2 groups, and I was supposed to take my group to another classroom.  This will eventually be happening in all my classes, where I alternate groups each week because the classes are too large (30-35 students) for me to take them all on my own.  Well, I didn't know where I was supposed to take them, given that last time I asked the building coordinator she had said there weren't enough classrooms in this school.  I went to see her again, and she told me room 106 was open, so I led me students up there.  Well actually they led me, since I couldn't find it.  It turns out that rooms 106 and 107 are one room, with a divider in between that the teacher in 107 told me I couldn't close so basically room 106 was already occupied.  In short, we ended up spending the next 20 minutes wandering around the building, with various people sending us to various places that were also unavailable.  Finally, we had to kick 2 girls out of the study lounge and use that room.  And this will probably happen every time I have class, so 12 times a week.  Awesome.

In spite of all the administrative problems, I do actually really like my classes so far.  It's a bit difficult to get the students to talk, since they're not used to having to speak out loud in class, but I think I will manage to get some oral work out of them and I have some ideas of fun lessons I can do with them.  The other plus is that I only take half of each class at a time, so any ideas I do think of will last me 2 weeks, as I obviously plan on using the same lessons for every class.  If anyone has any ideas of fun discussions we can have about american culture, don't hesitate to comment! 

Also, in case you haven't heard, the french are AWESOME at burocracy.  Yesterday they were telling us about all of the things we need to do and papers we need to fill out in order to be allowed to live here, get a bank account, get paid, get social security, etc etc, and it reminded me of this:

Oh yeah, I almost forgot.  As if it wasn't embarrassing enough that my students had to experience me being totally lost and unprepared this morning, I thought one of the girls in my class was a BOY.  omg.