Now that the school holidays are over (yes, I got two weeks’ holiday just over two weeks after I started work) and I’ve spent a couple of weeks observing and working in my schools, I thought I’d give you an account of my schools and their charms and quirks.
Brief update: now that I’ve got somewhere to live sorted and I’m all moved in. I tried going to sort my bank account out recently, only to find when I got there that it wasn’t open on Mondays, so I just bought a doughnut instead. Thankfully, I’ve now got a bank account, and things have finally started picking up, so I’m leaving the subject matter of the previous posts behind.
Both of the schools I work in have been kind and welcoming, if a little lacking when it comes to efficient communication and organisation, but being in France, I’ve learnt to expect that of all institutions here. I will say though that my lycée (Years 11-13, 15-18 year olds) was more organised in so far as I was communicating with them from before the summer holidays, whereas my collège (Years 7-10, 11-15 year olds) didn’t reply to my initial emails until the beginning of the school year in September.
The collège isn’t much of a looker, but the lycée is pretty fancy!
At the collège I teach a regular group of 4º and another of 3º (Years 9 and 10 respectively), and then for the final of my 3 hours there I either work with a group of adorable and enthusiastic 6º (Year 7) or another group of 3º. I’ve struck lucky with the first two groups, in that they are groups of students who have opted for extra English lessons and as such, their level of English is far beyond what I would have expected.
At the lycée, I have a mix of 2º, 1º and Terminale groups (Years 11, 12 and 13 respectively), although the majority of my classes are with the 2º, who don’t have exams in English for another two years and who have just started at the school, meaning that they don’t know the school itself and its ways particularly well, and they don’t really know their fellow students much at the start of the year either. All these things make for those classes to prove the more difficult at times, as there’s no sense of urgency for them in learning English and at the beginning of the year getting them to speak in pairs can be rather more tricky.
As the lycée is an international school, they also have an International Section for each of the major nationalities and languages spoken at the school, so that students can be taught by native speakers or teachers who completed their teacher training in the target language and take exams in their own language or one of their main languages if they would do better that way. Linked to this, there is a stage between the native and bilingual speakers of the Section and the standard French classes who learn English as a foreign language, unfortunately referred to as the “Spécial”. However, they are special in so far as they are specialising in English as their foreign language of choice, rather than being ‘special’ pupils. I work with two Spécial groups, both of whom are in their final year and who are working towards their exams in June. While I don’t teach the bilingual or native speaker students for obvious reasons, I worked briefly with a couple of them back in October, as some of them were applying to Oxford and had questions about Oxford and the application procedure.
The schools, the newer build of the collège in particular, has reminded me of what high schools and high schools are generally like. Somehow you manage to suppress the olfactory experiences, but the moment you set foot in another high school, the wafts of BO and industrial cleaning chemicals remind you of the ordeal again.
In general, being back at school has reminded me of what it’s like to be a high school student. Having gone from university, where people are generally fairly motivated (by the fact that they’re paying a large sum of money if nothing else) and more mature in their mindsets, back to school where the attention spans are much shorter, and doodling and low level disruption in class is much more common. As a teacher, it annoys me more than it did when I was in school, especially because I can relate to the kids who just want to get on with things, and also because I’ve not been used to it for the past couple of years.
During the first week at both schools, I had a period of observation, where I got to come into each of the classes that I would later be working with, just to see how the teacher handled and taught them, what their English was like, and what sort of class they were. However, observation, as I learnt, does not necessarily mean sitting at the back of the class making notes. On the contrary, many of my lessons in that first week involved me standing up at the front of the classroom, telling the pupils about me and getting them to ask questions.
In the very first class I went into, I spoke at one point about the Oxford Singers, the choir that I was part of and ran for a while whilst I was in Oxford. Naturally of course, the pupils then asked me to sing, a request swiftly followed by a reassurance from the teacher that I really didn’t have to, and that we’d just move on to the next question. Not being one to shy away from such moments in the limelight, I of course obliged. There was however a slight hitch. I’d previously been speaking about British identity and what parts of British culture I felt were important to me, so when I was then asked to sing, I suddenly seemed to forget all songs ever. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I was trying to think of something that the kids might know, but as someone who doesn’t really keep up with the charts, I panicked and settled on singing the British National Anthem of God Save the Queen instead. Thankfully it was fine and the teacher then asked if I could sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah too, to which I replied that I could and would, whilst she hurriedly tried to find a karaoke backing track for me on her phone. That lesson quickly turned into a karaoke sing-along, with a trio of Spanish girls singing a Spanish folk song for the rest of the group, and a whole class rendition of Cups from Pitch Perfect, including the cup routine by some.
In my general presentations on myself and the Q&A section that followed, I had some interesting responses. The result of living with a younger brother who borders on the carnivorous has meant that I’m used to a strong reaction to being vegetarian. However, French school children take that a step further, by displaying a complete and utter lack of understanding as to why on Earth anyone would give up meat ever. Granted, I am in Alsace, a region that combines the German love of meat with the French preference for it, which results in the majority of regional specialities involving meat in some way.
One of the teachers decided not to present or introduce me at all, instead just leaving me at the front of the classroom as a ‘mystery stranger’ and encouraging the pupils to ask me questions about who I was. This did backfire somewhat when I got asked whether I was the brother, then husband, then son of the teacher, especially considering that she’s 29 and was pregnant at the time. Thankfully most of the other teachers didn’t make the same mistake and introduced me as the new English assistant to the class before letting them ask questions.
Another of the usual questions that I got asked in every class without fail was whether I had a girlfriend. However, in one of my classes at the collège, one student had clearly been reading or watching something rather older, because she didn’t ask me whether I had a girlfriend, instead choosing to phrase it as “Do you have a darling?”.
The pupils in general do have good priorities though. When explaining to one class about the Oxford tradition of trashing (covering friends in all manner of things after they finish their final exam, from glitter and silly string to eggs, flour, milk and even fish) and the practice of then jumping in the river (or the lake if you’re at Worcester) to get it all off afterwards, one girl said “But isn’t it dirty?” to which I replied that the river wasn’t particularly clean and clear, but it was better than the things you get covered in. She then replied saying that she was asking about the state of the river after people were jumping in it, not before, because she was concerned about the pollution and environmental effects.
An example of a trashing. Fear not, French children: I didn’t jump in the river afterwards.
In one of the classes where I was actually just observing at the back of the room, I got to see a lesson on forms of protest. The teacher started by showing six different images associated with protest on the board and asked the students to explain them. One was of a band in concert who were associated with charity and benefit concerts, and the teacher told the class the genre of music to help. Somewhat sensibly, one pupil guessed that it was U2, but as it turned out, it was the Sex Pistols. Apparently U2 is a punk group now.
I’ve also been reminded of how much of what teachers say sometimes goes over the heads of their students, and not always intentionally. One of the teachers I work with I find to be a very witty and funny woman, but her humour doesn’t seem to garner much of a response from the students at times, even though they’re the more able linguists. She has a particular turn of phrase for when the students are clearly just translating from French in their head and as a result say sentences that are heavily based on the original French rather than sounding English. In these moments, she tells the students “There’s a frog hiding behind that!” and waits for them to correct what they’ve said to make it more authentically English.
It was the same teacher who in the week before the final of the Great British Bake Off who intercepted one of the students questions about what television I watched to ask me simply: “Are you watching the final?”, in a beautiful moment of mutual understanding without being at all specific on the matter.
Despite having newer school buildings, the collège is still dated in its own way. Some of the displays on the walls give it away, especially the map in one classroom that has Northern Ireland listed as Ulster. Thankfully the students know that it’s no longer called that, otherwise they might have ended up rather stuck in the past with their English. That being said, the school bell is the final phrase of Greensleves, so having them speaking about Ulster would at least be a step closer to the present. At least Ulster was once correct, whereas I’m not sure your visual organs have ever been called ‘eies’ in English, despite what the textbook says.
The collège is also slightly strange, in that the playground has what I initially mistook for car parking bays. They turned out to be labelled with the name of each room in the school, and so when the bell goes at the end of lunch, the students are expected to wait in the bay corresponding to the room of their next class. The teacher then goes and collects them from the bay and brings them to the classroom for the lesson. As practical as this might sound, the collège really isn’t big enough that anyone could feasibly get lost for any extended period of time there, but I’m learning not to question French logic.
On my first day at the collège, I had anticipated needing to do some admin before my lessons started, and as the bus I now take regularly gets in about ten minutes before my first lesson starts and the bus back leaves ten minutes after my last lesson ends, I opted for the earlier bus during the first week so that I would be able to get my bearings and get things sorted easily with plenty of time. I’m rather glad I did so. Having not managed to do a practice run, I had relied on looking at Google Maps Street View to figure out whereabouts I ought to get off the bus and which way to walk to the school. Unfortunately, on that first day I mistimed pressing the button to get off the bus, and so I saw the bus drive past the school, down the hill and to the mini roundabout that I’d assumed was the centre of the village. I pressed the button when I saw that, but by that point we had already passed the stop in the village, so the bus kept driving, up and over the hill on the other side of the village and through the countryside for another couple of minutes until we reached the next village, rather worryingly called Pfettisheim. As the buses were only once every hour and a half or so, I had little choice but to walk back along the country road and over the hill to the village and the school. Thankfully it was less than 2km in total, so I made it to the school about 40 minutes later than intended.
One thing that surprised me about the lessons and teaching here is the ready usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet in teaching the pronunciation of new words. Having studied languages for many years now, it wasn’t until I got to university that I even came across it, so it surprised me how often it was used in France and that the kids on the whole could understand it fairly easily.
Much like the German and other school systems, it isn’t uncommon for students to repeat a year of schooling in France if their grades aren’t good enough. In this case, because it’s more commonplace, it seems to be talked about less, and so I don’t know for certain without asking how old any of my students are. There’s one group of 2º (Year 11) students who, had I seen them outside of the school environment, I would have assumed had just finished school and were preparing to start university or go into the world of work. There are certainly some in that group who look older than I do, which is a little disconcerting when you’re the one supposedly in charge. There is some consolation in the fact that they seem to act more their age or the age you at least suppose them to be. Talking to them fairly quickly reveals that they’re not as mature and worldly-wise as their appearances may at first suggest.
As a literature student, I was quite glad to see that most classes study an example of English literature every year in the lycée, although sometimes I do question the choices. One of my 2º classes this year has been working on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and I’ve been working with one of the Spécial groups on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but they’re both easier texts in comparison to the classes that have worked on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The lycée does seem to have a vague literary air to it in general. Somewhat appropriately, given the title of this blog, I was talking to the Head of English about Proust at one point, and she revealed that he’s one of her favourite authors and that she’s reread À la Recherche du temps perdu several times. She also told me about how she was once walking down the corridor and saw the P. E. teacher walking along reading the first volume between lessons.
Being in a French working environment has already revealed some examples of French stereotypes. In addition to French organisation (an oxymoron if ever there was one), I’ve also seen the French preoccupation with their health first hand. As I was talking to a colleague at the end of the day, one of the secretaries walked past, so we stopped and briefly chatted. When asked how she was, she mentioned she had a slight headache, at which point 4 of the nearby teachers walking past all stopped and reached into their bags to procure aspirins to offer her.
In Search of Lost (Reading) Time 