poor attention span, classes overview

As with so many things I throw myself into enthusiastically at first, this blog has become a little neglected. I guess it's because the new and exciting sheen has worn off, and my life here's become somewhat routine. Not boring, but nothing worth writing about.

Another contributing factor is almost definitely my massive lack of attention span. Even sitting down for 10 minutes to write a blog entry seems like a massive effort (so spare a thought for my poor dissertation...) Ritalin is seeming like a better and better idea for final year, although I'll see how far self-discipline gets me for now.

To bring myself back to the Blogosphere, I will start by a little round-up of my classes.

École EM

My first school was diplomatically described by Hélene, who I do 3/4 of my classes with, as "economie-plus" compared to my second. Camon is a very small commune so it seems odd that the minor difference is noticable. The teachers are, on the whole, somewhat more easily angered in this school so maybe it's just a matter of slightly stricter discipline.

CE1 (age 6-7)

A sweet class. They're the class that Hélene teaches so I spend quite a lot of time sitting at the back waiting for the next English lesson, listening in and being reassured that my French grammar is at least comparable to a native speaking 7 year old's. This class maybe contains the four cutest children I have ever met. Twin count = 1 set, non-identical.

CE2 (age 7-8)

This class I find somewhat more difficult. The class teacher takes them for the English lesson, and this is her first time teaching English having not studied it since high school some 25 years ago. The activities in the classbook, I feel, are sometimes aimed too high and we should go back to the basics- but other times I'm pleasantly surprised. This is the class with three sets of identical twins.

CM1 (age 8-9)

Bright sparks abound in this one. This is one of my favourite classes because they're just a joy to teach. They pick things up very quickly in general. Contains one set of identical and one set of non-identical twins.

CM2 (age 9-10)

Apparently last year's CM2 class at this school was horrible ("someone threw a dictionary at me once", says Hélene) but this year's isn't nearly as bad. There are a few boys who prefer to throw balls of paper around, but Hélene is quick to dole out les punitions for any offenders caught ("I must not throw paper in class" in their best handwriting, twenty-five times. Ha!) I have a soft spot for the quiet fat kid in the back who always knows the answer but won't shout out like everyone else.

École PL

The slightly poorer cousin of my first school, although blessed with superior facilities (larger playground, Wifi, kettle in the staffroom...) The slightly rowdier intake might be because the school is located right next to a newish housing estate, but when I say "rowdier", this would be heaven for some of my fellow Language Assistants.

CP (age 5-6)

My only Kindergarten class. They're pretty much content to watch me play the fool and sing The Hello Song for 45 minutes a week. The naughtiest kid in the school is in this class. Si mignon, mais si méchante! It also has one set of twins.

CE1 (age 6-7)

As with the CP, they're pretty good overall and I can fool around without feeling like they're going to make fun of me. In this one I sort of play the foil to the class teacher and it works out pretty well.

CE1-CE2 (age 7-8)

Without a doubt my most challenging class. I leave there with a headache almost every lesson and they are NOT the ones I wish I started my Friday mornings with. There are a few bright kids, but they get lost in the general rumpus. I think the teacher's basically given up on trying to get them to be calmer. Right now we're learning days of the week, and there's a song I found for them to listen to - but of course you can't put music on without half the class getting out of their seats and dancing. Oy...

CE2-CM1 (age 8-9)

One of my largest classes. There are 6 CE2 (younger) kids in this class, but as far as I've made out, there isn't much difference in the curriculum for them - but they will stay in the class the next year as well. Bright sparks include a smiling red-cheeked girl called Mary, and twin Arabic girls who I can never, ever tell apart.

CM1-CM2 (age 9-10)

This class is taught by Christelle, the same woman who teaches the CP. Her English is very good, having studied it at university and done basically the same programme as I'm doing right now, but in Wakefield. They're slightly more reluctant than the other school's final year, with two boys constantly pushing Christelle's patience to its limits. While marking their last test (fill in a basic information sheet about yourself), I was surprised to see how many couldn't spell the name of their school...

Right, that was fun procrastination. Time for more work on my ridiculously overdue dissertation proposal! It's not as fun as this book:

vive le vent

Winter is definitely here in the Somme. The snow has stopped falling, but temperatures are still frosty and the pavements still treacherous. This week has been a busy, festive one for me: Hannukah began last Wednesday night, my birthday was on Thursday, and I've been teaching Christmas songs to most of my classes all week in preparation for a soirée at the Centre de Loisirs next Friday night. My birthday fell on a good day - I don't have to be in until 1330 on Thursdays so I spent the morning in bed eating chocolate sent by a friend and watching Eastenders. Once I got to school I got sung to in various degrees of fluency and gifted with a wristful of Silly Bandz, the preferred currency of the primary school.

On Thursday I also had my most challenging class yet. One of the CM1 (9-10yrs) classes had been to the cinema that morning to watch The Snowman, and their teacher had purchased the anniversary DVD which had a documentary about the film that the children wanted to watch - except it was in English without subtitles. On the spot translation turned out not to be too difficult, with the English teacher offering vocabulary where mine was lacking. However, because neither of us had seen it before, we weren't prepared for what one woman said: "We get some odd requests for licensing. I suppose the strangest request I've had [and here I knew what was coming] was for a Snowman condom, where the condom was, well, his body." I looked at the teacher and we tried not to laugh too hard; in the end I said didn't know how to translate it, and she said that she didn't understand it properly. Luckily the attention span of children is such that they soon became interested in the next sequence and forgot about what it was we found so funny... I daren't imagine how long it would have taken us to stop the laughter.

Friday's challenge came in the form of handwriting. The songs we're learning are quite short (Jingle Bells, and We Wish You A Merry Christmas) so I would write them on the board and the kids copy them into their notebooks. I have never had "good" (ie: consistant, always legible) handwriting, but here I really tried to be neat. However, lots of the kids were totally baffled by it. When they start school they learn script (essentially what we in the UK would call calligraphy), which the teachers use to write on the board too, but they read books in regular book print. Anything inbetween is a mystery, as illustrated below. The first "ride" is in script, the bottom one is my regular handwriting.

In one class the kids asked me to try and write in script, so while they were copying the songs down I painstakingly drew an elaborate "Christmas" on the board. After many restarts, my efforts were rewarded with a somewhat patronising round of applause.

Getting old, not growing up:



and a loving Latke:

parfums d'hiver (and silicone bracelets)

The Amiens Christmas Market is in full swing now. A full half of the width of the pedestrian rue Trois Cailloux is taken up by the huts selling various edibles and gifts, making it actually dangerous to cycle down and threatening the already-fraught relationship between cyclists and pedestrians. A couple of fairground-style rides are set up, too, so covered in lights that they make me think of the Trocadero on mushrooms. Similarly surreal are the speakers, running from the station all the way to the Hotel de Ville, piping out the same Christmas music. Disneyland on Valium.

I have to give the toy stand a wide berth; crowds of children after school flock to spend their pocket money on rubber bracelets that come in various shapes. It's a phenomenon that seems to have come to Amiens in the last 2 weeks. Before the vacances I don't think I saw any, but suddenly every other child seems to have a few, more than a few, or two solid armfuls of multicoloured silicone that reform themselves into shapes once removed. Even one of my teachers has a few - every time she catches a kid playing with a bracelet, she confiscates it and wears it herself. I wonder how long until these are banned in schools in the UK... anything popular enough is eventually, right?

le brouillard

Around dusk the birds here start going crazy. As the sun dips low, they swoop down in huge clouds and squabble among their factions for the prime position in the belltower and rafters of the Eglise Saint-Leu. Great ungainly swarms of pigeons clamour with the synchronised fleets of starlings, who retire to the trees next to the church as dusk settles but don't shut up for hours. The odd bat flaps around too, sadly not en masse. I need to stand outside the church with my camera one day.

Yesterday was a wonderful day of eerie freezing fog. I took this picture of workmen putting up the Christmas lights. They're up on the high street, too, and on my road, and there are some snowmen lights ready to be lit up in December outside one of my schools. I can't wait! (Probably because Christmas lights mean my birthday's getting really close...)

As for work, it's getting routine now (which I suppose is a good thing?). As long as the kids don't start finding me boring. The Twin Total has gone up to 6 pairs now with the addition of Annalise and Gwendoline to my CP class (seriously, if there ever was a class that could melt an icy heart...) I've even sort-of managed to win over the less cooperative members of my CM2 (10-11yrs) class (hint: anything to do with football gets attention). In the younger classes I sort of play the comic relief foil to the teacher, but it would pretty much be career suicide if I exposed a more human side with the CM2 class.

And everything else? Bike rides, pub, beer, good conversation and friends, which well balance out the missing Bangor and going-back-to-uni-oh-god-i'll-have-forgotten-how-to-study anxiety. I don't think I ever want to leave.

this post is about tea and politics

Dear American "Tea Party Patriots",

This sign at the RTRS sums up how I feel about you, minus the vitriol:

Nina.

déboussolé

So, pretty much as I'd thought would happen, school is out for les vacances des Toussaint and I've fallen into a weird fuzzy sleepy spiral of disorientation and oddness:

I slept through Monday (except for 3 hours in the pub).

I slept through half of Tuesday, before I got the guilt at around 2.30pm and got out of bed to Do Things. It might be the week (and a half) off, but I still have a heap of bureaucratic things to do that I've failed to do so far. As it is, all I managed to do today was go the doctor. I didn't even know if i was in the right waiting room - there was a poster about not touching wild rodents' droppings to avoid catching haemorrhagic fever, so I made an educated guess. It turned out to be the right guess, and within 15 minutes I was in the doctor's office. In France, it appears, you don't need to register - you just show up and wait. You do, however, have to pay (and then send a reimbursement form to Social Security). All I needed today was a prescription for more happy pills, so we had to do the whole damn history, then a physical (at one point, taking my blood pressure, he said "c'est quarante-huit, c'est trop". I have no idea what he was referring to. Possibly my pulse?).

Tomorrow I'll take the prescription to the pharmacy and steel myself to be thoroughly rogered in the bank account department. I haven't yet received my Social Security number - although MGEN (the company) does email me regularly suggesting I pay for their advanced medical plan. Despite the fact I'll have about 6 appointment and the same number of prescriptions while I'm here (not counting any emergencies), I'm pretty sure it'll work out cheaper NOT to pay into an insurance plan.

Also planned for tomorrow - WAKE UP, DO THINGS, DRINK TEA, THINK ABOUT DISSERTATION.

over and out

Halloween classes and observations...

I'm feeling slightly unproductive as the only time I've used a crochet hook since I got here was to extract a shy drawstring from my pyjama trousers. I have found a yarn shop in Centre-ville but I've not passed in optimum not-on-way-to-work conditions and while it was open (most shops here close between 12-2pm). I need to knit something! Anything!

My second week's going pretty well so far (this is a Wednesday evening - French schools have no class on Wednesdays and they no longer have Saturday mornings either). With Hallowe'en coming up during the mid-term break most of my lessons have involved something do to with this - from teaching numbers (one black cat, two ghosts, three witches etc.) to listening comprehension (John Barrowman reading Winnie The Witch on CBeebies!). I've made this for my Thursday and Friday classes so they can design their own pumpkin faces:

Observations on French primary schools that I've collected so far:

* French kids learn handwriting, and by that I mean calligraphy script. When I was in primary school we learnt to make letter shapes into vaguely recognisable forms in the hope that we would end up with legible handwriting, but these kids are being taught what kind of loop to put between each letter etc. I have to spell out what I've written on the board for some classes, and that's even when I'm being extra neat, because all the teachers write in the same style. It's either script or book-style print over here.

* French students have to learn verb endings too, and this makes me happy in a schadenfreude kind of way.

* The teachers seem to be pretty short-tempered with the pupils' minor misbehaviour (I saw some 9yr old boys get thoroughly shouted down for taking blu-tack off the walls and putting it in their pockets).

* It's not just new and exciting teaching assistants that get notes and pictures from their young admirers. The other day the CE2 (8-9yrs) teacher came into the staff room and showed me something a girl had given her - a piece of paper covered in hearts with the words "Madame, je t'aime". French doesn't have really have words that differentiate between love/like immensely/admire; as one of my younger classes were filing out of the classroom on Monday a small girl whispered in my ear "Je pense que tu es magnifique" and then ran out with her friends. I forgot how impressionable small children are - I am careful not to smoke when I'm near the schools!

On Saturday night, Amiens hosted La Nuit Blanche (coming to Brighton on the 30th of this month). It's a city-wide contemporary arts festival so we found modern art in public squares, DJs in small bars, photography exhibitions in our local pub, musicians in the streets... and The Bobby McGees! (domestic violence and ukuleles):

Me and Rob, who's here on ERASMUS at the university:

and in other news? Finances are awful (I can't afford this month's rent so need to get hold of my dad and eat humble pie for a loan), and paperwork bureaucracy is giving me headaches and anxiety (need to send numerous forms/find other ones that have gone missing in the post) and probably not helping my neverending cold, but look what I found in the supermarket!:

and finally, as an extra special treat, here are my knees last Sunday morning, the day after I fell over in public. The right one still hurts when I have been cycling for ages: