Sunday, November 25, 2012

Tis the Season

The theme for my week has been all about the holidays.  I did Thanksgiving lessons in all of my classes, which went over pretty well.  I had planned out different levels of activities for each of my classes.  Ultimately I'm not here to teach grammar and stand in as an actual teacher, I'm to be used as more of a cultural tool who helps the students improve their english through subtle ways of learning.  So I play lots of games with the students and trick them into using english.  Works every time.  Most of my students had vaguely heard of Thanksgiving once or twice before, but had no clue as to what it meant.  That's where my lessons came into play.  I think most of the students are just excited for a reprieve from their normal boring lessons filled with worksheets and grammar exercises so they always beg me to come up with another game to keep them for just another 5-10 minutes.  I tried to explain to all of my students to story of the first Thanksgiving and how we celebrate it in modern times, granted this story had to be changed for each level of students.  (I work with 4 different levels.)  I did get a couple rather interesting questions and comments regarding Thanksgiving, such as, the students confusion between turkey and Turkey.  I tried to explain to them that they are pronounced the same but mean totally different things, and the only signifying factor between the two words is that one is spelled with a lower case "t" and the other is spelled with an upper case "T".  Some of my students are either of Turkish origin or have family in Turkey and for the life of them they couldn't distinguish the fact that it just happens to be a coincidence that the words are spelled and pronounced the same but have completely different meanings.  Instead they took this confusion as an insult to Turkish people thinking americans are calling them "turkeys".  I also had a student ask me if the real story of Thanksgiving is when all the pilgrims landed in America, killed the Indians and took their land.  This startled me at first. (How does he know that part of history?!)  I tried to lightly answer his question with a "yes, well..." and then get right back to the lesson pertaining to traditional Thanksgiving food.
As all you Americans know, Thursday was Thanksgiving for us and that is by far my favorite holiday.  I do like Christmas and all the holiday cheer that comes with the season, but there is nothing like Thanksgiving to kick it all off and have the first big family gathering of the winter.  I had hoped to make a big Thanksgiving feast for all of my non-American friends, but unfortunately my package with the necessary ingredients never arrived.  So, I made do with a half feast on the ingredients I could actually find in France.  I made a small piece of turkey (France doesn't seem to sell whole turkeys), garlic mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, and a corn.  It wasn't the same without pumpkin pie, but still a very good meal.  I was able to share with my two housemates: Janine and Deliece.  I am happy to say that after a second helping we all slipped into a nice food induced coma for a couple of hours.


Yesterday I went to the Christmas market with a big group of friends.  I don't think Christmas markets like this exist in the US.  I've been to the one in Chicago, but it was a little different than this one.  One part of the center of town was set up with a ride and musical attractions for little children.  In the Grand Place there is a giant ferris wheel and a little christmas village all set up.  At first I thought this man dressed as santa was a part of the display, but then I realized he was a homeless man posing as santa to make a little extra cash if you want a photo with him.  Pretty clever.  The last part of the Christmas market was set up with wooden booths selling all kinds of food and drink and then some Christmas trinkets.  Unfortunately it rained the entire time, making it a little but miserable.  I tried some vin chaud- hot wine.  It was ok but a little too sugary for me.  I also tried a speculous crepe.  For those of you who have never tried speculous or as it's referred to in the US biscoff, you must stop reading my blog post at this very minute and go to your nearest grocery store and buy a jar.  Or even two jars, you'll be glad you did.  You think nutella is good?  Speculous/Biscoff is out of this world amazing!!  I digress...  









Sunday, November 18, 2012

Life Lessons

Salut! (Hi!)
Another week down and more stories to tell, but unfortunately no photos this time.  This week started off with a BANG!  I had 6 hours of class time on Monday in both of my schools.  When I got to my first school at 9am the teacher I'm assigned to for that hour didn't know realize I would be working with her class and thus she had no clue how to use me in the lesson.  Her brilliant solution was to send me off to another classroom with 4-6 students at a time and make up a lesson on the spot.  Now, for any of you who have taught before you'll know that young school children can sniff out when a teacher doesn't have a lesson plan prepared, and of course they take advantage of this and chit chat the entire time.  So I resorted to the classic "Let's introduce ourselves to the class" lesson plan.  This is easy for them to do cause they have been doing it since the first year they started english, but I can also critique their sentence structures because at this point they shouldn't be making mistakes when introducing themselves.  Then for my second class I was assigned with the same teacher and she pulled them same little stunt on my again.  All the teachers have my schedule to know who I am teaching with each week, so she should have been prepared for this.  She asked me if I by chance have a lesson plan concerning personality traits prepared and with me.  At this I just laughed!  Really?! Really?! You think I walk around with lesson plans prepared for every possible topic that could be thrown at me and that I have them at the ready every day I walk into that school.  Sorry chica I'm not Mary Poppins.  I told her if she wants me to plan lessons I'm more than happy to do so, I just need a 48 hour notice of what the topic is, how many students I'll have at time, and for how long I'll have to work with them.  I really don't think that is asking too much.  It's basic organizational skills, which I am quickly learning the french do not possess.  So for my second hour I once again had the class introduce themselves.  My third hour was spent in the teacher's lounge due to the fact that one teacher was absent, the other teach I am assigned to on tandum weeks has yet to inform me of the classroom number for that hour, and when I went to ask the secretary who has a giant binder of every teacher's schedule, there was a long line of people waiting to ask him a question.  After 20 minutes of waiting for the secretary I took the liberty of resting in the teacher's lounge seeing as the entire class time has been wasted at this point.
You'd think my day would be looking up at this point, right? HAH!  I ate lunch on the metro ride over to my other school.  My first lesson was a breeze.  5 minute one on one conversations with students and I write down all the grammatical mistakes to show the teacher after class.  I go onto my second class which is taught with my absolute favorite teacher between the two schools.  I was waiting outside the classroom and saw she had several students at her desk, and she was writing in their carnets.  A carnet is correspondance book each students carries around that contains their class schedule and then pages and pages for teachers to make notes about bad behavior that is taken home and signed by parents.  It's a big threat to the students to even just ask for the carnet.  If a teacher writes in the carnet they are in BIG trouble.  When she had finished with those students and stepped out into the hall she looked at me and said, "I think I might quit my job and become a butcher.  Funny cause I'm vegetarian."  I tried to politely laugh this off as a simple joke, but she seemed pretty serious.  I had planned out an awesome lesson about the presidential elections for this class and so the teacher asked me to go find an empty classroom.  She also went ahead and split up the class and sent half with me.  As I was looking for a classroom...  Of course all the rooms were either occupied or locked, and I have 12 chatty students following me like ducks.  When I went back to inform the teacher that I can't access any open rooms she had disappeared and the rest of the class didn't know where she had gone.  At this point I'm left in the hall with 25 talking 13 year old kids.  As an assistant I am never ever allowed to have more than 10 alone to myself, let alone an entire class.  In the hallway!  Finally another english teacher came into the hall to find out what the noise was all about and usher the students into the classroom.  He asked me to go next door and check on the teacher I had been assigned to teach with at that hour.  She was crying and having a panic attack when I walked in the room.  Let me just stop the story right there and say: several big rules about working with an assistant have been broken and on top of that I was not trained to handle stressed out teachers mid crisis mode.  She looked at me and said, "I can't be here anymore, I can't stand these students, you'll have to take the class and carry on with your planned lesson."  To which I told her, "no, there needs to be someone watching half the class so I can take the other half and do my lesson."  Finally a secretary was brought up to the room to watch half that class as I took the other half to give me lesson.  When I saw that same teacher later in the day she was packing up her desk and made a comment about trying to leave her classroom in order so when her replacement is found that teacher can just take over.  When I went back to this school on Friday this same teacher was absent and might be taking a month's leave from teaching.
Tuesday was uneventful with a 9am-4pm training day.  I did get time to speak with the two people putting on the training day to figure out how to handle the problems I'm having with both of my schools.  The one bummer about the training day is that the power went out in the kitchen so we didn't get free lunch, which is in all honesty is the only reason I go to those training days.
Wednesday evening I went with my friend Emily to an Arabic class taught on the southwest side of Lille.  It was a solid hour transit for me to get there, but we were just going for an observation class to see if we want to sign up for the semester.  The class had already been meeting for 3 weeks, so we picked up mid-alphabet.  This was a beginner Arabic class, and for those of you who don't know I've already taken 2-3 years of Arabic.  I do want to keep learning and building on what I have learned so far, but this class started from the beginning.  Literally A-B-C.  The class is taught in French which would challenge me, but it wouldn't teach me anything new about Arabic.  My friend Emily however does want to start learning the language from the beginning so I have offered to help her when she needs it, and I'll just plan to study on my own at home.  At least I brought my text books with me.  I'm hoping second semester I can find an Arabic tandem partner to work on speaking.
Thursday and Friday went by as usual, lots of unorganized chaos, but this is beginning to become my norm.
Sorry for a long rant about my tests and trials of living in France, so to end on a good note here is some good news coming up!!  Chad will be visiting me in 25 days!!!!!!!! My mom just bought her plane ticket to visit me for 2 weeks in February!!!!!!!  and my birthday is in 2 weeks!!!!!!!! AND I'm taking another trip in 3 weeks!!!!!!!
Hopefully next weeks post will be a little more cheerful :)

Friday, November 9, 2012

I will survive.

Don't worry: I'm still alive and well, I've just been rather busy these last 2 or so weeks and unfortunately didn't have the time to update my blog.  So get ready for one hell of a post!!
I have been on vacation for the past two weeks, which is one of the few good things about living in France:  the school system takes a 2 week break about every 6 weeks.  The first week of the break I spent it laying around the house, watching French tv, and shopping.  We got our first paycheck in the middle of that first week so of course I had to spend some of it!  Don't worry mom and dad I did pay rent and I am buying food not just shoes and scarves.  On Tuesday of that first week I went to the zoo in Lille, which is situated in a part of the citadel and in fact the zoo is free!  For being a free zoo it was actually really nice and the animals were all well taken care of.  They had a pretty good array of animals living in the zoo as well: monkeys, birds, zebras, rhinos, capybaras, and so much more!  (See pictures below).





On Wednesday of that week I went out with my friends Janine and Emily and my new french friend Vaalentine (she is friends with Janine from a previous language exchange program).  We went to Euralille and shopped literally all day.  It was so nice to have been paid and to have money to treat myself to some new clothes.  For those of you who don't know, Euralille is a giant shopping mall in the city center of Lille.  It doesn't compare to the mega malls in Indianapolis but definitely bigger the Eastland mall in Evansville.  You can find a little bit of everything in that mall and that we did :)

Friday of that first week I left for a 6 day trip along the northern coast of France.  Janine, Emily and I visited Dunkerque, Calais and Boulogne sur Mer.  Our friend Jason from Canada and his canadian friend Erica joined us for the trip to Dunkerque.  We left Lille pretty early that morning and took a train to Dunkerque.  When we got out of the station it was of course raining (this is the north of France).  we had about a 30 minute walk from the train station to our hotel.  After dropping our stuff off in the hotel room we went to visit the North Sea.  With all the rain and wind and general cold of the north we decided not to stay at the beach for long.  We tried to visit a WWII memorial museum, but it was closed for the winter season.  So instead we visited a Maritime museum and spent as much time there as we could muster as to not have to be out in the cold rainy day.  The museum was very informational on the history of the ports in Dunkerque throughout history and the highlighted on famous people who have made the city into what it is today.  Around early evening the weather had let up just enough for us to explore the city where we found lots of restaurants and shops and an old church.  That night we decided to just buy a couple of pizzas and eat dinner in the hotel room watching Youtube videos all night.  Very good use of the time given the dreary weather was against us.


 



                       
                     











We left for Calais the next afternoon, but before we left Dunkerque I had decided that I had had enough with the boots I had brought with me.  They had completely split open in the back and in the rain water was just rushing into my shoes soaking my feet and socks.  Not only was this a fashion crisis but it just wasn't healthy to walk around in the cold with wet feet.  So! I stopped at a discount shoe store and bought a really great pair of black rain/snow boots.  We had a moment of silence for my beloved brown leather boots and then I threw them away in the trash.  I'm really hoping a homeless person in need of shoes found them.  The train ride to Calais didn't take long and after checking into the hotel we headed off towards the old part of town and the beach.  First we stopped off at the Hotel de Ville and saw a famous sculpture by Rodin, which is situated just infront of the Hotel de Ville.  We found a really neat lighthouse, but of course it was closed due to the rain getting the stairs wet and making it a hazard to tourists.  Instead we headed to explore the one thing that is free and guaranteed to be open: the beach.  We explored the harbor housing tons and tons of boats and then when we tried to cross a pedestrian/vehicle bridge a little tug boat was entering the harbor from the ocean.  It's antenna was just barely too tall to fit under the bridge so we all had to wait for the bridge to rotate itself letting the boat into the harbor.  I've never seen something like that before!!  The bridge literally tilted and then rotated clockwise till it was perpendicular with the street and the boat could go by.  This beach was more packed with people flying kites and walking dogs.  I don't mean to give the impression that we went to the coast for a nice holiday in the sun and sand.  It was insanely windy and cold and we couldn't stay longer than 10-15 minutes before just giving up.  That night we ate out at a really nice restaurant and took about 2 hours to sit and eat and chat.  Typical french dinner.


 


The next day we made a second attempt at viewing the lighthouse, but since we tried to get in just before the noon hour (which is lunch time and very important to the French) we were asked to come back later in the day.  We found a famous church where Charles de Gaulle married his wife Yvonne.  Of course it too was closed for renovations.  We tried to get into a WWII memorial museum that was housed in an old Nazi Naval bunker, but it too was closed.  The museum is situated in a park and since there was a strong wind storm coming in the park was closed to the public.  We made a third attempt at the lighthouse and FINALLY had luck with a tour.  It started out with a very informational video about the history of lighthouses and their current day function.  I learned that each lighthouse is decorated differently so sailors can distinguish which cities are along the coast.  At night when the lighthouse can't be seen the light projected from the lighthouse is unique to each one determined by the frequency of the beam and how long it shines in each direction.  After the video our tour guide lead us up the 271 steps to the top of the lighthouse.  It was so windy out you could feel the lighthouse swaying in the wind.  After the lighthouse we went to an art museum, where I got to see more sculptures by Rodin.  He's my favorite sculptor so that was pretty exciting for me.  I did realize after a while that the pieces on display were borrowed from the official Rodin museum in Paris, which I've already been to, so these pieces weren't new to me.  There were a lot of paintings and sculptures all around the museum and after an hour of exploring we decided to head back to the hotel to rest up before dinner.  







 

The last part of the trip was spent in Boulogne sur Mer.  I liked this city the best because there was much more to see and do.  We met up with our friend Grace at the train station and went to check into our hotel.  The hotel was unlike any other I have ever stayed in before.  For one there was no elevator and our room was on the 4th floor, which to the Americans that actually the 5th floor.  There was only a toilet and sink in the corner covered by a fabric curtain.  We learned to blair the tv when someone needed to use the facilities.  The showers were communal amongst the floor and just on the other side of the hall.  The first night in Boulogne we ventured down to the beach and watched the sunset.  For dinner we thought we'd try out a chinese restaurant just next to our hotel.  The sign on the door said they were closed but a little chinese lady ushered us inside and read us the entire menu twice telling us everything on the menu was very good.  She spoke to us in French but I honestly thought she was speaking Chinese.  I ordered a chicken dish, and was afraid my chicken was undercooked because it looked a little pink inside.  The other girls ordered some kind of noodle soup.  Pretty much a bowl of water with noodles and some sliced vegetables.  Needless to say we weren't too pleased with that restaurant.




The next day we went to the old part of town that is surrounded by the Ramparts or old fortified walls of the city.  We found a bright and colorful art garden just outside the Hotel de Ville.  We tried to go up the Belfroi to get a 360 view of the city, but of course it was closed for the season.  So we explored the rest of the Hotel de Ville and found a big ballroom and court room.  We ventured around the old city some more and found a giant church with a crypt housing many Egyptian artifacts (of course this was closed too).  the view from the old city was gorgeous over looking the rest of Boulogne and then out into the sea.  We got lunch at a cute little creperie restaurant.  I had a ham and cheese crepe with a side salad and a local type of cidre.  In the afternoon we walked back to the beach and the harbor.  This day was election day in America so I retired to the room to nap so I could stay up late and watch the election results.  I could only stay up till 1am or 2am before passing out.  I had set my alarm to go off at 6am and got caught up on the election results.

 

 

 



 



The next day we checked out of our hotel and headed off to an aquarium, which is supposed to be one of the best tourist attractions in the north of France.  Naussica was AWESOME!  It was by far one of the best aquariums I've ever been to.  We saw all kinds of fish, alligators, penguins, sea lions, and so much more!  







Thanks for sticking around for an insanely long blog post!  Back to work on Monday!!