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 :)