It's been a really hectic few weeks, but good. First, school stuff:

I'm on a two-week rotating schedule, which I am calling Week 1 and Week 2, because while my schools both call them weeks A and B, they are (of course) on opposite weeks. I'm pretty sure all the schools in the area begin on the same day, so I have no idea why that should be, but there it is. I don't work on Fridays, but each of the 8 days that make up my cycle is completely different. There are 4 classes that I see twice during that period (so, once per week) and there's one class that I see once, but for two hours. The rest of the hours are all different classes, and there's one block that is split over three different beginners classes, meaning I see each of those groups once every six weeks. (But of course it's not really every six weeks, because every six weeks I have two weeks of vacation.) In all, I have 21 different groups. I haven't counted the kids in each class, but most of them have pretty close to 30 kids, so I'm working with at least 500 different students. As soon as I realized that, I immediately gave up on learning any names. I'm also working with at least nine different teachers, most of whom seem to be very friendly, but none of whom really understands at all what my job entails. So it's been interesting.

I've been trying to keep detailed notes about how classes have been going and what i've been doing in each of them, because I have no earthly hope of just remembering. So far it's mostly gone well. For most of the first week the kids just asked me questions about myself, mostly the same questions as before over and over and over. My two least favorite (yet common) questions are "what do you like" and "what are you like." How am I supposed to answer that? I've also gotten "Are you greedy" at least twice, and other questions that are clearly just excuses to show off new vocab, like "Is someone in your family expecting a baby?" It leaves me with the impression that they don't think of English as just the mode Americans/Brits/etc use to express themselves, but rather the entry into a different world, in which nothing needs to actually make sense. They're not asking me questions that a normal person would ask another person to learn about them; they're just stringing together whatever they can out of the vocab they know. Sort of like magnetic poetry. I'm being unfair; I also get lots of perfectly reasonable questions. But honestly, they would never ask anyone these things in French. It sort of makes me understand a little better the explanation given as to why I meet with some of the 6ème classes (who don't really understand anything I say yet): "We just want them to realize that English-speaking people exist in the real world." Fair enough.

The whole "ask the assistant a lot of questions" thing plays out really amusingly with one of the teachers, because her strategy with the younger kids is to have them repeat things a lot, on the theory that the more you say something out loud the better you understand things. If you sort of understand something when you hear it but you don't actually get how the construction works, that becomes clear when you try to say it. So the kids get these slips of paper each class with spaces to mark their points up to 20, with 2 points for asking a question without making any grammar mistakes or for being the first person to correctly repeat something complicated or difficult that I said, and one point for repeating something correctly after the first person already did so. So in other words, every single answer I give is repeated 10 or so times as she calls on different kids. Sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it takes on an oddly mantra-like quality. "What is your name?" "My name is Rosalie." "Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie. Her name is Rosalie." "Do you like France?" "Yes, I like France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "Yes, Rosalie likes France." "What is your favorite color?" "My favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." "Her favorite color is green." I can't help laughing at it sometimes.

The upside of having so many classes is that, most of the time, I can pretty much do the same lesson (modified slightly for level) for two weeks. I'm not really that creative, and since I don't work more than four hours a day at most it doesn't really get boring, so I definitely prefer it that way. For this past week (and at least part of next week) I used a powerpoint that I put together about me, my family, DC, UVA, the work I did for Obama, and my road trips to and from Alaska. They all seemed to really enjoy it, especially the "typically American" things like my parents' house, my graduation cap and gown, and anything to do with Obama, who is kind of a rockstar here. (Any mention of his name is immediately followed by at least one adorably French-accented yell of "yes we can!") It was also pretty easy to tailor to different levels - for the younger kids it's a good excuse to practice numbers ("I have thirteen uncles, seven aunts and fifty-six cousins;" and "my grandfather is ninety-seven years old"), and with the older kids we got into a discussion about how universities are different in the US and Europe.

I'm not really sure what my next lesson plan is going to be - the only request I've had from any of the teachers is to "talk about the Pledge of Allegiance," and so far I haven't thought of much beyond "it's really pretty creepy" and "little kids don't understand what they're saying" and "I agree that it's weird it mentions God, yes we do sort of claim to be secular like France." But hopefully I'll think of something else interesting to say. Something, ideally, that does not involve them needing to understand the words "pledge," "allegiance," "indivisible" or the construction "for which." I'm sure it will be fine.

Anyway, so far most of the kids have been a lot of fun. The little ones don't speak much English at all (I mostly respond in English to their French, or the teacher translates for me) but they seem eager to learn, and the older ones are a little more jaded but much better able to communicate, so it's fairly easy to keep them entertained because we can have actual conversations. There are really only two classes I'm alarmed about. One is a 4ème (age equivalent to 8th grade) "non-Euro," so non-advanced. The teacher is actually one of my favorites so far - she made a big point of reaching out to me by email before we met, and warned me that the class was a little rough, and assured me repeatedly that I would never be sent out on my own with any who were badly behaved and that if they were bad, I could send them back and I would never have to see them again. I kind of thought she was overdoing it with the warnings - I'm not all that easily intimidated - but honestly she was actually pretty understated. The kids are completely insane. She spent at least 80% of the hour on basic behavior control, and if anything she erred on the side of ignoring things she could have responded to. There are 30 kids, and they spent the hour standing up, throwing things at each other, moving tables, kicking each others' chairs, pulling chairs away if another kid stood up so that he'd fall when he tried to sit, stealing pens/pencil cases/notebooks/anything not nailed down from each other, making short hooting sounds every time the teacher's back was turned, and just generally being completely out of control. Even the kids who wanted to participate in the lesson were awful, with several of them whining if she didn't call on them every single time they raised their hand or shouting "moi! moi! moi!" ("me! me! me!") when they wanted to be called on. Fortunately for me, none of this is my problem - my job was to answer the questions they asked me, and not to speak when the kids were too loud for my answers to be heard, and to let the teacher deal with all behavior issues. So I left the class a bit shocked, but not in bad spirits. The teacher and I decided that at the beginning I'm only going to take four or five of these kids at a time (I'm allowed to take up to half the class), and I think that should be pretty manageable. But Jesus.

As a side note, the way that class spoke to me has made me really wonder about the relative courtesy implied in different French question constructions. When I first showed up outside the classroom, one of the kids said "vous êtes qui?" ("who are you?" or, literally, "you are who?"). That inverted form of question is pretty common, and I've noticed it most often with "where" questions like "tu viens d'où?" ("you're from where?") and "t'habites où?" ("you live where?"). I really need to actually ask someone who speaks good French about this, because as an English speaker, I am having a hard time shaking the sense that there is some sort of rudeness or almost snideness about this form. In other words, I tend to hear it as "and you're from where, exactly?" Which is probably not fair. It's probably fine. But still, "vous êtes qui?" set my teeth a bit on edge. It sounds not so much like "who are you?" as "who are you?"

The other class I'm worried about is the equivalent 3ème, which is the kids who were in the above class last year. I was supposed to see them on Wednesday, but the teacher emailed me to ask if I could skip that class this week and come to her next class instead. She showed up to that class a minute or two late - because her previous class, the one I'm supposed to have but haven't met, had made her cry. (In fairness, as she herself pointed out, she's pregnant and therefore not particularly difficult to make cry at the moment. But still!) So that'll be interesting. Though if they're really that bad, there's a chance she can decide that I just won't see them at all, and I'll meet with the later class as a permanent schedule change. Which classes I see are completely up to the teacher, which means I don't deal with most of the rough stuff. But yeah, still really not sure what to expect from that.

Anyway, the above notwithstanding, things are generally going very well at school. All of the staff and teachers have been really friendly and helpful, and the kids really do seem to have fun talking to me and get excited about the chance to speak real English to a real American, and even when things don't go perfectly, I never work for more than four hours at a time.

Have to run now, but a post about non-school things is soon to come. For now, two pictures:

Really, English textbook? Really?

Well-meaning teacher could not understand why I saw this and just started laughing. "Let's all draw Rosalie's family tree" might not be the best easy activity for my little 6ème kids.