Your wallet is for documents. Please go pay at the cash desk.

        With all of my writing about traveling, it’s often hard to remember what I am doing over here in the first place. But you all remember that thing I have, you know, a job? Surprisingly yes, I do have something that I build my life around over here – teaching. And I must admit, in the past four weeks that I have been back, I have few complaints. My confidence has grown in the classroom, I have fun lessons planned about American culture and history, and the game of Jeopardy has made it into more than one class period. I do realize that since I’ve been over here, I haven’t really blogged a lot about my experience at the school, so I am devoting this week’s posting to my life inside the classroom….enjoy!

            During my first two weeks back, I spent the timing wrapping up with my old classes, before switching to my new spring schedule. However, even after having these kids for three months, I still found it hard to remember their names. Call me crazy, but when you have 12 classes in two days, each with 15 or more students, it becomes a little difficult to recall the name of each and every student. In one of my classes, the only name I could remember was that of a kid named Jeremy. Easy enough, that’s my brother’s name. Only problem with that is, when you can’t remember anyone else’s name in the class, you repeatedly call on the one you do know. In this instance, Jeremy took this as a sign that I had a crush on him. Typical French boy. In one class, I used him as my exemplary partner for a group exercise. I guess he thought this “sealed the deal” so-to-speak, and I now have a boy who will sit in the front of the class, continually winking and blowing kisses in my direction. Slight unnerving, but harmless nonetheless.

            Most of my post-Christmas lessons dealt with working on the past tense, both preterit and imperfect. At the beginning of class, we would come up with a list of questions that you might ask someone to learn about their holidays. I wanted them to describe where they went, what they did, what they ate, what presents they got, etc. The following is a list I wrote down of some of the questions they came up with:

            -Did you turkey eating?

            -Have you skiing in the holiday?

            -What did you become as a present? (Well, I turned into a Jack-in-the-Box, thank you very much)

            -Did you holiday winter? (I have no idea what this was meant to be)

            -Did you make shopping (literal translation of “faire du shopping”)

            -Did you go to your grandparents’ hoose? (pronounced hoo-z)

            -Did you recive clothesis? (pronounced re-si-ve and clothes-iz)

            Another subject many of them don’t like to talk about: New Year’s. The get incredibly embarrassed when they speak about drinking. As many of you know, the drinking age in France is technically 18. However, high schoolers start much earlier, that I can attest to. The number of students I have who “couldn’t remember” what they did on New Year’s was actually astounding. But in telling me so, most of them turned beet-red.

            Towards the end of this first semester, my students got increasingly comfortable with telling me things about their personal lives. This is rare for French people – students and teachers alike – because they don’t generally tend to share information with people they don’t consider their close friends (much unlike Americans). One girl began to tell me about the boy she had just met on the internet. Apparently they had been dating for 3 weeks, and she wanted advice about going to visit him. Why ask me? Well, he was from Boise, Idaho. I think she thought that since I was American, I would have some sort of advice for her about going to Boise. I think I told her, “I hope you like potatoes.” I can give really awesome advice.

            In one of my new classes, this sharing phenomenon was reversed. With one of the English professors, it is generally the custom that I come to the first class, meet the students, and they are allowed to ask me questions while he is in the room. For one of the classes, they ran out of questions with about 5 minutes of class to go. He decided to use this time to have the students ask him questions. Note: this is extremely rare. French students and teachers do not interact beyond the academics of the classroom. It amazed me that they didn’t know if he was married, had children, or had lived in Malaysia, Singapore, and Dubai. Those were things I learned from my first conversation with him! When one student learned that he had traveled all over the world, she inquired about his wife, “And do you have French woman?” I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

            In my new classes, the first few weeks are devoted to introductions. I get to know a little about my students, and they get to know a little bit about me. I mostly ask them to work in pairs, so they practice asking the questions to their neighbors, writing down the answers, and then presenting their neighbor to the class. While they were writing their responses, one student asked me the translation of the word “belle-soeur”, which means stepsister. When she was presenting her neighbor to the class, she said this is Coralie, my stepsister. I was intrigued, so I asked “Were you friends before your parents got married?” Confused, she didn’t answer the question, and instead moved on with her presentation. “This is my stepsister, and she is also dating my brother.” OKAY…WHAT?! Serious clarification necessary. Thankfully there was a student in class who caught the look of shock and horror on my face, and told the girl in French what I thought she had said. She clarified that no, their parents were not married, and that yes, Coralie was dating her brother, that’s what made her, her “belle-soeur”. Aha! Crux of the problem is that belle-soeur has two translations: stepsister and sister-in-law. Thankfully she was referring to the latter of the two, as the girl and her brother were engaged to be married. How I love when things get lost in translation!

This is where you put your documents.

            I also love the beginning of a new semester because it means I get to sit-in on the classes I will be taking over. This allows me to observe how these native French-speakers teach my language. And it is quite amusing. In one class of BTS students, those in their post-back years (so basically the exact same age as I am – awkward), they were learning about the song “Ka-Ching” by Shania Twain. Or should I say, Shan-ya Twain, as the teacher pronounced it. I love how they put the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllables – it’s adJECive, not ADjective. Going through the song, the students had a list of vocabulary words they needed to identify the meaning of. One such word, wallet. When asked what people use a wallet for, I generally say, to hold money. However, I stood corrected when one of the professors corrected me and said, “No, no. A wallet is to hold your documents.” And where do you go pay for things in a store? “A cash desk.” Duh.

Cash desk.

            A very large difference between French and American schools is the amount of PDA that exists inside the hallways. It is actually quite astounding. I am often caught off guard as I round a corner and find students making out in the middle of the hallway. As I mentioned before, coming from the land founded by prudes, this is not something we see on a daily basis. Another difference is the number of “repeater” students they have. In some cases in the US, kids can be held back a year if they haven’t progressed enough the year before. But I would say that being held back isn’t exactly commonplace. Not the case in France. I have students who have been held back one, two, sometimes even three years! I have a student who is 20 years old in an English class with 15 year olds! Absurdity.

            One question I get asked a lot, which really makes me laugh, is why in the world I would ever want to leave Washington, DC to come to a place like Saverne. When students ask me this question they seem genuinely confused that anyone in their right mind would choose to come and spend a year in Saverne. And after spending 6 months here, I must admit I agree with them to a certain extent. There ain’t much going on over here. But when I explain to them that I get to do all of this wonderful traveling, they sort of understand. They are amazed I can be so far away from home and so independent. One student asked, “Are you afraid of anything?! You seem so brave!”

Warsaw

            Speaking of being brave, I should tell you about my next holiday. Next week, the schools go on a two-week February vacation. As an exercise in total independence, I am traveling alone to Poland, Scotland, and Italy. This will be the first time that I am completely on my own in a land where I don’t speak a word of the language (Dzien dobry anyone?)…Exciting! I’m hoping to become one of those really cool travelers that can stay by herself at a hostel, meet awesome new people, and be entirely self-sufficient in a foreign land...We’ll see how that goes!

If anyone has any traveling tips for Warsaw, Krakow, Edinburgh, or Florence, feel free to comment below! I am eager to glean travel tips from my readers. 

Until next time, do widzenia!