Can't I Have a Pro Without a Con?

Contrary to my nature, I had a blog post all planned out about packing and how I’d rather sew my fingers together than do it; I even have the pictures to prove it.  But in accordance to the laws of “Gotcha!” that govern my life, as I sat down to write it, I checked my email and received a pretty little surprise: a response from my contact person in La Flèche!  In English!

Dance party!

In every single communiqué from the government, they warned us not to panic if we emailed our contacts in, say, July when we received our arrêtés and didn’t receive a response immediately.  Yes, we all know of the French aversion to electronic communication, but the real reason is that the schools are on summer vacation from mid-July through the first-ish week of September.  (Yes, I do know my contract doesn’t start until October 1^st.  Yes, I know that’s later than September.  Have you met the government?)  They also provided a list of pretty simple questions to ask in French — which I bet these contact people see every year.  Questions like can you tell me what the school’s like?  How many kids are in my class?  What will my duties be?  What’s the town like?  I knew these contacts must get all these questions because in my contact’s response, she answered all of the above.  And I didn’t even ask those questions.

I had poured over the list, selected the few that were pertinent to my situation or that I absolutely needed to know before I left the States: mostly about where the hell I needed to go when I get there and how the hell I go about getting there.  The rest (like the teaching part) I could quietly freak out about on my own.  Over the past month or so, I’d have days just like with my arrêté where I worried I’d spelled the email address wrong, or I’d saved it instead of sent, or the Interwebz Godz went fishing with my question marks.  But, also like my placement paperwork, my response came unexpectedly on a Friday in August.  So I’m going to start really expecting the unexpected.

I’d heard so many horror stories about contacts never responding or providing one-word answers or being no real help at all.  Muriel, my contact, surpassed all my hopes.  She offered to pick me up at the train station in Le Mans if she wasn’t working, and she said I could stay with her over the weekend because she didn’t want me “to be alone” at the lycée, as it would probably seem a bit “gloomy” to arrive only to find an empty school.  The students that live at the school must go home on the weekends, which is another reason why I can’t eat at the cafeteria over the weekends or breaks.  Her kids “are always very happy to have someone ‘special’ at home.”  Guess that’ll be my first test as a “special” teacher!  Also, I need to shop for Chicago-themed kids’ presents.

Then she’ll take me to the school Monday and get me settled in.  The school provides bed linens which can be changed at the lingerie (which loosely translates to linen changing place) free of charge, but I have to bike into town to do the rest of my laundry, and she hinted that the bike might be provided, which is 60 Euros that are staying in my future pocket. She suggested making friends that are willing to put up with my presence in a car so that I can get around a bit easier, so I assume the teachers have done some pro bono chauffeuring before.  And it looks like I’ll be taking my driver’s license and brushing up on my International Rules of the Road, because she said renting a car is a real option.

But I don’t know how to drive stick.  Sigh.  I just don’t know how much more of this learning stuff I can handle.

She even had a fabulous sense of humor, which not many French people display that openly with someone they’ve never met.  For example, laughing loudly in public is seen as rude, and smiling at strangers on the street makes them think that there’s something wrong.  Shopkeepers won’t help you unless you expressly ask for help, and even then it’s no guarantee, so no “CIHYFS,” team.  When describing the school day, she wrote that “school hours are from 8 AM to 6 PM (yes . . .),” and she said she’d help me with all the bank paperwork “(as I’m so terribly fond of this!)”  I think we’ll get along just fine.

However, there were some worrying parts.  She called La Flèche “a small country town” whose cultural life is “interesting but limited.”  After all that I’ve found while methodically stalking the town’s website, I’ll admit to more than a little disappointment.  I probably should have taken something presented with tourists’ dollars on the brain with more than just a grain of salt.  I had myself halfway convinced that it would be okay, that I’ve had enough experience over 24 years to keep myself entertained without bars and nightclubs and 500 different options for nightly activities from which I would be unable to pick and eventually sit at home anyway.  But hearing an actual person describe La Flèche as limited makes me doubt myself, makes me wonder if every past assistant’s small-town horror story will happen to me.

I guess I can’t obsess over it right now.  There’s really nothing I can do ahead of time to research or prepare myself for a ground situation that I haven’t as yet experienced myself.  And if all else fails, I’ll finally get to write one of those fifty books floating around in my brain.

What probably should be more troubling in the grand scheme of things is what Muriel told me about my job.  I’ll be taking 10-15 students for about 25 minutes at a time and making them speak in English.  Then I’ll take the second half of the class for the second half of the period.  One-on-one work as well as conversation-based or other similar extra-curricular activities are possibilities that I could (and probably will) pursue with students that need help or are particularly interested (oh God yes please).  But all.  Alone.  In the back of my mind, I’d known this situation was a possibility, but I’d hoped that I’d be serving more as a teacher’s aid.  Oh boy, had I hoped.  Now those hopes have been dashed like . . . well, I think hopes are really the only things that can be dashed.  And papers from a desk in a harlequin romance.

Like I’ve said before, I’ve had very little teaching experience.  I have guest lectured to a class of future teachers about sonnets; I’ve given about a bajillion presentations and speeches; and I currently work one-on-one with NCC’s speech team to help them write and perform speeches.  But I’ve never had to manage a classroom before, and never had to corral unruly French teenagers.

That’s mostly where my fears lay.  I have no trouble commanding a captive audience of adults or at the very least young adults with shiny-object-induced ADD.  But French teenagers are a whole other beast.  The way the French raise children is directly opposite of the typical American style.  Americans tend to be very forgiving when the child is young, like “boys will be boys” or “they don’t know any better.”  We heap on the restrictions as time passes, such as curfew, etc.  The French, in contrast, crack down in the early years and lighten up as the child ages.  This style is actually how I was raised: my dad says he wacked me upside the head at a restaurant once when I wouldn’t stop screaming, and I was grounded for a whole week in first grade when I went down the street to a friend’s house without permission.  I never needed curfews in my teenage years, and I wasn’t really a bad kid.  Whether one follows the other, I don’t know; these are just the facts.

I could be an aberration of the French system, however, because in my time in France, most of my experience with teenagers just plain sucked.  The girl I stayed with when I was in France for the first time was an absolute model student.  She was quiet in class, did her homework the day it was assigned, and even attended extra study sessions for her Arabic class.  She ended up not coming to America because she had to study for the bac, or baccalauréat, the French version of the ACTs or SATs hyped up on speed.  But her peers were loud and rude and talked the entire time when I was in her Italian class with her.  The teacher would issue an occasional “Tsst” when the decibel level approached bleeding eardrum range, and she kicked out a student who tried to sneak in five minutes late, but other than that, she tolerated the noise.  And my friend said she was a strict teacher!

Ditto for the college courses I attended in Angers.  In every class, I had to sit in the front row in order to hear the professor.

And now I have to teach them.

My teacher friend Manda has offered to help me with some classroom management books, and I’ll gratefully take the aid, but I honestly don’t know how much use it’ll be.  The books I’ve read and the training she’s received has been from the American perspective where kids in high school are looking for the rules, if only to then know how to break them.  My only consolations are that she was a French major as well, so she’s probably smart enough to put two and two together.  Also, she knows my experiences will be chronicled forever on this blog, and she could use me as a efficacy reference in the future.

Bright side?  I hope so.

Stay tuned.  Next time: packing!  And pictures, I promise.

PS: New development!  Muriel emailed me again and said that another English assistant has been posted in La Flèche!  She’s English (as in from Britain), and all Muriel knew was that her name is Verity.  Let’s see how many Facebook hits I get with that information. . . .