The REAL Oldest Profession

I've now been teaching - properly teaching, as opposed to hovering in the corner with a nervous grin on my face while the teacher introduces me to the class - for just over a month and am starting to properly settle into it. My ego is more than sufficiently inflated after having been told by the teachers in charge of me that I'm a natural, and I'm still at that naively enthusiastic stage of genuinely enjoying creating overambitious lesson plans. The buzz I get when I enter the classroom to see rows of bright young students eager to learn (oh, all right then, slack-jawed teenagers who are no less stroppy than their anglo-saxon counterparts) is the same one I get when I step out onto a stage to act in a play or onto a dancefloor to perform.




High- (and low-) lights of teaching so far:




- The weird not-quite-a-teacher-but-not-a-student-either status I have that comes from being only three years older than some of my pupils, which means that I can enjoy a bit more banter with them than a proper teacher. Such as, for example, the cocky teenage boys who think they can chat me up in class. One asked me if I had a boyfriend and when I replied that I did, he asked, "Is he as handsome as me?" The phrase In your dreams, sunshine was swiftly added to vocabulary books...

- Along the same vein, not being sure whether to be flattered or suspicious (or both; I've learnt quickly that cynicism is rarely inappropriate in this profession) when during a task in which the students had to describe their ideal boyfriend/girlfriend to a partner, who then reported back to the class, one kid explained with a grin that another boy's ideal girlfriend was, "English, with long brown hair, green eyes, and good at dancing..."



- My attempts to instill a bit of rebellion in the students. While conducting short one-on-one interviews with them on the book they've been reading, about life under a dictatorship, I asked them whether they thought it was important to rebel against oppression, assuming that they would be all for protecting the values of free speech. I couldn't believe it when more than half of my students - in a country that loves to boast about la résistance - voiced the opinion that it was far too dangerous and better to just do what the government tells you.



- During a lesson on the fashion industry, attempting to keep a straight face while a class of fifteen, six of whom are wearing the same harem-pant-style trousers and the rest with carefully-coiffed trendy emo fringes, swear blind that they are all individuals and don't follow the crowd.

- Discovering that French kids get most of their English vocabulary from American TV shows, and that the George Clooney Nespresso advert is extremely popular over here, so it's best not to ask, "What else?" when pressing a student for further answers if you don't want the class to collapse in fits of giggles.

- Mourning the waste of the Suffragette's efforts after a poll on various household tasks (cooking, cleaning, paying bills, looking after children, DIY, earning money etc) and whether men or women should do each task. I was expecting these trendy young things to say that both should share all or at least most of the chores but no, the vast majority (including a large proportion of girls) voted for women to cook, clean, wash up, look after children and so on.

- Learning that it's not a good idea to teach French kids the phrase "Dos and Don'ts". After nearly six years of having it drummed into them that they must write 'does' with an 'e', this is likely to blow their little minds. I lost count of how many of them tried to correct me, no matter how many times I explained it was a noun.

- Being completely wrong about pupils sometimes, no matter how well you think you know them. I had prepared a lesson on the song Dedicated Follower Of Fashion by The Kinks, and was rather worried about using it with a slightly troublesome class, fearing blank stares and refusals to sing along. But to my surprise, they started singing all by themselves, well before I'd asked them to (during a gap-filling lyrics exercise), and appeared to love the song so much that I could still hear the refrains of, "Oh yes, he is!" floating down the corridor as they went to their next lesson.

- Trying to learn the names of the 200-odd students that I teach in total (some of whom I only see once a fortnight) and seeing how quickly they work out that it's bad for them if I know their name because they get picked on to ask questions more often. Having a difficult-to-pronounce name also helps because even if I know it, I usually avoid saying it where possible.

- Being secretly impressed at the lengths that even the most apparently apathetic student will go to, in terms of cheating, in order to win a game. For example, I like to wake them up in early-morning lessons by playing a running dictation game: in pairs, one partner has to dictate a short text to the other, but the catch is that the text is at the other end of the room, so they must run back and forth, memorising as much as possible each time. I noticed one boy had stopped running; assuming he had decided to give up, I went over to investigate, only to discover he had somehow managed to type out the text in a message on his phone without me seeing and his partner was now copying it out long-hand. While I had to disqualify them for cheating, I couldn't help but privately admire the sheer ingenuity and audacity of it.

- Learning that you can get almost any class enthusiastic about a task by turning it into a competition, even if the prize is only the glory of winning. Even the most uninterested stroppy teenager will start yelling out bits of vocabulary to his team-mates if it means they might beat the girls' team.

- Trying to decide which is worse: the noisy class who won't stop talking when you're trying to explain a task, or the zombie class who look at you with blank, glassy stares like dead fish and won't utter a word. And then realising that you're prepared to endure either because that one kid who comes alive during your lessons and is genuinely enthusiastic about learning English makes it all worthwhile.

- Worrying that I'm starting to dress like a teacher.