Grapple For The Teacher

I'm going to put the usual 'isn't-it-funny-how-the-French-do-this?' blogs aside for just a moment while I talk about teaching styles. No, wait, don't go!

Fine. Well, it's much cosier with only the two of us left in any case. Anyway, teaching styles. French children are used to a very old-fashioned, teacher-sitting-at-the-front-lecturing-and-students-taking-notes-all-lesson approach. Your reaction to that last sentence is a good determiner of age; if you just thought to yourself, "And what's wrong with that? Never did me any harm!" then I'm afraid you're officially old. Sorry.

Now, I'm sure that type of teaching has its merits, and I'm equally sure that when I've been teaching for twenty years and have had every last drop of enthusiasm wrung out of me by league tables and brats who don't want to learn, I will also become one of those teachers, eschewing carefully-prepared lesson plans for, "Turn to page 53 and do exercises 1 to 14, and no talking while I try to catch up on sleep". But, fortunately, I'm still in that incredibly annoying (to everyone else, most of all world-weary teachers) phase where I'm naive enough to believe I can 'make a difference' and actually care about whether or not the students like me. Couple that with the fact that I grew up with the modern, more dynamic, varied style of teaching, and you get a bunch of lycéens who don't know what's hit them.

Firstly, I refuse to sit at the desk at the front, droning on about some grammatical point or other, or to be glued to the blackboard. Instead, I walk around the classroom a lot as I'm explaining things; it means that there no longer is a back row where they can pass notes among one another, because half the time, I'm right next to them. It also means that my confused students end up accidentally listening to me, because they're turning round to watch me, wondering what the hell I'm doing over there. Maybe it's the bellydancer in me, but I like to perform among my audience, up front and personal, not up on a pedestal somewhere.

Secondly, something as normal and unoriginal as pairwork or groupwork is an unfathomable concept for students who are used to silent, individual work and occasionally answering questions. The first time I tried to get my classes to split off into pairs and work on something, it took me ten minutes to explain what I meant, and that was before I'd even mentioned the activity. They simply could not get their head around the idea of being allowed to confer with someone else, much less being asked to turn their chair around and, shock horror! face the wrong way to work with the person behind them. Even now, when they're more used to me asking them to work in groups, they still whisper as if they're doing something wrong, no matter how many times I tell them that I want them to have lively discussions with each other (as long as it's on the subject matter, in English, or both).

I like to use music in my classes because pop and rock songs tend to be a great way to sneakily practice certain grammatical structures and pronunciation, or just to get the students thinking about a particular issue. Some classes have taken to it more than others, but almost all of them were initially bewildered and horrified by the idea of singing in the classroom. And that's with the relatively safe option of singing along to an MP3; I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when my boyfriend first brought out his guitar in his classes in French Guiana... But it's paid off, because they think they're having a fun lesson, and they don't generally notice how much work they're doing. My favourite clandestine pronunciation activity was on the last day of term, when I left some music playing while they were doing a Christmas crossword as a treat. Without realising it, most of them starting singing along to the ones they recognised (carefully chosen songs that I knew had been hits here), yet just thought it was cool to be able to listen to music at school. Mwahahaha!

I also like to be extremely physical when I'm teaching - again, something which I'm sure I'll grow out of, but good for the time being. A while ago, I was trying to explain the word 'cliffhanger'. First I told them what it meant, and talked about soap operas and books, then I decided to show them why it's called that. I climbed up onto a desk and pretended to be running, telling them a story about a man who was being chased by people who were trying to kill him. As it got to the part where he tripped and fell over the cliff, I jumped and grabbed a heavy door-frame next to the desk, hanging from it. My feet were only dangling an inch or two from the floor but I played up the story, asking whether he would be rescued by a helicopter or would lose his grip and tumble into the sea, to be eaten by sharks. Then I stood up and declared, "I'll tell you what happened next week. And THAT'S a cliffhanger." I'd definitely get in trouble if my headmaster found out about it, but hey, that class will never forget the word 'cliffhanger'.

Now, I know it can't be like this all the time. I know that when I'm a qualified teacher, I'm going to need to put in the spadework, drilling verb conjugations and the like. I know that when I sit on desks, I lose a bit of authority, and when I play the clown most of the time, it's harder to make them sit and work on something quietly when I need them to. At the moment, I tell myself it's okay because I can leave the boring but necessary stuff to their real teacher, but one day, I'm going to need to work out how to incorporate both styles of teaching. My informal approach - coupled with my age and the fact that they call me by my first name - leads to a few difficulties, like getting hit on fairly frequently. Still, I'm assuming that's karma, a result of the hell I put some of my male high school teachers through by flirting incessantly with them - Mr Higgon, I hang my head in shame.