Fish, Frogs and Cheese

Today was April Fool's Day, or Poisson d'Avril, as the French call it. I have absolutely no idea where their obsession with fish comes from, but it appears that the pinnacle of Gallic wit is to pin a paper fish onto someone's back when they're not looking. Very bizarre, but then again, we are talking about a country where Mr Bean is still found amusing.

It's getting towards the end of my stay here, so my lessons have become a lot more lighthearted and self-deprecatory. I gave one class a list of bizarre sports practiced in Britain, such as bog-snorkelling, gurning, shin-kicking, the Bognor Birdman, zorbing, and so on, and got them to decide which were real and which I'd made up. They were amazed to discover that they were all true, leading to declarations that, "Ils sont fous, les anglais!" Just in case our reputation wasn't bad enough.

They were particularly struck by cheese rolling. For those unfamiliar with British rural pastimes (we really do have top-notch eccentrics), this is a race which takes place in Gloucestershire every year. A large Double Gloucester cheese is rolled from the top of Cooper's Hill, a very tall and steep hill, and hundreds of people run/stagger/fall down after it in an attempt to catch it. The person who manages to grab the cheese first is the winner, but since it can reach speeds of up to 70 mph, there are usually plenty of injuries, although so far, there haven't been any deaths.

There are some great clips of last year's event here, although I'm slightly disappointed that they've gone all health-and-safety mad by now having lots of races with smaller groups instead of everyone at once. Still, there aren't many times in your life you get to hear someone yell, "Get the cheese!" at the top of their lungs.

My students were absolutely dumbfounded; after I explained how it worked, there was a stunned silence followed by a bewildered, "But... WHY?"

I looked at the girl. "You spent today trying to stick paper fish to people, right?"
"Well, yes."
"And you think the British are weird?"


Of course the real answer is that if you have to ask why someone would want to roll down an enormous hill, risking serious injury, while chasing a 70-mph cheese, then you're simply the kind of person who will never understand.

Things I Never Knew About Teaching...

... when I was still at school.

- Teachers know everything that goes on in the school, even if they don't show it. They do notice when best friends fall out, and when pupils date each other. Carefully Coiffed, a 16-year-old boy in one of my classes, used to be - let's be frank here - a little shit until he recently started going out with the most intelligent girl in his class. Now his hand shoots up at every question, just to impress her, and every teacher in the staffroom is rooting for that particular relationship to last, at least until the summer holidays. And they're both still convinced we don't know.

- Teachers can spot masticating teenagers a mile off. Do they seriously think we don't know the old trick of putting chewing gum under your tongue when you answer a question? Come on. It was only six years ago that I was still at school. The same goes for surreptitious texting in the classroom, no matter how subtle they think they're being.

- Teachers never seem to tire of discussing pupils in the staffroom; it's the favourite topic of conversation. All the gossip, and dissection of their fashion senses too. Honestly, they'd be mortified if they heard what their maths teacher had to say about their new skirt.

- Teachers also appear to sense no shame or irony in announcing that a pupil they have taught for the past five years knows absolutely nothing about their respective subjects.

- It feels really quite weird for a 22-year-old unmarried female to be called 'Madame' by her 19-year-old pupils. And yes, some of them do call me that, despite the fact that I introduced myself as Zoe. I imagine it's equally weird for a fifty-something woman with three kids and thirty years of marriage under her belt to be called 'Miss' in the UK.

The Good, The Bad, And The Homicide-Inducing

I have a number of students who make me light up just by walking into the classroom. There's Sensitive, a lovely, quiet boy with a side parting and a propensity for wearing roll-neck jumpers; he blushes every time I talk to him, and after I recently found my name and a rather flattering cartoon of me surrounded by hearts in his textbook, I now know why. Then there's Sunshine, who won my heart in her very first lesson with me by telling me that her favourite hobby was, "smiling," - and she wasn't lying. There's Earnest, who works harder than any student I've ever known and always has her hand up, but regularly bursts into tears because it never seems to make a difference - she has an A* for effort and enthusiasm but an F for actual ability. There's Philosopher, a brilliantly imaginative boy who often teaches me things when he weaves in original ideas and information from books he's read or documetaries he's seen into his presentations, and who is desperately trying to cultivate a moustache in an incredibly endearing way. There's Mr Boombastic, a cheeky little so-and-so who tries to chat me up in class (in that very French, charming way) but who is all talk - he turns as red as a beetroot if I ever joke back to him.

And then there's Prima Donna*. She is a tall, willowy blonde who is naturally going to be a famous singer one day, so she doesn't need to worry about a silly little thing like English. Unfortunately, she's also the coolest kid in the class so everyone else follows her lead: when Prima Donna talks while I'm trying to explain something, so do all the others.

Every teacher has a student - usually more than one - who gets to them. I know various ex-teachers who, years on, still shudder when they say certain names aloud. My family and partner know Prima Donna's name well, such is the amount of dread and foreboding in my voice when I mention her - and I usually do have to mention her a lot. I will admit that her class have, on at least one occasion, driven me to tears - thankfully once they'd left the classroom - out of sheer frustration. One of the problems of being female is that it's difficult to be heard over lots of noise; if I raise my voice, it just becomes high-pitched and shrill. There's a reason Margaret Thatcher had to have training to lower the pitch of her voice if she wanted any hope of sounding authoritative in Parliament, or even of being heard at all.

So when you manage to finally get somewhere with a student like that, you could practically bottle the relief and euphoria that flows through you. There is a human child in that devil spawn after all!

It happened completely by accident. I'd planned a lesson on star signs and horoscopes, not expecting much, so I was amazed to hear Prima Donna say, "Ah, c'est cool, ça," when she read the sheet I'd given her. It turned out that she was massively into astrology, so she got stuck in to dissecting the character analysis for her star sign straight away. And where Prima Donna goes, the others follow and soon they were excitedly discussing their star signs and writing horoscopes for each other.

I couldn't believe it. I don't expect that it will last long, but it felt incredible when, instead of the usual pouts, churlish silence when asked a question and haughty looks, she even called me 'Madame' and asked about some of the vocabulary. God knows what'll happen in the next lesson - I obviously can't do the Zodiac every week - but I feel a little glimmer of hope at least.

As an added bonus, I asked them how many believed in their horoscopes and about a third did. Then I gave them what I told them was their horoscopes from the day before - in fact, I'd taken some from the internet over a month earlier and doctored them a bit. Almost all of them gasped about how spookily accurate they were; in the next vote, the number who said they believed in horoscopes doubled. I still haven't decided whether or not to 'fess up.



* Up until an embarrassingly late age, I had only ever heard this word spoken, and so I thought it was actually Pre-Madonna. It made sense to me: a wannabe diva who hadn't quite got there yet. It wasn't until I finally read the libretto of Phantom of the Opera that I realised my mistake...

What's In A Number?

As well as the variation in levels, another difference I noticed between schools in Guiana and Brittany is the demographic of teachers. The majority of teachers in my boyfriend's schools were around 35 or under; in my school, almost all of them are in their late forties and there's only one under 35. Bizarrely - and I think this is just a coincidence - a large proportion of them are in interracial marriages, that is to say, a white French woman married to an African, Arab or Asian man. I have no idea why all the non-racist people in France appear to have gathered together in one school, but there you go.

However, the age difference is unsurprising when you look at how teaching works in France. Unlike in the UK, teachers in France are actually civil servants: once they've passed their exams*, assuming they remain fit to teach and don't turn out to be paedophiles, they have employment for life. Hence why they go on strike far more often than their British counterparts.

The designation of French teachers works rather like the Army: instead of applying for jobs in individual schools, as we do, they instead get posted to schools by the government. They can choose the académie (academic region) or at least make a request, but they don't choose the school they are assigned to. In theory, each posting is a contract for a few years, but they can choose to extend it if they wish.

Unsurprisingly, the more experience you have as a teacher, the more clout you have when it comes to getting your preferred académie. NQTs almost always get the dirty jobs that no one else wants, while seasoned veterans can practically pick and choose. This is why so many new or new-ish teachers end up in the overseas départements. They know they're likely to get in because no one wants to go there due to the poor school results, but if they apply for anywhere better, they'll be lumbered with worse - ie the suburbs of Paris - so they hedge their bets and figure that at least they can get a tan. Or, if we're being less cynical, the teachers who choose to go to the DOMs are young, single and still looking for a bit of adventure and jungle trekking before they settle down in the south of France.

Brittany, on the other hand, is one of the most desired académies - supposedly due to its high school results but I'm tempted to believe that the amazing cider has something to do with it too. Which is why my school is populated with highly experienced teachers who have done their bit, slogging it in the ZEPs (Zone Education Prioritaire - basically ASBO Central), and are finally settling into probably their last posting in a cushy job in a nice Breton lycée, with kids who know how to spell Proust and who say, "Bonjour Madame," every morning to you.


I promise I'll stop blathering on about education theory and get back to the guess-what-my-students-said-this-week anecdotes soon.


* Which are competitive; in other words, if there are 50 places and 100 entrants, the top 50 will pass and the rest will fail, even if they get, say, 95%.

Wonderwall

The other day, I used Wonderwall by Oasis with one of my classes, as music is generally a good way to get them talking without realising it. One of the follow-up activities was to get the students to read out some of the lines for pronunciation practice.

"And affter all, you're my wonderwall," one of them read.

"That's good," I replied, "You just need to think about that first vowel in 'after'. It's 'ah-fter', remember, like the vowel in 'aunt' that we practiced before?"

"Affter."

"Not quite - listen again. Ah-fter. Can you say that? Ah-fter."

"No, 'e said affter in ze song."

The student was so determined that she was right on this one that she made me play that section of the song again, grinning triumphantly when Liam Gallagher did, of course, sing 'affter'. And what could I do? I explained that he spoke a Northern dialect which does in fact use the short 'a', as well as dropping 'h's, which I'm always telling them off for doing. I explained that I spoke Standard English with at least the remnants of an RP accent*, and that was the dialect usually taught to foreign speakers of English. However, I couldn't actually tell them that what they were saying was wrong. Damn you, Liam Gallagher.

The UK has an amazingly high number of dialects - far more than most European countries, I'd wager, especially given its size. In France, there's only really Parisian, Breton, Ch'ti, Southern and Tours (the latter being generally accepted as the 'best' French) - there are more than that between Birmingham and Edinburgh alone. This makes life pretty difficult for teaching English because the majority of people don't have the standard accent; I do wonder how the Scottish and Mancunian assistants nearby get on. Should they try to change their accent for teaching purposes in order to avoid confusion, or just speak normally and acknowledge that they have a different but equally valid way of speaking?

Most of the time, it doesn't matter too much as I only really insist on certain aspects of pronunciation, such as 'h', 'th' (instead of 's' or 'z') and stress. I only picked on that particular vowel because it was a common mistake: my students tend to blend a lot of vowels together so that (because of the dropped 'h'), the words: 'hut', 'hat', 'hot', 'out' and 'ate' are pronounced almost identically - something a bit like 'put' but without the 'p'. Still, I've learnt my lesson and will never use Oasis for pronunciation exercises again. I can only thank my lucky stars I didn't use that song where they manage to somehow fit four syllables into the word 'sunshine'.


* Which moving to Suffolk, going to university, and dating a Northerner have begun to kill off.

Why Teachers Have High Blood Pressure

During my trip to French Guiana (see previous note if you're reading this on Facebook), I had the interesting experience of helping out my boyfriend, who is also a language assistant, with some of his classes. I expected a lower level; firstly, he teaches younger students than I do, and secondly, Rennes is one of the best-performing academic regions in France while Guiana is one of the worst-performing. However, it was still a hell of a shock.

In one troisieme class (equivalent of Year 10 in the UK), I asked one girl if she had any pets. She thought about it for several minutes before mustering all the efforts of at least four years of learning English to reply, "Me dog."

In a seconde class (Year 11), we revised the simple past and got them to write a single sentence describing what they did in the holidays. After extensive revision on how to form the past with regular verbs, a game to practice their formation, the words "play -> played" written on the board and ten minutes of writing time, one boy still managed to produce "I play football".

What the hell is an assistant meant to do with a kid like that? Now, I realise that my experience of language learning was very different to that of these children; plus, as someone who loves languages and finds them easy to learn, I know it is important to remember that not everyone will pick things up quite as quickly. But there is no way to achieve the oh-so-lofty British Council ideals of 'cultural exchange' and 'aiding spoken fluency' when the students' level of English is so poor that you are reduced to revising basic grammar every lesson. Frankly, in those situations, it is difficult to see the point of having an assistant at all, aside from the fact that some of the real teachers don't even speak particularly brilliant English either.

One of the problems stems from the lack of setting in the French education system; thanks to good old liberté, égalité, fraternité, almost all lessons are mixed-ability, an idea I have always detested. At best, this means that the strongest students are bored (or pretend not to be strong so as not to get bullied)so they mess around, the weakest students don't have a clue what's going on and are embarrassed about it so they mess around, and the average students don't stand a chance of learning anything among all the chaos. At worst, you end up with extremes like one seconde class in which my boyfriend is expected to be able to teach the same lesson to a girl from St Lucia who is practically bilingual, and a boy who can't read the sentence, "Where did you go?" off the board.

One more particular bete noire of mine: just about every ESL/TEFL resource will tell you to pair weak students with strong students during groupwork activities because they can help each other. No, no, and no. As someone who had to put up with this for years at school, I can tell you that it doesn't work. I just got incredibly frustrated at the other person and at never being able to stretch myself by being able to have a discussion at the level I wanted. Then, when I got to university and suddenly wasn't top of the class anymore - far from it, in fact - I got to experience being the weaker student in the pair. That's no better, because I just ended up tongue-tied and not wanting to say anything at all for fear of embarrassing myself in front of a peer who was so much better than me.*

Segregation in education has its problems, sure, especially when you take it to extremes, as in Germany. But there are times when I get sick of all this twaddle about everyone being the same, and this is one of them.

* The fact that, two years later, I ended up dating that very same peer I was too terrified to speak French to is irrelevant. *grin*

Foot in Mouth Disease

And the nominations for this year's "Please Just Let The Ground Open And Swallow Me Up" award for most embarrassed student are:

- The student who, when I asked for an example of a song that uses franglais, piped up without thinking, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?". To which I simply grinned and told her it was very kind and we'd talk about it later.

- The lad whose so-called friend had told him that the English word for soudeur ('welder') was, in fact, 'blowjobber'. He had just announced to the class, during a discussion on future careers, that this was what he wanted to be. I'm not sure who was more embarrassed, me or him, when I had to explain to him what the word actually meant...

- The student who told the class that his biggest complaint about his parents is that his mother is a dominatrix. Another of those occasions where it's difficult to decide if it would be worse to explain what he just said, or not to...

- The lad I saw this afternoon in the lingerie section of a large department store in Rennes. My students always seem amazed enough as it is when they see me out of school - as if I sleep upside down from the rafters like a bat when I'm not teaching - but the look on his face was priceless when he realised he'd been caught traipsing round looking at bras and enormous knickers with his Mum. That's the last time he'll be asking for my phone number in class.

FAIL

Double fail for me this morning, in the same class.

I was working on pronunciation, and in one activity, focused on the incessant and downright irritating 'h'-dropping that is so common among French people speaking English. No matter how many times I tell them, or how clearly I explain it, they always leave out 'h's where they're needed and then, bizarrely, insert them where they're not; "Ow hold hare you?" is pretty common, for example. I'm reliably informed by a linguist (a real one, not a poser like me) that this is because they know there's an 'h' in there somewhere but they just don't know where to put it. I can see this, though personally, I would have thought that the spelling was a pretty damn big clue. And while we're on the subject, Americans, go look up the word 'herb' and tell me what it starts with.

Anyway, in this activity, the students had to read aloud short passages of text, while the rest of the class listened closely to their pronunciation. If they spotted a dropped 'h', they had to yell, "Ha!" and scored a point (and, of course, if they dropped the 'h' of the 'ha', someone else could call them out too!). I should point out that this is a small, cheeky group of about 8 with whom I have a really good rapport, before anyone accuses me of bullying my students.

The game went well, and we moved on to something else. A little later, I read out some instructions that they had on a sheet in front of them. As I said the word 'hour', one of the boys yelled triumphantly, "Ha!" Twenty minutes of, "Look, I know what I said but... yes, I know it doesn't make sense but... no, there isn't any way of telling..." later, I concluded that English is a bloody stupid language.

The second fail (or epic win, depending on which way you look at it) came towards the end of the lesson. I've mentioned here before that my school doesn't have a traditional bell to mark the end of each class; instead, there is a short burst of music (usually classical, but not always), chosen by the headmaster and which changes every half term*. At the moment, it is a Mike Oldfield song, but unfortunately not 'Tubular Bells' - I have a couple of students who are demonic enough to warrant it. No, it's "Talk About Your Life" - the section where the woman sings:

"Talk about your life, I'd like to know
It's not easy going where no one goes"

A bizarre choice, but there we go. Anyway, one of the boys has a gift for mimickry and has managed to get her voice down to a T, as I discovered when I almost dismissed the class ten minutes early; I was saved only by the fact that none of them could keep a straight face.




* My suggestion of the theme tune from The Great Escape has so far been ignored.

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.

Yo Ho

I have a class that contains a few budding thespians, so I was looking for an English play that they could work on. I couldn't find anything suitable - everything was either too difficult or too childish - so then I had the idea of using a film script. I found the transcribed script of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film on the internet, selected a few scenes from it, edited them a bit where the language was too esoteric, and gave them to the students to act out in groups. They went to work and soon the room was filled with cries of, "But why 'as zee rum gone?", carefully-choreographed swordfights with rulers and set squares, and students being forced to walk the plank off the tops of tables. In other words, a most successful method for waking up 17-year-olds at 8:30 am on a Thursday morning.

Before the grand performance at the end of the lesson, I did a bit of warming up to get them into character (being rather experienced when it comes to treading the boards, dontcha know...). I taught them a number of classic pirate phrases, such as 'me hearties' and 'avast, ye landlubbers', and discovered the hard way that, while there is great entertainment value in getting French teenagers to try to pronounce the word 'swashbuckling', it generally backfires when one of them asks you to explain what it means. I also learnt some French pirate phrases of my own and have since added to my staffroom reputation as the eccentric English girl (more on that in a future post) by exclaiming, "A l'abordage!" as I go off to my next lesson after the end-of-break bell.

Instead of taking a normal register, we fill out a special form noting any absences, which is normally left in a box in the staffroom at lunch and the end of the day. However, there is a separate form for the first class of the day, at 8:30 am, which is collected by whichever admin staff member is free, or has been naughty, about halfway through the lesson. Which is how the headmaster himself - who thinks I'm a retard, remember - came to open the door to my classroom, only to find the whole class on their feet and me at the front, yelling, "Yarrrrrrrr, ye scurvy dogs!" at them in my best Cap'n Barbossa accent. I'm expecting the restraining order any day now.

Feelin' Good

Today, I taught a lesson using a wonderful song by Renaud, It Is Not Because You Are, which is a marvellous demonstration of Franglais. The students listened to the song, then worked through correcting and improving it, first in small groups and then as a class. I thought they might enjoy it - it's an amusing enough song and self-deprecatory humour always goes down well - but I was surprised by just how much of a hit it was with them. Like most STG classes, they're not normally massively interested in learning English and their level isn't particularly brilliant as a whole, but suddenly, the whole class was really getting into translating the song, suggesting various different ways of expressing phrases that cannot be translated directly.*

One of the high points was informing them that what they call 'rouler a pelle'** is known in the UK as 'French kissing', which led to a quick swapping of nice and not-so-nice phrases involving the other country, such as 'French letters' and 'French leave' versus 'la vice anglaise' (sodomy) and 'les anglais ont débarqués' ('the English have landed' - a pleasant way of referring to a woman's period). Eventually, one boy decided that we call it French kissing because the French are clearly the best kissers; when I replied that I was in no position to be able to comment on that, he decided to try his luck and offered to show me himself. I drily assured him that I would somehow manage to resist the temptation.

There were only four lines of translation left to go when the bell went. I turned round from the board, expecting the usual instant scraping of chairs, and said, "Thanks for a great lesson, guys - you did really well today. See you all in two weeks!"

One of the girls protested, in French, "But we haven't finished the song yet!"

Confused, I replied that the bell had gone and the lesson was over. I was amazed to see her actually pout.

"But we want to stay and finish it!"

I smiled and replied, "That's very touching, but you'll get into trouble if you're late for your next lesson."

She answered smugly that it was now break-time, so they wouldn't get into trouble. Amazed, I looked around the class, asking, "Do you all really want to stay behind for a few minutes to finish the song?" They all nodded, even the boys. I shook my head, laughing, and so we carried on.

That girl wasn't the class geek, just a normal seventeen-year-old teenager who had probably spent at least 45 minutes that morning picking her outfit and making sure she fitted in properly. That class wasn't the high-achieving Littéraire group, just ordinary, stroppy adolescents who had somehow managed to get fired up over this particular piece of work. It was the most incredible feeling I've ever had and, while this is a potentially dangerous soundbite to coin, it made me realise that teachers are basically like crack addicts. You get that amazing buzz, that wonderful moment of euphoria just once, and then you put up with whatever crap keeps getting thrown at you day after day, just to feel that high again one day. Whenever I ask myself what the hell I'm doing here, that lesson will be the answer.



* Such as 'chialer comme une madeleine' - to cry like a cake.

** Which translates literally as 'to roll a shovel' - a wincingly accurate mental image.

Why I Have The Best Job In The World

When I was at school and sixth form, it was quite normal to discuss the various teachers: who was good-looking, who was a dragon, who had bad breath and who had an annoying voice.* It never occurred to me that the teachers might do the same in regards to the students, but obviously they do. Today, one of the maths teachers posted up on the noticeboard a particularly funny piece of homework from a student of his, an event which isn't uncommon. It was the solution to one of those "If one train leaves Station A at ...pm, travelling at x speed, and another train leaves Station B at ...pm, travelling at x speed, where will the two trains cross?" problems. The student wrote that they will cross when the first train is 35 km from Station A and 65 km from Station B, and the second train is 25 km from Station A and 75 km from Station B, and so we all had a good laugh about how the normal rules of physics apparently don't apply to the world this child lives in.

But I think that teaching ESL has far more scope when it comes to laughing at the students' expense, and I'd like to explain why. And before you tell me I'm cruel for making fun of my defenceless pupils' mistakes, I'd like to point out that only last year, due to a mispronunciation, I accidentally told my French lecturer that my mother had had a penis transplant** and I'm sure he dined out on that one for a while.

So, without further ado, I present the top 5 reasons why I have the best job in the world:



5.
Student: "I do my muzzer."
Me: "You do your mother? If you say that in the UK, you're going to get funny looks from people."
Student: "I do my muzzer eat?"
Me: "I'm not sure what you mean. Can you try again?"
Student: "I eat my muzzer?"
Me: "OK, if you say that, not only are you going to get funny looks but you're also going to get arrested for cannibalism. Can you think which verb you need to use?"
Student: "Oh yes! I cook my muzzer!"
Me: "That's better, but you're still going to get arrested. What little word do you need to add?"
Student: "Ah! I cook for my muzzer!"
Me: "That's right, well done. Now do you believe me when I tell you prepositions are important?"


4.
Student: (describing a picture of a Masai woman) "She is knickerless."
Me: "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I'm not sure I heard you right."
Student: "Ze Masai woman is knickerless."
Me: "OK... Well, I suppose it's possible that the Masai don't wear underwear; I'm not an expert. But can you tell me why you think that?"
*confused student points to part of the picture*
Me: "Ah. I see. OK, the sentence you're looking for is 'She is wearing a necklace'..."


3.
Me: (discussing a text on the new scanners at Manchester Airport which see through clothing) "Why is the man uncomfortable about using these new scanners?"
Student: "Because you can see his knackers."
Me: *chokes* "Well, that's one way to put it. I think in this context, it's better to say 'genitalia', though."
Student: "Genitalia? Zat means the same thing as knackers?"
Me: "Er, more or less, but it's a more formal way of saying it. Just out of interest, where did you learn that word?"
Student: "[Teacher] told me zis word. It is not ze right word for nue?"
Me: *long pause while I try not to laugh* "Ah. Yes. I think what you were trying to say, in that case, was 'because you can see he's naked'."


2.
Student: (discussing holidays) "On holiday in a hot country, I like to sit in shit."
Me: "I'm sorry?"
Student: "In shit? I like to sit in shit?"
Me: "I'm pretty sure you don't mean what I think you just said. Can you write the word for me?"
*student does so*
Me: "OK, now this is very important. The word is pronounced 'shade'..."


and my favourite of them all, which happened tonight:

1.
(During a role play about a teenager arguing with his mother)
Student: "What ze fuck? Shut up, you crazy bitch!"
*class laughs/gasps*
Me: "OK, I'm not going to tell you off for that because it's something that English people do say. And you got the grammar right, too! But it's important to think about context. Would you say 'What the fuck? Shut up, you crazy bitch!' to your Mum in real life?"
Student: "No, of course not."
Me: "Good. And why is that?"
Student: "Because she don't speak English."


That kid could not do a thing wrong for the rest of the class.





* Since this blog gets imported into Facebook, where I am friends with a number of my previous teachers, I'd like to point out that I am not above bribery and am prepared to talk if the price is right.

** 'Coeur' = 'heart'. 'Queue' = penis. Almost identical in sound aside from a slightly longer vowel and an 'r' sound at the end.

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.

Those who can...

The timetable is (mostly) sorted, I have thousands upon thousands of documents/lesson plans/pupil lists, and I'm beginning to finally feel like a teacher. Walking into the familiar surroundings of the lycée, I beam as pupils call out, "'Ello Zoé!" in their tell-tale French accents, and I can hardly believe I am in the same building that seemed so labyrinthic and terrifying only two weeks ago. I love the camaraderie of the staffroom banter, with hundreds of different conversations going on at once, punctuated with typically wild gallic gestures and singsong delivery. I love the way in which the other teachers revel in teaching me risqué French phrases with wicked schoolboy glee. I love the genuine delight they take in deadpan British humour; when someone asked me if I'd like to play Gaelic football and I replied with a straight face that surely it was just like ordinary football, only you drink Guinness first, you would have thought I had made the funniest joke in the world. I love the fact that everybody drinks at least six or seven very strong black coffees every day. I love the way that it is de rigeur to greet everyone you see, no matter how many times you see them in a day.* I love the private joke of keeping a straight face when male pupils tell me with apparent sincerity that they have husbands or that they serve icecream at customers. Oh, and being able to jump the queue in the canteen isn't a bad perk, either.

The icing on the cake, however, was the ultimate tool of a professeur's trade: my very own magic key which opens every classroom in the school! Ah, the power. Sod long holidays and warm fuzzy feelings - this is why I want to be a teacher.



* This has got to be one of France's most charming qualities, and a habit I'll have to learn to shake off when I eventually return to England if I am to avoid funny looks. Even in the streets, you greet everyone you pass with some form of appropriate salutation, no matter how bizarre it might seem. Bonjour. Bonsoir. Bon journée. Bon weekend. Bon dimanche. Can you imagine a Brit or an American stranger wishing you 'happy Sunday'?