First day!

Today was my first day of work. I taught three classes at the E.Q., one CE2 (the first year most children in France learn a language, usually 8 years old), one CM1 (9 years old), and one CM2 (10 years old). This will be my normal Friday schedule from now on. The CM1 and the CM2 have both had English before, and so they picked up on the things I was saying more quickly, but it is very much like starting from scratch. The trick will be to figure out how to make sure I keep things interesting for them without having to come up with 3 (or 4, because I have one CE1) lesson plans for every class. For the first day, though, it went very smoothly.

I've also observed classes at my two other schools, which are basically opposites in terms of the populations they serve. V.H. is right downtown and the children are almost all white. B.A. is right near me, in the ZUP (Zone à urbaniser en priorité), and the classes are much more diverse, and also much less well-behaved. On the other hand, the standards for children in France is much more strict than that in the US--for example, the kids at E.Q. wouldn't start writing the title page on their notebooks until I told them where to start on the page (all of the paper is like graph paper), and when I gave them stickers, they asked where they should put them. Also, the schools are much smaller than they are in Philadelphia--each school I go to only has one class for each grade (or sometimes two combined classes), and the classes have 25 students in them at most.

So far the teachers have been very friendly to me and have been helping out a lot. This seems very different from what I've heard is the case, with teachers who leave the room during the class or are even disruptive, and act like the assistant is a nuissance for them. Most people so far have at the very least been pleasant, and some of them have seemed genuinely interested in me.