Starting School

Last week was my first week of proper work.  I’m going to be working 12 hours a week across 2 schools- La Canopee, a college, and Les Barbadines, a primary school. There’s six hours in each – in the college, that’s concentrated in one day starting at 7.30 am, and in the primary, across two mornings.

On Monday mornings I start at 7.30 with a 6eme class (yr 7s in the UK – kids in their first year of secondary school) .I haven’t met this class yet because of various unusual things that have happened. Other than that I have already met most of my classes, I have four 3eme classes (kids in their last year of college), two 6eme classes and one 5eme class. There are several teachers that I’m with for a couple of classes. 

The ‘introduction’ in all classes was to have students ask me questions in English about myself. “what is your name?” “where do you live?” “do you have a boyfriend?” “do you have any pets?”. They also asked some weirder questions that were topical to what they had been studying.. “do you believe in aliens?”. Someone asked ‘do you like French Guiana’ – when I replied that I LOVE French Guiana everyone cheered.

I’ve had a second lesson with a few of the groups now. In some I worked with the teacher in the classroom and lead an activity while the teacher was keeping order a bit- in other groups I took half the class for half the lesson to go and do an activity. I did the same activity with each class but with different levels of difficulty and follow-up activities.

In the primary school, it was pretty different- I turned up having been told the students had never learnt any English, with the intention of teaching them to say ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘my name is’. It turned out that in a couple of the classes certain students already spoke quite a lot of English (and some spoke none) so I had to sort of improvise. Having now done another two mornings there (I would usually see the same students twice in one week), it’s getting a bit easier.

This week, I took them outside to do a ‘class instructions’ kind of activity and then back inside to do vocabulary learning. 

You have to constantly be really loud and make a lot of movements to keep their attention, and any time you ask the kids to do anything half of them will have finished whilst your still trying to explain to others how to it. It’s tiring, and really hard trying to give the impression that you’re in charge- but when they all start saying “aaaah j’ai compris!!” to each other, it’s pretty cool to see them getting excited about having understood another language. 

All of my lessons so far I’ve taught only in English. With primary school sometimes, when you have a classroom of really confused faces, and various students offering their interpretation of what they’re supposed to be doing, it’s good to be able to listen out for someone with the correct interpretation and get them to repeat it for everyone – but most of the time you can explain just by gestures, demonstration, talking slowly.