Floods

Getting to my school for 8am is a challenge. I was up this morning at 6am and left at 7am. The stars were out and it was dark and sooooooo cold, freeeeeeeeeezing. I got to school at about 7h45 - the corridors were still in darkness. I had to be there a little bit earlier because I had some photocopying to do for my first class. From 8am to 9am I have a Terminale class. They're quite good at English although some of the students are more willing to speak than others. Isabelle (the teacher) gave me 10 students who I took to my room (yes, I have a room, with a key that works!) I gave them a picture of a boy in Sudan entitled 'Famine in Sudan' and a picture of an anorexic model entitled 'size zero model'. Basically they just had to describe the picture, I then gave then 10 minutes or so to work in pairs to discuss their opinions of the pictures and then they had to report back to the class. The teacher had asked me to give each student a tick when they spoke. Even though I had pictures of them with their names it was still really hard to see who was who - everyone looked the same! It was my first proper class on my own where I didn't have to begin with 'my name is Gill, I come from England, I am a student,' etc etc. After that class I was free until 11am so I stayed in the Salle des Professeurs and was talking to one of the English teachers - Anne, who lives in Aix. And then the school began to flood... but it was ok, apparently, because the cleaners came round with water hoovers and cleared up. I think it was something to do with the heating which caused the flooding although I'm not quite sure why because the heating wasn't on, brrr. At 11am I had a BTS class, well, I work with 3 students at a time. They are preparing for their oral exam where they have to talk about their work experience. These are quite good students and I was able to listen to them, correct them and help them. With this class I'm actually able to have a conversation, their English is quite good and they are interesting. I think because they are a BTS class (after the bac) then they have chosen to be at Lycee. They are also, most of them, the same age or a year or two older than me, but that doesn't bother me. After this class I went back to the Salle de Professeurs for lunch (the flooding had subsided) and then I had another BTS class after lunch, again 3 students. This time they had done their work experience in accountancy firms rather than something engineering related. This group is much weaker and I spent an hour trying to get them to talk. They are supposed to write 300 words on their work experience but they had barely a paragraph. They were unable to tell me what they had done in the accounts office. It was painful trying to get them to talk to me about their work experience. All I got was 'je n'ai rien compris' I mean, it's not like I have a strong accent or talk muffedly! Argh! After this class was a Terminale class where I work one to one with students. They too are preparing for their oral exam, this time for their bac. They have an image and they have 10 minutes to prepare what they are going to say about the image. I used the same image as I had done that morning - about famine and size zero models. The two students I worked with during the hour were alot better than the ones I worked with last week. At least this week they were able to string a sentence together. I would normally have another class after this, my secondes. But Isabelle wanted to split the class into two but my room only holds 10 and so wasn't big enough for half of the class. She told me not to go this week and that we would try and sort something out for after the holiday. I was quite pleased because I get the impression this class are going to be incredibly, umm, challenging? I left Lycee at 15h and came home to make microwave flapjack. I then put myself on a tram. It was the first time I'd used the tram way. It's quite slow but because it's new it's clean, I liked it. I went to the last stop where Aimee came to meet me. We went to the supermarket and I helped her carry her shopping home. We then cooked dinner together. We had potatoes cooked with shallots, oil and water, mushroom omlette and salad. She is living in either the 10th or 11th arr, I always forget which. She has a basement appartment which is basically in someone's home. It's the old secretary of the Lycee where Rachel works. The family are really nice and the lady showed us how to make a traditional french salad dressing. Aimee's appartment, although lacking sunlight, is amazing. It's quite big for one person and the bathroom is lovely with pink and orange and red tiles and daisies too! She has the tv, internet, the only drawback is that she lives on her own and it's about 40 minutes to the centre of town. After we'd eaten we watched Hungarian tv! She has so many channels. It took us about 15 minutes to work out that it was a Hungarian channel, it was actually some kind of programme set in a school at the end of the soviet union as there was a russian lesson going on (or so Aimee informed me from what was written on the blackboard - she's studying Russian and French at St Andrews in Scotland). I left later on and got the tram back, came home, showered and went to bed.