Winter

School this morning. I had to be there for 8am which meant another morning of walking to the metro under the stars. I had a BTS class first. 4 students. I was helping them prepare for their oral where they have to talk about their work experience. I like this group. They're nice students and their English is quite good. I took a different approach to correcting them today. I wrote the incorrect sentences up on the board and they had to try to correct them themselves. It was quite painful staring at a sentence with only 8 words in and suggesting all manner of possible mistakes but managing to miss the actual mistake. The trouble with this method is a) trying to remember all the mistakes and b) you have to be able to explain why it has to be x and not z. For example, why does it have to be 'for' and not 'during' in 'I did my work experience during two weeks'? Anyway, after this class I had another class, this time I was in the whole class with the teacher. It was with Christiane who I had tea with last Friday. They are supposed to be a renforce (complete with an acute accent over the final 'e' which my computer doesn't want to do) class but they don't seem to be particularly interested in learning. They're studying a text at the minute. It's an extract from a Ruth Rendall novel - 'an unkindness of ravens'. It's a really good text and I'm enjoying studying it even if they're not. I got a good welcome when I walked in, it's amazing how doing something as simple as speaking your own language can make you somewhat of a celebrity. I took the part of the lesson where they were looking at the text. I asked them questions, simple at first, like 'who is present at the scene?' then we moved onto attitudes expressed in the text. There was this one boy in the front row who wanted to answer every question and he began to get on my nerves because there was a group of 4 in the corner not even looking at the text, making no attempt to find out why Inspecter Wexford was at the Williams' house. I enjoyed this class even if some of them were a bit hard to motivate. It made a change from talking about work experience and describing images. After this class I had a terminale group which I hadn't met before. That meant going back to the 'my name is Gill' stage and drawing a map of the UK on the board which I thought I'd perfected until I asked them what it was and they didn't know! After I'd introduced myself I asked them questions to see if they'd understood. It was the first class I'd taken this approach with and it was interesting that although they all sit there nodding whilst your talking not all of them understand. You seem to get one or two who end up translating it into french for the rest of the class. After I'd introduced myself they all had to introduce theirselves and then we just talked about various things - their oral exam (yes, it will be yet another class where I will be describing images) and England. I am still amazed by how few of them have been to England and those that have have usually been to London as part of a one or two day school trip. Anyway, I liked this class. Because it was semaine impaire i didn't have my next class which would usually be another BTS class, nor did I have my class from 14h-15h, this left me with a 4h gap so I went home, had lunch, called the Restos du coeur people, who were not very helpful for saying I want to volunteer with them. I then went back to school for a class from 15h-16h. It was a class of secondes. The word 'secondes' is enough to send me running after the Tuesday class of secondes but this class is nice. They remembered my name! I like the teacher too and I'm in the class with her so no listening to work experience or describing images. The lesson was about the present perfect - a grammar lesson! I really enjoyed this lesson, I was going round helping the students with the exercises. Afterwards the teacher told me that we could plan grammar lessons together and that I could maybe give a lesson at some point. This is more what I was hoping to be doing. Having a certain amount of freedom with what I do with my students. Some of the language assistants here are basically given classes and told to get on with it but my school seem to be giving me specific things to do with the students. Anyway, I think I prefer Thursdays to Tuesdays - the classes are nicer. After school I went to meet Rachel and we went shopping for food and then home and it was throwing it down and I mean throwing it down. Proper rain like I haven't seen since England. It was horrible. Cold, dark, grey, wet. Urgh. Needless to say I didn't go out again that day!