As each week progresses, I seem to get more and more into the teaching side of life in France. Perhaps it is because I am more familiar with the kids. Perhaps it is just down to getting more experience. In any case, with four regular private pupils and one after-school charge on top of two schools, teaching is a large part of my life here. I am brutally aware that I am not a natural born teacher, and although as with a lot of things, practice makes perfect, I am unsure as to whether I will ever become a really good teacher.
For example, I watch Marjorie, a teacher in her late twenties and just finishing her teaching ‘formation’, and am so impressed at her teaching methods. Having spoken to her at the beginning of the year about whether teaching was her calling and, in particular, why she chose to teach the special needs class. In actual fact, she kind of ‘fell’ into this sort of specialised teaching, yet despite this she has completely excelled and is a fantastic CLIS teacher in her own right. Through a combination of tenuous links and well-timed job openings, Marjorie is now a highly trained, and highly competent, teacher of the CLIS class. In fact, she is due to sit her final exams (where an outside assessor sits in on her class for an hour and a half) in early May, after which (I think) any additional training will be for a well-deserved pay rise.
To me, Marjorie represents the best kind of teacher. She is completely no nonsense, but is kind and is hugely fun at the same time. The major difficulties that I have encountered lie in a) explaining something for the nth time without sounding exasperated, b) trying to establish where problems lie when a student just doesn’t seem to be able to understand something, and c) avoiding succumbing to favouritism. I know that all the teachers with whom I work have a hell of a lot more training, but Marjorie just seems to breeze over each of these problems. For example, arriving at the CLIS a little early this morning, I watched as she explained the rules of subtraction. First using little cubes (split into ‘dizaines’ and ‘unités’) to explain how you can borrow one from the dizaines if you don’t have enough unités et cetera (i.e. 51 – 39) she then transfers the sum onto the board. The students draw columns that represent tens and units, thus although there are no more little cubes in the equation (‘scuse the pun) there remains a heavy visual element. After two more examples, the students are left to work out the final example on their own at the board, and use a mixture of numbers and pictures to fathom out how to ‘borrow’ from the tens. The teaching method is so logical, and the students seem to progress without even realising it. It’s definitely something for me to take as an example, and even if I think I am getting nowhere with my classes, it’s a massive treat to watch how teaching really should be done.
On a lighter note, school is damn funny. There are so many moments where I am about to die with suppressed laughter at something a student has said or done, or their indignation, or the wonderfully naive way they behave towards one another and towards the teacher. I think I am especially spoilt as a language teacher, because some of the mispronunciations are absolute classics. Obviously, I can’t think of any off the top of my head, aside from the ruder ones (Try saying “Can I take a sheet?” with a French accent...), but I assure you, there are hundreds.
However, perhaps the funniest two hours I have had so far were during a whole school singing rehearsal on Tuesday of this week. Already, having ‘whole’, ‘school’ and ‘rehearsal’ in one sentence does not bode well for anything even marginally productive or successful. Try cramming around 200 under 12’s into one modest gymnasium on a rainy Tuesday morning and asking them to concentrate for two hours. Major fail. The whole rehearsal was spent separating trouble-makers, hissing ‘chuuut’, glaring at chatterboxes, and physically removing errant class members and leaving them outside with the shoes and coats to ‘think about what they’d done’. One kid was moved so many times for distracting his neighbours that he made the full circle of the hall and ended up back in his original place. Another spent the whole time making faces and Michael Jackson-esque poses in the mirror, much to the despair of the poor teacher in charge. The problem child of the school – you can tell I am not in a hard-core inner city school, there is only really one problem child – took it upon himself to sing louder than any other child in the room. Well that’s great, right? I mean, enthusiasm is so much better than apathy, isn’t it? Perhaps not. Somehow, he managed to place each note exactly one semitone higher or lower than the actual pitch. Carnage. Later on in the day, when the younger ones had gone back to class and it was only the CM2’s left (who, incidentally, were a lot less well behaved), one mistimed fart meant that the whole rest of the rehearsal was a shambles. Not going to lie, I can’t stop laughing even when writing this, you can imagine how hard it was to maintain an ‘I’m a teacher and am very serious and responsible and farting is not funny’ expression when the deed was done.
Seriously, the kids are absolutely great, and the teachers even more so. There is a sort of wonderful unspoken confraternity between all the teachers – all of them are constantly looking out for each other and ready to give support and help when it is needed. One of the teachers, clearly at the end of her tether with a couple of the exceptionally energetic members of her class, was promptly shooed away by Hervé, a lovely replacement teacher, who took hold of the situation to give her a brief, if not very well needed, respite. Likewise, the staffroom chat is absolutely hilarious. 99% female, there is definitely no lack of gossip in the Ferdinand Buisson salle de profs. In fact, they’re still completely ripping into me for Scotland’s abysmal performance in the Six Nations. I long for the day when the cuillère de bois isn’t mentioned. Or for when they stop laughing at how my boyfriend is from Wales, and the ‘Pirate Bang Bang’ (pronounced ‘bong bong’) is also Gallois. (“Est-ce qu’il a une jambe de bois, ton copain?! Haaa” ! Seriously. It’s not that funny.)
Although, with work, I still feel miles out of my depth, and I despair at whether my students really know the difference between ‘toes’ and ‘nose’, I feel hugely lucky to have this experience. In school, nothing stops. I am constantly observing, listening and, most of all, learning from both my colleagues and my students. I reckon that, come the end of June, I will have been learnt a lot more than I could ever dream of teaching. And for that, I’m grateful.
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