Les Touristes

           We ambled around the Quartier Latin, took touristy pictures in front of Notre Dame, and walked through Les Halles. This evening, we made ratatouille with Christelle and went a 1995 rap concert. I've never been to a concert that's such a show or, in French, "une spectacle". The rappers were incredibly dynamic. The concert was at the Olympia, a medium-sized venue that felt intimate because the rappers were so dynamic. They actually got the crowd clap, move sides, jump, rap, and run...I got my workout in for the day and I felt uber French "singing" one line per song correctly. Here's The Motto video.
           Today, we walked around the Bastille and Laura bought fabulous Aigle rainboots, like mine! We  met her friends from uni and went to a Jewish fallafel place in the Marais. It was literally the best falafel in the world and my fellow Yelpers agree: L'As du Fallafel.

Paris, je t'aime

Typical tourist photo, but at least my fur matches Notre Dame!

         In France, teachers work for six weeks and then get two weeks off. This excellent system means that after three weeks in the classroom, we are now on vacation! Laura and I headed to Paris on the SNCF fast train.
        We stayed with Laura's friend Yannis Saturday night. He lives in the 13th arrondissement, which is chock-full of Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese shops and restaurants. We went to a pho place for dinner, where I had two bowls of pho with the excuse that it was freezing. You'd think that Bonneville, tucked into the Alpes, would be colder than Paris, but you'd be wrong. Vain side note, I am wearing different clothes every day, but I only brought one coat (and to think that I almost nixed bringing it!) so I've been walking the streets of Paris in shame, like a serial fashion repeater.
         After dinner, we went out on the Grands Boulevards to several Irish bars, where all the Parisians were dressed up for Halloween! In France, Halloween costumes tend towards the scary (think Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls). The bar was full of zombies and monsters and skeletons and lots of fun!

Quartier Latin

Annecy

        This weekend we made the long awaited trip to Annecy. Annecy has been built up to be the promised land; every single person I have met in Bonneville has told us to go to Annecy, not Geneva, but Annecy. Obviously, I was expecting to be handed champagne, chocolates, and perhaps blocks of gold upon our arrival. Spending an hour to walk what should have taken ten minutes, we circled the same roundabout three times and, by the fourth time we had shuffled past him, started waving to the flower shop man but we made it to our hostel. And then we went for a walk...

Just your everyday 12th century Palais de l'Isle along a lake canal

Kat and Laura along the river canal! 

Little rues in Annecy!

Attempting to dance and being annoying taking pictures.

            Annecy is certainly a gem of a town. And even if we had to buy ourselves a glass of champagne, we will be back!

Witches, wizards, ghouls, and ghosts

          Three weeks into teaching, I'm getting into the swing of things. I developed a little routine. I start each class with "Good morning" and "What day is it?". We then do a tongue twister. My first tongue twister was "Red leather, yellow leather" because many students have difficulty with the "r's". At teh end of the year, I've told them we'll work our way to "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". As the students learn more basic phrases, like "How are you?", we'll add these into the routine, too.
          Then we progress into the lesson for the day. Typically the teachers and I agree upon a very broad topic. Last week, it was San Francisco. This week, it's Halloween. Here's a sample lesson plan (please excuse the grammatical errors in French!).

       
           I've experimented a bit with what activities and games work. Simon Says is excellent for review of what we learned last week, especially when the kids take turns being Simon. We pass batons or balls to one another in small groups to practice the difference between questions and answers. I use Charades to instill vocabulary and Find Your Partner to review short dialogues. I find myself speaking almost exclusively in French, but the students really don't understand English. I give all simple directions in English, from "sit down" to "raise your hand", along with loads of hand gestures. I've been debating starting to speak more English. Other assistants have said they speak exclusively English but that hasn't been effective for me. Teaching is certainly a dynamic profession. I try to take time after every class to I'm trying to figure out how to avoid the hundreds of photocopies I make a week. They are really vital to the progression of the class but I feel green guilt with so many paper documents. Suggestions appreciated!

Future home

           I took a train, a plane, and an automobile to Geneva today. Just kidding. But I did walk along the highway for 45 minutes to get to a random parking lot (fending off horrible flashbacks of my arrival in Bonneville) where I took a mini bus to Geneva. Whilst traipsing 90m an hour through the French countryside, I looked out the window and saw a decrepit trailer park. There were probably ten trailers and at least five of them had brand new Mercedes SUVs parked outside. The cars all matched so apparently some French family decided to sell their houses and buy a highway-side trailer park compound for some flashy new Benz. How bizarre. 

          Geneva is amazing. I walked around the Old City for several hours. The shopping is to-die-for and there are charming little restaurants and bars tucked into every nook. Everytime I have free Fridays, I'm coming back to window shop for the afternoon. 

          Here are some pictures: 

Bonneville this morning as I walked to the bus "station".

I wine-ed and dine-ed myself. And attempted to read Pillars of the Earth in French.

Little rues in Geneva

Cathédrale St. Pierre 

Further faux

When I am not busy misconjugating French verbs in class, I find plenty of other ways to make grave faux pas. In addition to the Gabriel/Gabrielle fiasco, I accidentally outed a child with a learning disability and threw away a present another student made for me in front of her. 

Last week, we were playing Simon Says with classroom objects. I noticed that one child was sitting with the teacher matching pictures with names. I thought he was helping the teacher prepare the next activity. So we finished Simon Says and I asked him if he and the teacher were ready to join the class for the next activity, trying to usher in the teacher's project. In my French, this obviously sounded very awkward. The kid didn't answer. The class was silent. Then the teacher looked at me with confusion and said, loudly, that this child did his own work and that he would just continue to work by himself. I realized with horror that he may have had special learning circumstances and I had just blatantly called attention to that in front of the entire class. After unsuccessfully scrambling to make something up and cover my big mouth, I apologized profusely to the teacher. He was unfazed. In France, all students learn in the same classroom - teachers are very open about some students learning differently than others. Some students are taken out for short periods of time, but as one of my other teachers explained to me, the new French school philosophy is that students of a particular grade should all learn in the same classroom, regardless of their learning needs. Many of my classes have two different grades in them. This makes it slightly difficult to teach, but I also appreciate how it encourages the younger children to learn, reinforces concepts for the older children, and allows different levels of the same grade to remain in the same class. The same child that struggles with English, for example, might be a math whiz, and being in challenging classes seems to encourage their learning. 

On one of my first days in the classroom with the teacher I am closest to, I was presented with a very carefully colored American flag. I showed it to the class, thinking the teacher had asked them to color it for me. I then discarded it somewhere. Probably the trash. Fast forward a week. Kat told me that the secretary at her school had a daughter in my class who had made Kat a very carefully done British flag. Her mom told Kat that she had spent hours making her the flag. Not putting two and two together, I asked the girl on Friday if she would make me a pretty flag like Kat’s. She looked like she was going to burst into tears and woefully told me that she had made me a flag last week and I had thrown it in the trash. There goes teacher of the year award. I begged her to make me another flag…so hopefully she doesn’t totally hate me.

Jump Fit

            I went to my first “Jump Fit” class tonight, thinking that was the French way of saying Zumba or some other cardio class. Obviously, it was literally jumping. With a jump rope. Which is incredibly difficult. I really need to learn to take English words in French at face value.

            Everyone else seemed to be incredibly nimble, managing to hop on one foot at a time, unlike me, and at three times my pace. For every one perfect “saute”, I had countless jumps in which I got the jump rope wrapped around my hair and my shoe at the same time, slapped myself in the face, or barely missed whacking the instructor.

            Luckily, the instructor’s wife liked us and gave us a discount. She works for our insurance agency and knew we were English assistants - clearly we are known townspeople now!

Des bouchées à suivre

            My only qualification for writing about wine and cheese is that I like to eat and drink, so I am not going to proselytize about the hint of oak in the Burgundy or the lingering taste of herbs in the goat cheese. One bite, one sip in one word. Reviews to come! Des bouchées à suivre...

An Accidental Solo

          I accidentally sang solo in a semi-professional choir this evening.

One of my teachers was dying for Kat, Laura, and me to go with her to her choir. I went, reminding her several times that I really can’t sing and despite ten years of piano, really can’t read music. She promised that was okay. I practiced lip-syncing in the car.

As per usual, the Bonneville singing group’s median age was 60, so we obviously fit in swimmingly. They warmed up with the chords as I shrank closer and closer to Kat, who sings beautifully, in hopes that her voice would suffice for my lip-synching. Unfortunately, I forgot to lip sync during part of one song and carried the note. Solo. The director noticed, and somehow knew it was me. He then chastised me in front of the entire choir for singing when I was supposed to have stopped, for singing too fast, and for singing off key. I suppose I even look like I can’t sing.

Then we started singing in Hebrew, which also didn’t go well for me. Volleyball starts again next week, so I will doe-rai-(see) myself out of that choir.

Thonon-les-Bains

             Today we took the train to Annemasse, which is half an hour away and one of the bigger cities closest to us. Annemasse has loads of shopping and restaurants and young people so I think we’ll come back to shop and go out and meet people who aren’t over 50. We had to go to Annemasse to get to Thonon-les-Bains, which is another half an hour away. It’s absolutely beautiful. We spent the day walking around and stopping at little cafes before we took the last train home. Normally everything in Bonneville shuts down around 8pm, but as we were walking home, we saw our friend from the mayor’s office at one of the bars. She owns it with her husband and we had wine with them and their friends (also over 50) and chatted about our days. We are quite popular with the middle aged set (aka the entire town) of Bonneville. Here are some pictures of Thonon:

 
Typical rue dans la ville. There were some chains but mostly little antiques, clothing, and chocolate shops!

 














View of the town hall. I love how all French mayor’s offices have flowerboxes!






The whole town sits on the lake – you can take a furnicular down to the shore. This is Lac Leman – Geneva is far to the left and Zurich is far to the right.














No, it was not cold enough to wear fur.

Vin-ready

             Today was Friday, or “vendredi” hence my lame rhyme, and I visited my third school, L’Ecole des Iles, which sits right along the river. It’s a charming school because it’s newly renovated and has grass and playgrounds galore, but also because the teachers are amazing. The only glitch occurred when I got locked in the school. It has hedges and gates enclosing it and I didn’t want to seem like an idiot on my first day, so I attempted to climb over the hedge, but was unfortunately wearing harem pants, which got stuck, hoping no one had seen me. Looking like a trespasser I walked back through the mud and all the way around the school, peering into windows to look for teachers and getting lost in the hedges yet again, until I found the preschool entrance. The preschool teachers had seen me attempt to hop the fence and told me to always go out the front – as if I hadn’t realized that by now. Luckily, I will not be teaching their kids. Our third roommate arrived today! Kat is from London and has my dream accent. She is lovely and has spent the summer in Ghana working at a women’s empowerment non-profit. She’s here in France and picked this region for the skiing, so now I have a coach along with my newly stolen skiis from Sarah. I just have to cross out Sarah’s name on her skiis, replace it with my self-appointed French name, which I daily alternate between Margaret and Marguerite, and I’m set. Laura, Kat, and I spent the weekend tooling around the house and the town including an accidental walk along the highway and trek uphill through mud (my fault) in search of the supermarket, where I bought only wine and a notebook. There was a sale, so it was obviously worth it, especially since now I know where the McDonalds is.

Back to school

            I visited several of my schools today and met some of the teachers. French schools look similar to American schools, but inside there are classrooms full of extraordinarily well behaved children. They already speak a minimum level of English – or maybe they’re just good fakers – and were very attentive when I barged into their classrooms. The teachers were welcoming and so excited for me to be there. They want me to focus on the oral comprehension and practice as none of them focus on grammar or even written English. They uniformly felt that an emphasis on written English diminishes the level of spoken English – writing the word “spider” on the board before the kids learn to pronounce it will engrain the word as “speeder” into their brains…thus, according to the teachers, France thinks Toby Maguire is “Speederman”. After I met my teachers and begged them all to correct my French at all times, which they happily did, Laura and I went to lunch and had our first friend citing in Bonneville. The woman from the mayor’s office who has been so helpful sat next to us… local social life is officially established. We noticed that the waitresses sat us in the corner at a table that was semi-crummy (literally) for a good ten minutes and did not seem happy to hear our whispered English, but as soon as we spoke French to them and I asked them all sorts of probably annoying and inappropriate questions about tipping, they warmed up and were super friendly. Almost everyone I’ve met here is incredibly kind, once the veneer of their seemingly natural reservedness wares off. As ungrammatically correct and oddly accented as my French is, I am certainly not afraid of using it that definitely makes a difference with les Bonnevillais. I’ve found, in the two whole days that I’ve been here, that once I start asking questions, people instantly warm up and chat with me, but they are often reserved until then. Laura told me that it’s good I’m here because I am, to paraphrase, overly outgoing and nosy, which is, franchement, true and also effective.

House of Mirrors

             I found the French version of Jersey shore and it’s so good. It’s called “Les Ch’tis a Mykonos” and I flip between it and the news so as to be well-balanced…except that I mostly keep the channel on Les Ch’tis. When not watching reality TV today, I was decorating our apartment. Our appartement is not the house of mirrors. In fact, there are no mirrors anywhere. I was left to see if my outfit looked French enough in the reflection of the windows. Actually, we have shutters, which makes me feel very French. Because we’ve no mirrors and the apartment needs to be personalized, we’ve been going to the little corner store every day, which is hilariously called “Cash”. I am already friends with the owner and he’s lent me his hammer and given me decorating advice, probably because I’ve bought half the store already. The inside of the apartment is coming together nicely, but nothing trumps the views from all the windows – the Alpes surround us! Pictures to come soon.

View from my window! 

Lectures du vin

           Bonneville’s mediatheque was just renovated – here’s a picture. I signed up for a library account today and the librarian recommended good French books for me! He gave me books by Marc Levy, Jean-Christophe Grange, Harlan Cobin, and Fred Vargas. He also suggested I try Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth in French, which is a terrific ideas because the language is rich and the vocabulary can be difficult, but I’ve read the book in English. The other novels are mysteries. Reviews to follow! Haute Savoie has a “Universite Populaire” series throughout the towns in the region. UP hosts discussions once a week in Bonneville ranging from politics to the envionment to architecture. Last night, we went back to the library for a talk on Rousseau, given by the dean of Rousseau’s home in Chamonet. He very clearly traced the origins of Rousseau’s theory, from Plato to John Locke, intertwining ancient and modern philosophers to contextualize Rousseau’s social contract. Although I probably missed loads of what he was saying, he was a compelling speaker, particularly because he aided his presentation with diagrams outlining his concepts, such as the power of the individual to accept a ruler. I noticed that the United States was frequently mentioned in his talk and in the question and answer period. He seemed to be implying, in much more specific and eloquent terms, that the US struggled and still struggles to reconcile the fact that to enjoy equality and liberty, certain rights must be relinquished to the state. While obviously that is true, it’s also true in France, but my philosophy nor my French were strong enough to defend the US then. Despite underaging the rest of the audience by about forty years, we really enjoyed the talk. Especially because it was free and there was champagne afterwards. Next week, there’s a talk about the economy and the environment that I’m looking forward to!

Day One

          Today I taught for the first time! I had two classes of CE1. The primary schools in France are divided into CP or “cours prepartoire” (age 6), CE or “cours elementaire” 1 (age 7) and CE2 (age 8), and finally CM or “cours moyen” 1 (age 9) and CM2 (age 10). Before elementary school, schoolchildren go to “maternelle” (ages 3-6), and after elementary school, they go to college for five years. At 16, they start lycee for three years and if they pass the baccalauret, they go to university for three years. The CM1 kids all presented themselves to me, carefully noting their names, ages, and where they are from. Some of the children hesitatingly told me their favourite activities, much to the delight of the teachers. We translated their names into popular American English names and they practiced presenting one another. In CM2, the teacher was a substitute and welcomed me to the classroom with “je vous les lais” or “they’re all yours!” My jaw dropped because I had asked the teachers several times if I should prepare anything and they insisted that I not. Luckily, the students wanted to introduce themselves and that took up a good chunk of time as we reviewed how to do that. It’s hard not to write on the board because I lose track of what I’m saying and what verbs I’m using. I know I’m supposed to speak to them only in English, but doing so was much more effective when I gave directions or explained something in English and then we translated it into French together. When I explain grammar or what something means, it has to be in French. For example, it was hard for the students to grasp what “I’m (age)” meant. In French, you would say, “J’ai (age) ans.” In English, you cannot translate that as “I have (age)”. I was backwards translating “I’m” as “J’ai” until the sub teacher explained that to translate it logically you would say “Je suis” or “I am” – he lamented after class how difficult translating even simple things like age can be across languages. Once we got through ages, he told me to teach them something, so I attempted to teach the body parts head, hands, feet, and the directions up, down, left, and right. He was helpful in making the kids think of where they had seen those words before – in football and in the sports brand Head. I tripped over myself in using “feet” and “foot”, which is of course simple in English and totally confusing for French speakers. My first lesson, for being unplanned, wasn’t a disaster but it was certainly unnerving. Wonderfully enough, English for French children is not a chore – they seemed genuinely eager to learn, but I was warned that once the novelty of my presence wears off, teaching will be more difficult. The teachers advised lots of games and songs, which is perfect, and perhaps even more fun for me to plan than for the kids to do!

Les sports

         Given my wine and cheese diet, my lack of a gym, and my inability to run for more than 8:35 minutes (latest record), I’m joining all the sports clubs in town. Tonight was volleyball, which I assumed was a casual gathering of mediocre players and lots of beginners. I was wrong. Instead, I turned up to the gym to find a team of women who are trying to get on the regional championship team. However, only a small group of them are devoted enough to come to the practices regularly. I was lucky number six – my poor partner got stuck with my uber rusty skills and general confusion about the coach’s directions as I realized I don’t know any body parts or how to speak sports French. I kept telling my scrimmage teammates and screaming “je l’ai” or “I’ve got it” which I thought was equivalent to the “mine” we use in English volleyball. After usually not having the ball, or if I did have it, frequently whacking it in the wrong direction, I learned I should be saying just “J’ai”. The players are youngish and super nice. They weren’t (visibly) offended when I accidentally called several of them old. They patiently showed me how to set properly and I actually got way better as I warmed up…not a terrible game for not having played volleyball in eight years. Volleyball is twice a week and I’m going to attempt to play badminton twice a week on another hopefully casual team with Kat and Laura. My badminton experience is limited to one day of high school PE badminton, but I will embarrass myself playing any sport that enables me subsist on bread and cheese.

Stage

We woke up not so bright but very early to take the train to Grenoble for our training. I met all the other assistants in the region and realized how lucky we are to have cheap housing, let alone any pre-arranged housing at all, and to have such welcoming and helpful “personnes des resources” around us. Everyone else is struggling to find anywhere to live because it’s so expensive to live in HS. The stage didn’t give us much helpful info in terms of teaching itself, but I think we just need to get into the classrooms to figure things out. Nestled in Alpes, Grenoble is beautiful. We stayed in Autrans, which is up above the city in the mountains, but I want to go to back to explore Grenoble.