Rosetta: Work Not Play

I got my 'official' schedule. I will have Fridays off! Sometimes. If I ended being needed on the occasional Friday I will work but in most cases I will have a three day weekend. Thursday was my first day back after break and I had three hours of class. One hour with a part time English teacher, Anne-Marguerite, and two hours with my English teacher, Laurent. Anne-Marguerite had requested me because she was holding a special one hour session in addition to her normal class time because her students are going to have a month of to do an internship and then a couple of months later they have there big exams. So she had asked if they'd be interested in an extra class and they'd agreed. She invited me along so the student could practice explaining what menu items were to me in English (a task that will be required of them on their exam). This was a good idea in principle but in reality was a huge waste of time. Five of the ten students were absent and the rest were unresponsive and unprepared. Granted, it was 9 in the morning the day after a two week vacation, but having me there would've been a lot more beneficial if they'd known any of the dishes they were meant to explain. These kids didn't even know how to explain the dished in French much less English. We spend the hour with me selecting one kid after another and asking, 'can you tell me what the quiche lorraine is?' or whatever dish I happened to pick from the list. And then the kid would struggle vainly to answer, sometimes the other kids would through out words like 'eggs' or 'butter' but in the end the teacher ended up telling me what the dish was. I think if I had been in charge of the class and they had acted like that I would've given them a couple of minutes to prepare an explanation for each dish (even if they were supposed to have already done that it was obviously necessary). And, since they were supposed to comport themselves as if they were waiters and I was the customer, I think it would've helped if we'd made them stand next to me while I sat instead of the other way around. My two hours with Laurent went a bit better. He gave me groups of 3 students for 20 minutes at a time to talk to in English about whatever we wanted. I took some time to prepare the classroom and wrote 'helpful phrases' on the board such as 'what does that mean?' 'Can you repeat that?' 'I don't understand.' Because I had had difficulty with getting my groups to express these ideas in English in my prior experiences. But in fact, the groups I ended up with all spoke English very well and had little difficulty understanding me. We talked about vacation and internships and future goals and the 20 minutes went by quickly. The only down side was that I ended up with 4 groups over the 2 hours I was with Laurent and I tired of asking the same questions over and over, I even forgot at one point if I'd already posed 'that' question to 'this' group or not. But one of the things I learned at orientation was, if nothing else, make sure the kids leave the room with a smile on there faces. I think I accomplished that, especially with the last group which was a bit rowdy and laughing a lot of the time, but I know that they enjoyed themselves and they did participate and speak English so my job there was done. Next week I will have class with Annie, another full-time English teacher, and she had meticulously planned everything I will do, and unlike Laurent, she wants her students to see my sessions as work not play.