*Sigh*, they only want me for my English.

What I had conveniently forgotten until about five days ago was that the only reason I am in France right now is to teach. I think at some point this past weekend I realized with a considerable amount of anxiety, wait a minute, I have to be responsible for the knowledge of English and the US that a group of French kids will get over the next eight months! With all of the bustle about an apartment and getting a cell phone and enjoying the city, I hadn’t considered this yet. Weird I know, but it just seemed so peripheral to me with everything else going on.

However, as soon as I went to meet the Inspecteur Académique of my circonscription, and all the teachers at my schools, all that anxiety dissipated immediately. Everyone was incredibly nice and accommodating, interested in me, excited to have me there, and more than willing to help me get settled as easily as possible. I found out that I will be teaching at three different elementary schools, with around 9 or 10 classes ranging from ages 6 to age 9. There are some kids that have had private instruction in English outside of school, but other than that they hardly know how to say hello and goodbye.  And yet, I am still supposed to be speaking only English to them! I have no idea how this is going to work, especially because some of the teachers I am working with have a really difficult time speaking English themselves.

That being said, I am actually more pleased than not that my teachers and students don’t speak English, because it does mean that I’ll get to speak or at least hear French a little more than all of the other teaching assistants. That’s really what I came here, whether or not that is selfish of me, so I am grateful for that. And I’m sure that as the year goes on, these kids will absorb faster than I expect all that I am saying to them, whether or not it seems like they understand. At this point, though, it is mere repetition and memorization, as I sing songs like “head shoulders knees and toes” or “old macdonald has a farm” and they try to make the same sounds that I am saying. It is difficult, and involves a lot of wild and emphatic gestures while speaking very loudly and slowly. It took me a while to explain that there is no body part that is called “kneesandtoes” but that it is two separate things, knees, and toes. In another class, with older students, the teacher was trying to teach them the geography of the UK while having them practice the English names for these places. When she asked the students where London was, the vast majority of them shouted out “New York”. That was a difficult one to explain. I guess that’s why I’m here though, right?