This is sort of a melange of all the days I work, just to get a good picture of what I do in general.

8:30 AM- I work with a class of Starters—the name given to a group of students who have just begin learning English—in the international section. This class has only 8 kids, and I’d say they’re in the running to be favorite class. We stat of with a little warm-up forcing each kid to say “hello how are you” and respond to each other one by one. Then we launch into some sort of interactive game, taking advantage of the small class size. We like to play a game where I hide some dice in the classroom and the kids have to find it. The winner of the round is the person that can correctly say “the die is under the desk, etc.” They just learned prepositions and have a pretty good vocabulary of stuff around the room, and for some reason, they love it.

Around 9:45 the class fills up again with the “movers” and “flyers”, students whose level of English is progressively more advanced. The class now has 24 kids in it, and we have to do something that caters to all three levels. Usually we fit some sort of art project, and then sports into this one hour period. The teacher is in the class the whole time, and usually I don’t do much in sports but follow along.

After sports, which I have, ever since I was in school, hated, it’s time for yoga.

Twenty kindergarteners file into the dance room and I lead a sort of yoga exercise simplified for kids. Downward dog becomes a modified animal miming activity, as I ask the kids to “wag your tail” and “make puppy noises”. The cobra position becomes an exercise in hissing, as the entire class is transformed into a an imaginary zoo. We end with a fidgety attempt to sit still and concentrate. About 20 percent of the class is not buying it, but some of them take it really seriously. We put our shoes back on, and yoga is over.  I now really have empathy for my Istanbul friends who taught yoga to a huge room of rowdy Turkish kids. Time for lunch!

Roughly two hours go by. I sit in the teacher’s lounge like a sponge, soaking in snippets of zippy french conversations. There is a lot of delightful off-color humor going on and colloquial stuff I just don’t get. Every once in a while I’ll join in, and the teachers are really nice about explaining stuff to me. Sometimes I use this time to go online and print out worksheets or make copies for another class.

1:45

After lunch it’s time for the international section with another small group of mostly native English speakers. This is rivaling my favorite class. I especially love the little middle eastern kid from London who always has to pee. They’re about 9 years old and at the perfect crossroads of curiosity and compliance. The world still fascinates them but they’ve  started developing self-control. They’re easy to work with, and our class usually consists of discussing a topic, doing a worksheet, and some simple writing composition. Earlier this year, we took turns reading Fantastic Mr. Fox, doing reading comprehension, and then we moved on to Anglophone cities. We talked about New York (which I’m obsessed with) and they made their own postcards of Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, etc. It was great fun! This week we’re working on London so the kids are tasked with decoding the map and finding certain landmarks. They’re going on a class trip to London in May, so the fact that they’re studying it makes it all the more interactive, useful, and fun!

At 2:30 I get to go home!

There’s more to this story, as I usually stay at school until 4:45 on Mondays, and Tuesdays, but as I’m telling Thursday’s story, that’s where it ends. All in all, I work with 7 different classes ranging from Kindergarten to 5^th grade ( CP-CE2) and squeeze it all into 3 days. France says no to school on Wednesdays, and Fridays are luckily a vacation for me.

Now my worst stress is planning a vacation to Italy for next week. Ayy life is so hard! Although I do tend to get bored at times, I’m getting used to the French pace of life. Whereas before I couldn’t imagine staying beyond my contract, maybe now I might consider it….

Voila! There you have it a little view of what I do.

A la prochaine!