My First Two Weeks of Being A Language Assistant

My program began on the first of October. Prior to that, the local education department had sent me a timetable for my first week and on the first, I was meant to meet my new English teacher at the school at 8:30am. However, in a stellar example of French administration, nobody had thought to inform the teacher of this and he couldn’t meet me then. The first he heard of it was when I emailed him to confirm that I was expected then! Not to worry though, we just arranged another time and everything was OK.

The rest of the week was given over to a couple of training sessions and an introduction to the French school system. Then this week I began my two weeks of observation in the classes. Still more communications gaps, as I hadn’t been told which rooms the classes were being held in, nor the names of the teachers. One teacher hadn’t even been told to expect me, and several were not entirely sure what my role was actually meant to be. A couple of times the class that I was meant to be observing was having a test so I got to have a free hour (good when the it was my last class for the day, not so good when it was right in the middle though!) All in all a very interesting week.

My first day was made even more memorable when I was locked in the library over the lunch hour. The librarian didn’t realise that I was still in there when she left to have her lunch, and at the time I didn’t know that the library closed for lunch. So I was very happy when she came back and I could leave! The poor lady looked mortified and was terribly apologetic.

The classes themselves were very interesting to be a little fly on the wall and watch the interactions between the students, their teacher, and the class material. Every class has a kid who is better than everyone else at English. There is always a group of girls who would rather be off socialising than learning English. Almost all the kids in every class either could not or would not speak English out of self-consciousness. It really seems like I have my work cut out for me when I start teaching!