on your journey, i will bless you...

I can't remember how we got on the subject, but one day Marlene and I were talking about how stupid President Bush is, and I joked that I could do a lesson with my students of correcting his grammatical mistakes. I wasn't planning to actually do it, but Marlene loved the idea so much that I decided to. So I googled his most famous mistake ("Is our children learning?") and instantly found a seemingly-endless list of eight years of "Bushisms." I made a page of my favorites ("Relations between our governments is good") for my students, and last week we spent our classes correcting the president. It was a little too difficult for my 1-class to really enjoy it, but it was a hit with my T-classes. They laughed so hard they almost fell out of their chairs. At the end of class, one of them raised her hand and asked, "Why Bush was elected if he is so stupid?" Somebody tell me how I was supposed to answer that question. Because you French kids are smarter than the entire Republican party, that's why.

And on a random note, I think "Sunday Morning Coming Down," by Johnny Cash, and "Tis of Thee," by Ani DiFranco, are probably the saddest songs I've ever heard. I can't even stand to listen to them, they're so sad.

For some reason (we still don’t know why), the school’s computer room was closed all weekend, from Friday evening to Monday morning, which meant we had no way to prepare anything for our classes. Fortunately Rebecca was able to make her lesson plan with just the photocopier, but she almost died when she couldn’t access YouTube for 48 hours. The computers are running again now (obviously), so we think they must have been shut down because of a problem and not because the school didn’t want us using them. Although just in case that had been the reason, I prepared a nice long speech in French for whoever made that decision. The highlights of last week…

• The first week back after vacation was difficult, both for me and the students. I had a class on Friday that was really awful. My schedule has changed slightly for the new semester: two of my classes with Caroline were replaced by two with Madame Gady. I had one of the new classes for the first time today, and I have the other one tomorrow. I think they’ll be good groups.
• On Thursday I managed to compact a lesson plan designed for 45 minutes into just 10 minutes (it took longer to go over their homework than I had anticipated). It was on the 2008 presidential election, and I think I managed to give the students a good basic understanding of it.
• I bought a lovely calendar of Monet paintings for 2008 that has the days of the week in seven different languages – English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and two more I can’t identify. I learned all the days in German and Marlene was very impressed. Or she pretended to be, at least.
• I gave Sarah some advice about how to open a bank account and navigate the Paris metro, and apparently it was good advice, because now she’s been telling me, "I think Rebecca is always right." If only more people in my life would adopt that attitude.

If I ever see Yeager, Brager, or any of my other college French professors again, the first thing I'm going to do is thank them for helping me get into this program to go to France. The second thing I'm going to do is apologize for speaking so little in their classes. Before this week, I had thought that long silences in class only bothered the students who were supposed to be talking. But now I know how painful they are for the teacher.

(There are three basic divisions of language classes at this school. I'll be referring to them as 1-classes, students who have just started learning English; 2-classes, intermediate students; and T-classes, who are at the highest level of English.)

I started teaching (if you can call it that) yesterday with Madame Camus. We started out with a T-class, doing a lesson on Hurricane Katrina, which Madame Camus had asked to discuss. She is an excellent teacher, very nice but also very tough – the students don't just talk in her class, they stand up straighter when they see her in the hall – so it wasn't very difficult as long as she was in the room with me. Then she left me alone with half of another T-class, to do the same lesson by myself. The students were a little confused by my strange American accent and my fast talking – I tried to slow down, but even Americans have told me that I talk too fast – but their English was good, and overall, the class went okay, although it was hardly what I had hoped for.

Today I was scheduled to teach two more afternoon classes, but because one of the English teachers has been out sick this week, I had to teach a morning class on short notice. I wasn't prepared, so I used the Hurricane Katrina lesson plan that I did yesterday. Lo and behold, I was teaching the same students as yesterday. I couldn't understand why they were so bored with the subject, or why they looked so familiar, until finally I realized. It was positively painful.

When it was finally over, I went back to my room and felt sorry for myself and thought about what to do with my 1-classes that afternoon. I decided that it was Friday, and the students didn't want to hear about a depressing hurricane that happened two years ago on the other side of the world, and the subject was too difficult for 1-classes, anyway. I needed easier material, and thinking back to Brager's class, I decided to go with the Proust Questionnaire. (It's a list of questions compiled by Marcel Proust asking simple things about what you like or dislike, etc.) I also confessed to Madame Camus and Madame Gady about what had gone wrong with the morning class. They told me not to worry about it, and Madame Gady offered to stay in the room with me during the 1-classes – of course, I jumped at the chance.

So I spent the afternoon asking the 1-classes Proust's questions and trying to coax responses. It was difficult getting them to talk, but it was much less painful than the morning class had been. I gave a few answers to each question, which seemed to give them ideas. For, "What do you dislike?" I suggested Monday morning and cafeteria food, which made the students say homework and bad grades. I think it went well, but I was so exhausted afterwards that I didn't go grocery shopping like I meant to.

I plan to spend this weekend resting and planning more easy things to do next week. If the weather is nice, Heather and I might walk out to the McDonald's; it's far, but we miss our crappy American food.

Nakeisha and I left early Sunday morning to catch the train into Amiens. We had just gotten aboard when we met another assistant on her way to Amiens, Molly, from Missouri. She overheard us speaking in English and came over and sat next to us. She will be teaching at a middle school in Villers-Cotterets but living in Soissons, a nearby town. She was extremely cool and helpful. She changed onto the same train as us in Paris, and she knew much more about French train system; we probably would have gotten lost without her. We arrived in Amiens around three in the afternoon. Molly had reserved a room in a different hotel than Nakeisha and me, but they were only a block apart. After we all checked in, we met back up to find the center was the meeting was going to be held.

Molly had a map of Amiens and the address of the center, which we were able to find pretty easily. Then we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around Amiens, which was fantastic. The Somme River runs through Amiens, and so do several of its tribunaries, so there were bridges, canals, and rivers everywhere, which made it very picturesque. It was a lot like I imagine Venice to be like. We also saw the massive Notre Dame Cathedral. We walked all around it, but we didn't go inside. (I've never felt comfortable in houses of worship – my Catholic education is probably to blame – and I think there was some sort of service going on, anyway.) But the cathedral! There was so much sculpture with so much detail that I could have stared at it for hours.

We also visited the park in Amiens, which was beautiful. The Somme ran through it, and there was also a lake, with a snake sculpture in its center, full of ducks and geese and a little babbling stream where some French kids actually managed to catch a few fish. I used up the rest of the film on one of my disposable cameras taking pictures there. As we were leaving back to our hotels, I got an incredible view of the cathedral from a distance, set against the clouds. In short, the afternoon was exactly why I came to France.

That night in my hotel room wasn't so great. My room was nice and comfortable, but the sore throat that I had been fighting all day had gotten worse. It felt like it was on fire, but it also hurt to swallow, so drinking didn't really make it better. I had a lot of trouble sleeping. We woke up early the next day because the meeting started at nine and lasted all day. It was helpful but involved a lot of boring paperwork and Power Point presentations, so I'll spare you the details.

Molly was also taking the same trains back to Villers-Cotterets as Nakeisha and me, so we all travelled back together. They managed to sleep on the train, but I didn't. We finally back around nine Monday night. Nakeisha and I walked to the school from the train station, and as soon as I got in my room again, I found a box from Mom waiting for me. My iPod, my CDs, two Shirley Temple DVDs, candy – it was like Christmas!

Today I finally started observing classes. I was nervous, but I think it went well. The teacher had me introduce myself to her class, so I told them my name and where I was from. A few of them seemed interested when they heard that my city in Louisiana had a French name, and I tried to explain to them why it was called Baton Rouge, but I think I spoke too fast for them to follow. The teacher had to draw a red stick on the board with chalk, which was rather phallic-looking. They spent the rest of the class going over phonetics; French pronounces all syllables the same, so they had to learn how to stress syllables.