Barberesses

There are many things that are glamorous about living in France. My job as a teacher is not among them. I am an English assistant at a high school and a middle school in a little town about half an hour north of Toulouse, but as it turns out, that job description covers a lot of ground. Between the two schools, I work with ten English teachers, and since I'm an unusual resource there is no prescribed way to integrate me into their classrooms. As a result, my work life is unpredictable and varied, though it all focuses on teaching French students to hear and understand an American accent and on getting them to practice speaking. Sometimes I act as nothing more than a voice: I read the texts the teachers give me into a recorder or to the class. More often, though, I lead or co-lead class sessions, which requires a much larger skill set. A loud voice and an ability to understand English spoken with a thick French accent are key, as is the ability to quickly formulate questions that are not yes-or-no but that are nevertheless easy to respond to with a limited vocabulary. (Didn't know that was a skill, did you?)

So far the most satisfying class sessions have been ones during which the students had to struggle to understand what I was saying and I had to struggle to get them to understand. I know those students learned something. They may not remember how to say "Pilgrim," or what it means, but they will remember which sort of questions they can ask to get an answer they can understand. The hardest classes are those during which the students refuse to speak. Getting French teenagers who are tired or lazy to speak English to me instead of French to their friends is not fun. Challenging as it can be, I've learned to count any class where most students speak some English and prove that they have understood some English as a success.

Teaching English can also be pretty amusing, especially to someone who has spent eight years in classrooms trying to learn French. It is gratifying to hear that French students don't pronounce endings that should be pronounced; that they agree adjectives that shouldn't be agreed; that they confuse tenses. They struggle with the same things as American students do learning French, except inversely. Their logic can also have entertaining results; when asked, what is a person called who cuts women's hair?, one student responded, "a barberess." They also have a tendency to add h's at the beginning of words that begin with a vowel, out of precaution, I suppose, so I've been hearing a lot about "hairplanes" and "hair pressure."

I would like to end this post on a note of absurdity: just yesterday I stood in the front of the classroom reading a not-quite-authentic American menu out loud to a class of twelve-year-olds and having them repeat after me. It was a logical exercise -- it got everyone to practice pronunciation, and ordering off a menu is an important skill when you're in a foreign country. But man was it weird to watch a classroom full of many earnest voices intone "barbeque chicken sandwich -- deluxe club sandwich -- bacon cheddar burger" at me.