Augustus

I’m calling our principal Augustus, because in some respects, he runs his class like the Roman Empire. (Principals here continue to teach classes in addition to administrative work. It’s a good idea, I think; it keeps them in touch with the tenor of learning at the school) Mr. Lion took me back to the office after he’d finished giving me a tour of the town, and handed me off to the kind Augustus. We dropped by the school and ran into some teachers, most of whom were genuinely nice, save one girl who seemed reticent to even smile at me. I talked to his enthusiastic secretary about Baudelaire, then having collected the necessary papers, Augustus took me back to his home to eat with his family.

Augustus is a chain smoker. This man is constantly leaning out of the windows and doors of his home, pensively puffing away in a manner even Matt Langer at his most supercilious couldn’t match. He carries around the same battered marbolo pack and fills it with homemade cigarettes. Sometimes he’ll find himself a stretch of table in the teachers lounge and set up his assembly line, packing loose tobacco into his portable plastic mechanism and shooting it into pre-filtered paper tubes. His words are perpetually chased by the ghost of smoke-sticks past, but his overwhelming kindness and general good humour allow me to forgive it. As soon as we left Mr. Lion’s office, he lit up with an apologetic smile, and when we arrived at his beautiful turn of the century apartment, he cracked open a beer with relief.

His wife sports a stylish blond crop and Dior makeup, and is constantly laughing at the state of her English. (It’s fine) We had a few hours before dinner the first day, so she took me on a walk around town, pointing out the best bakeries and bars, and listening encouragingly to my fragmented sentences. Augustus did something similar a few days later, bringing his eleven year old son along, and making sure to introduce me personally to the pharmacist and the head of the bank. He even got my account opening fees waved and paid for my postage stamps when I didn’t have coins. His wife made jokes and told me about the six years they’d spent in Madrid, and about their life in Dubai afterward. She reiterated that she understood what it was like to live in a foreign country, and wrote down all their information for me, telling me I could call any time.

She’s since taken me food shopping, Augustus’s parents invited me to visit them at their house in the country, and I pretty much eat with them whenever I run into them, which is fairly often. I went rowing at the local club yesterday (three seat in a quad, behind one of my bosses and two other grey haired men) and ran into Augustus when he was dropping off his sister. I had to tell his sister when she was leaving that I was just too exhausted to come with her back to the apartment. I hope they’re not offended. I’m supposed to have dinner with them and their neighbors next Saturday to work out a possible schedule for tutoring their neighbor’s daughter. Whew. They’re pretty fabulously nice, and I’m pretty damn lucky. I found out during a discussion about religion and politics in schools with Augustus on Saturday that they’re UMP, though, so I’m glad I refrained from letting out a volley of Sarkozy jokes.

I shadowed Augustus’s class on Tuesday. His style is totally opposite to the American philosophy – but I’ll evaluate that in a later post. He asked one of his students to bring him coffee, which I found a little weird. She came back with one of those little espresso cups, and he turned and asked whether I’d like some, too. The little girl darted out of the room and came back with the cup of coffee, with two sugar cubes, teaspoon, and napkin delicately arranged around a matching saucer. He immediately started laughing. “Oh, so for me you do the minimum but for HER you make a big effort, huh?” Augustus teased. I went to recess briefly with some of the girls, did a presentation in English for the class, then visited another classroom and taught some six year olds Row,Row,Row Your Boat – which was pretty much a lesson for me in short attention spans. At this point, all the kids I’ve met immediately start yelling ‘HELLO! EY-LAY! HELLO!” whenever they see me. I feel like a superstar, haha.