What's up

I learned a new word, 'se branler,' from watching 'How I Met Your Mother' with French subtitles. It's been my humour buffer the last few weeks. The dark had been getting to me, so Don Julio and I have been watching the last two seasons together. I insist it's a useful exercise; he listens to English and maintains his vocabulary, while I learn interesting new phrases no one would dare teach me in a class. ('Se branler' means 'to masterbate' by the way.) I kept repeating my new vocabulary all this wednesday to help myself remember, much to the horror of Don Julio.

Most of the schools I'm working at don't seem to realize that I'm leaving at the end of April. Somehow no one in the administration gave them the heads up, but that's frankly not too surprising. The majority of the schools don't really know what to do with me; as a 7 monther, I'm supposed to be working with teachers to augment the quality of pre-existing english courses, but so far most of the schools I work in have been using me as an English sub. In other words, my job has never been clearly defined for the teachers by the administration, and after a few timid attempts to explain my role, I found it more effective to just go with the flow. In any case, the woman who came in to inspect me early in the year gave me a favorable opinion, so I've just continued to do the same style of lesson; vocab, culture, and song based. It works to varying degrees depending on the groups of kids. A lot of the time, I feel like I totally fail, but that's only because I have a couple of classes that I've never managed to engage, and the ones that I do...Well, sometimes I wonder if I'm even teaching them all that much. If I come back next year, I'm going to try to have more comprehensive lesson plans prepared; ones that fully utilize my ability to teach correct pronunciation and ones that are more adapted to the difficult nature of the kids in this area. At the least, I can more confidently define for teachers what I feel capable or not capable of doing, and how I think it'd work best to organize my time.

Curiosity won today: I tried the tomato soup from the instant coffee machine in the teacher's lounge. Surprisingly not heinous. It tastes like Top Ramen, if Top Ramen made tomato soup. It even has parsley sprinkled on top. I feel this is a French touch.

Update a few hours later: I just ran into one of the principals I work for in the bookstore. I'm usually more shy around her, because I feel like I've accomplished the least at her school. Frankly, those kids have been one major source of insecurity for me, and it's at this school where I have the two classes in which I feel totally ineffectual. Anyhow, she asked me how much longer I was sticking around in France, and she, like every other person I've told, was surprised to hear my contract was ending in April. She told me how everyone likes having me at her school and that while she didn't know what career I was thinking about, I definitely had a future in teaching if I so chose. Whew, that just took a whole ton of stess off.