Life at Lycée Storck

I have now completed two weeks in my role as Language Assistant, overcoming the first stage of challenges: including locating classrooms, learning the names of my colleagues… and then less successfully navigating (or falling face-flat at) the second round: inevitably the teaching-the-students part of the whole affair. It started off quite well, with introductory sessions being relaxed and my own English-ness proving a helpful novelty. Then it got a little harder. On day two, left in a class-room with 12 French teenagers and an instruction no more detailed than “just make them talk”, I felt a little out of my depth.  The principal struggle has been motivating the pupils to do more than just show up to class. I can choose engaging topics, plan creative activities and mobilise my ‘cultural resources’ until the cows come home, but ca ne sert a rien when what is staring back at you is a sullen face and a blanket response that they don’t understand, and don’t speak English anyway. Frustrating much. Then there is the small problem of trying to assert some authority when you could probably pass for most of your pupil’s younger sibling. The highlight of my crash course in what it really means to be a teacher (my idealistic visions of ‘making a difference’ went out of the window on day one) was a lesson with a group of trainee-chefs. What I considered to be a relevant and suitably challenging session based around BBC Foods finest cooking resources was treated with complete disdain, as if it was me wasting their time. Before the hour was through I was almost ready to concede to their peer-pressure and give up before I embarrassed myself further. I have come to fear the prolonged silence that signals pupil disinterest and ultimately lesson-failure. I am already tired of repeatedly giving an instruction that is repeatedly ignored and battling against the awkward silence’s not so appealing alternative in the form of a decidedly French undercurrent of conversation that is clearly a whole lot more interesting than anything I want them to talk about.

Lets not be melodramatic, it hasn’t all been horror-story material. Perhaps I was simply a little too optimistic, or did not fully realise the reality of what teaching English to teenagers actually entails. To avoid complete educator’s-despair, I will once again embark on the necessary pleasure-in-simple-things mantra and take recompense in the small things that have gone right – a successful conversation class (where they actually spoke), a fun session spent playing speaking games, a lesson based on The Apprentice that was neither too difficult nor too easy.

I may not be set to revolutionise the teaching of English in vocational colleges, or even work out when Je ne comprends pas doesn’t translate as I can’t be bothered, but I wont hand in my notice just yet. Apparently the move from language-student to enseignante de langue takes a little more than two weeks. And in my case, at least things can only get better.