News from the Depths of August

The summer has been spent very profitably travelling, swimming and painting the living room, and now I truly understand why teachers put up with the stress of teaching during 9 months of the year : the fabulous summer vacation.

In July I discovered my teaching assignment for September. In fact, I’m being sent to work at two collèges (Junior High Schools) and will have 9 contact hours in each school.  I was unable to contact the first school, where I expect to get run of the mill classes (if you can use that term to describe junior high students learning English), but I did manage to reach the second school’s principal, who informed me that I was to have three groups of SEGPA students. SEGPA students are kids with learning difficulties : concentration and memory problems, dyslexia, short attention spans.  They aren’t considered handicapped but have long-term learning difficulties and lack the essential skills and knowledge other students have when they leave primary school.  They also have a terrible reputation among most teachers who dread being assigned to these groups.     (I’ve set up a separate blog in French by the way about teaching English to SEGPA students ; the blog is in French and Please Speak Up will now be in English).

I have to admit that despite being assigned to two different schools which are both a 2 hour drive away from my home town, I’m actually looking forward to the coming year. Is it because the IUFM teacher-training year was such an unpleasant experience that things can only get  better ?  Or is it just the warm glow of summer holiday that makes me so optimistic ?

From CAPES to IUFM to TZR : new acronym in sight.

I’m changing acronyms again (the French love them). After passing the CAPES (Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du Second Degré), studying at the IUFM (Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres), I will now become TZR (Titulaire de Zone de Remplacement). A TZR is a substitute teacher ; I’ll fill in for teachers on either sick leave or maternity leave (or who’ve just disappeared). . Although the TZR is officially attached to a school in a designated replacement zone, he or she can be sent almost anywhere if the Rectorat needs to fill a position in the département.

The bad news is that although I know which department I’m in (les Deux Sèvres, out of the four in the Academy), I still don’t know the school or even the area I’ll be in. The good news is that the department is neighbor to my home department (the Maine et Loire). So I may be able to commute everyday instead of renting a studio during the week. Wait and see !

Docile Teacher Trainees Petition for Right to Pee and Drink Coffee

Yesterday was the last day of my teacher training at the IUFM. At 2 p.m. a Powerpoint presentation on legal aspects of school field trips, the kind where the speaker turns his back to the audience and reads the slides without pausing to take a breath. The other students were passively taking notes or doodling in their notebooks. Time dragged by. Suddenly my neighbor thrust a piece of paper at me : “Petition to Request a Break at 3 o’clock and To Ask for Permission to Leave Early”

I’m not sure who began circulating the petition, but I scribbled back, “Why not just ask him directly ? ” and passed it on. Then when the fellow came up for a breath I said in an assertive way, “Excuse me, I was wondering if you could give us a break. And do you think we might finish up at 4 instead of 4:30 ? “

Why would anyone PETITION for a break ? Why not just ask, or better yet, just quietly go ? The incredible thing is that we’d just had a discussion in the morning class about student autonomy. I had argued that the emphasis on student discipline might have the unfortunate side effect of killing student initiative, and recounted how so many North American and British teachers find French students to be incredibly passive and incapable of classroom autonomy. After 9 months of professional training, I couldn’t believe that my peers were still thinking of the speaker as a teacher and not a colleague.

P.S. I suppose the petition could have been a joke but I’m still not sure.

From now on, we’re only watching Tom Cruise movies

May is the loveliest month of the year – lots of holidays, almost no classes at the IUFM, and my students are relaxed and quite pleasant to be with, no doubt because the students who will make it to the coveted Première spot know they will make it, and those who won’t be continuing the adventure are resigned to their fate. The pressure is off the students.

The pressure is off me as well – I am happy to say that my second visit went well and my mémoire was accepted.  So now I can concentrate on just enjoying the students for who they are.  Even the troublesome kids (the two students who were suspended for stealing a Gçameboy in the internat right before the holiday) have been sweet as pie.

A Tom Cruise movie, then, until the end of the year, not only for work on future tenses ("In the future, we will still have policemen but they will be flying policemen") but also to keep them motivated and interested for the last two lessons, which are scheduled for after the final marks.  Watch the trailer here :

Conseil de Classe : motivating failing students

I haven’t written much lately – I’ve been hard at work on a paper, the research paper and getting ready for a visit from the top tomorrow.

Right before the holiday, the teaching staff met with student and parent representatives for our second trimester conseil de classe.  Personally, the meeting did me a world of good because I found that all the comments I had made about individual students and the class dynamic were echoed in the comments of my colleagues.  All the totally unsolicited confirmations of my opinion of the class (nice kids with no major problems apart from not really working hard enough) made me trust my instincts.   Apparently a pattern emerges during the year : the first trimester is dedicated to solving the disciplinary and  behavioral problems of the students as they make the transition from collège to lycée ;  the second trimester is spent discovering the academic problems students have because they have finally settled down to work.  The third trimester is spent trying to make sure the kids who aren’t passing don’t go mad with frustration.

Before the second conseil de classe, students are asked to declare which program they would like to follow next year – in our school, this means taking classes to prepare the Bac S (Science), STI (a more technical program) or STL (a much more vocational program)in two years.  The professors then look at the academic results and either encourage the students or indicate that they don’t think the students are ready or capable of doing the program.  In the Bac S, students do lots of math ; any student who isn’t very good in Math are either discouraged from doing the program or warned that they need to work harder.  In some cases, students are told that they may have made the wrong choice and at the end of the year, they will discover if they can enroll in the program of their choice, take different classes or even be held back.

Ideally, this uncertainty is supposed to act as a motivating tool for students to shape up in the third trimester but the reality is that some students know quite well that they probably won’t even pass this year.  There are about 7 students in my class who are obviously going nowhere next year and haven’t got a clue as how they could improve the overall results.  So this could potentially cause a problem if they feel excluded or left behind their comrades.  So motivating the failures – and the successful students – is my number one challenge for the third trimester.