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 ?

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 !

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.

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 :

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.

1) the thesis statement (or problematique) that sounded so good in November has a way of slipping out of your hands by March.

2) You may be interested in experimenting with learning styles, but that doesn’t mean the students necessarily are.

3)  A preference for a certain type of learning may explain why the student is having problems with certain activities that don’t appeal to his natural preferences – the visual learner, who prefers to discover new information through images, charts, graphs, and photos, will probably find it a 45 minute oral presentation without any visuals a tough row to hoe.  Result : boredom, indiscipline, a bad case of the fidgets… The goods news is that just because the student has a preference for a certain type of learning doesn’t mean he or she can’t learn in a different way, and most students are able to cope with a variety of learning situations

4) Taking into account learning styles may help explain some behavior (the visual learner getting bored in a lecture course) but my students also have the usual adolescent and academic problems that are keeping them from making progress :  unhappy home life, knowledge gaps  in the English language, raging hormones…especially raging hormones !

5)  My own score on the Index of Learning Styles indicated that I was "fairly well balanced in the two dimensions of each scale" (Active/Reflective -  Sensing / Intuitive – Visual / Verbal) but that I had a moderate tendancy to prefer learning situations that favor a sequential style . Gosh, I feel so balanced !

Link : Richard Felder’s Index of Learning Styles

The first question was if we were "allowed" to give a zero to the student.  Apparently, if a student doesn’t hand in any work, it is impossible to give a mark, so there is just a blank on his or her record. The idea is that marks should only be given for work done, but this can be a problem if the student is in a situation where the established marks are so high, not turning in work will not affect the final mark.   The discussion leader suggested that when students fail to turn in an assignment, it’s a good idea to ask the student to put his or her name on a sheet of paper, if only to have an actual physical document.

Once the student has turned in the work (even blank exam papers or the above-mentioned justification paper), the teacher can give a mark – but not a zero, because a zero  means that the student didn’t hand in anything at all.  But apparently, you can give a really low mark (like 3 out of  20 or a humiliating  0,5 out of 20) which will then lower the student’s average and prevent the student from getting away with not doing any work or cheating. 

Since France is a society where negotiation works better than invoking hard and fast rules to settle a conflict, this system allows teachers some sort of leverage when trying to get students to do what they want them to do.  In the short run, the assignment mark isn’t such a big deal, but the possible consequences on the student’s final average can be disastrous. 

In any case, it’s probably my own fault to a certain extent that the students acted this way. I allowed the students a few extra days to finish the assignments on time, thinking it would help them.  This works for students who don’t need to cheat anyway, but for weak students, it’s a recipe for disaster, because they wait until the last minute to finish an assignment and they they hand in any old trash.   If I had caught the problem earlier, I could have given them a stern warning and pushed them to do decent work. Unfortunately, it’s now too late for them to be able to make up the work before the second trimester ends. 

En dehors du fait que c’est assez bête de leur part, les trois élèves qui ont tenté le coup n’ont pas compris les failles de la traduction automatique. Ils n’ont pas saisi non plus qu’il existe des tournures et des expressions typiquement françaises qui ne marchent pas en anglais.  Ils ont rendu un travail nul sans doute parce qu’ils étaient pris de panique. 

Morale de l’histore :  à moins d’avoir affaire à un élève avec de vrais problèmes de santé ou de situation familiale, il ne faut laisser les élèves la possibilité de rattraper un travail après la date limite – s’ils n’ont pas été assez organisés pour le faire  en temps et en heure, ils ne vont certainement pas pouvoir faire le travail correctement avec une rallonge de deux semaines. 

Elle m’a également rassuré sur ce que je vois comme le côté très ralenti des 2nde.  Comme disait l’autre, "les 2nde ne sont que des 3ème qui ont eu deux mois de vacances."  En effet, mes élèves sont parfois d’une lenteur exaspérante, d’autant plus que nous sommes en janvier à trois semaines des vacances.  Je me suis rendu compte que ma tendance à proposer beaucoup d’activités et d’aller très vite s’appuie sur un désir d’avoir un cours "dynamique" ; encore faudrait-il laisser un peu plus de temps aux élèves pour souffler, réfléchir et saisir ce que je leur présente comme information.  L’horreur du temps mort vient sans doute d’un souci de "cadrer" les élèves.

J’avais l’impression d’être l’invité du jour en préparant les cours de sixième pour lundi prochain. Je prends ma première classe de collège pendant trois heures ; jamais trois heures de contact avec les élèves ne m’ont semblé aussi dures.  Ma tutrice passe d’une activité à une autre sans s’affoler, avec beaucoup de légèrété et les élèves suivent avec plaisir. Grace au manuel ( let’s call it New Jive 6ème), le problème n’était pas de concevoir la progression , ni le contenu, mais d’organiser les activités en classe.  Si le guide pédagogique foisonne d’idées, je ne sais toujours pas si je vais pouvoir les mettre en oeuvre sans perdre la moitié de la classe.   Je m’appuierai sur ma tutrice (thank god she’ll be there) – heureusement que je n’ai pas eu une classe de collège pendant toute l’année, car j’aurai eu un début d’année très éprouvant !

By the way, here is what we’ll be doing in class :
have got + color+hair /eyes
have got+(article) + adjectives (big, small, long, short)+ body parts (nose)
be + adjective (slim, fat, short, tall)
be + color (his hair is red / black ; his eyes are blue….

God forbid some kid has auburn hair and hazel eyes – they aren’t on the vocabulary list !