1 week in . . .

Hello and welcome to my first blog entry,

As I write, dear reader, I am sat on the balcony of my hotel room drinking coffee and eating ‘des oufes brouill és’. I am listening to Leonard Cohen and the sun is shining – life is good. If I have created an image of total tranquillity then cast it from your mind as a manic wing-flapping pigeon just flew up to the balcony, and scared the pants off me! However the interruption was not unwelcome as this feathered fellow has refocused my mind on the task at hand – a brief summary of events since my arrival here in Saint Raphael, France. I am having a great time – the weather has been glorious since the day we got here and our hotel is two minutes from the beach. I have the day off today and as such I thought it would be prime time to get the ball rolling with regards to our blogs.

The hotel is nice, I am sharing with my colleague Mark who is not in the best of spirits as his team, Bolton, got relegated yesterday. I have not yet told him that the goal Stoke scored to send them down was apparently a VERY DUBIOUS penalty. Probably best he doesn’t know. Asides from that we are all enjoying ourselves. Upon arrival we were greeted by Gemma and Christophe (a French man), who are very friendly and have made us feel very welcome – they gave us our individual packs with all the information we’d need for the next four weeks.

I am teaching at a collège which is about 20 minutes from the hotel along with my colleagues Grace, Lisa and Jocelyn. On the first day we were (very) formally introduced to the Alphonse Carr; we had a presentation and tour of the school in French. Although I could follow the majority of what was being said, it was good to have Gemma on hand to clear up any misunderstandings. I think we were all impressed at how well organised the school was in terms of the roles we would play- It was clear that a fair bit of work had gone in to preparing for our arrival, they want to make the most of this opportunity as much as we did. After croissants and coffee, we met the English teachers we would be working with. I have been assigned to Brigitte and her sixieme and cinquieme classes made up of 11-13 year olds. I am very happy with how open she has been to the task-based-learning approach of UKLC. She basically tells me what topic they are doing next and I try to come up with a lesson based around it and run it by her briefly before teaching it – she has been happy with my efforts so far and after each lesson we discuss what worked and what didn’t and how it could be improved for the next time.


My introduction lesson was based around pictures about me on the board, the students would tell me as much as they could about myself and then create their own name badge-type things to display on their desks with two pictures about them. Word of warning when doing this: one cheeky lad introduced himself to me as ‘Booba’. As this was such an easy name to remember I would often call on him by name to answer a question. Every time I did so his fellow students would start sniggering – I assumed I was pronouncing it badly and tried a few different variations. This went one for three days and then Brigitte noticed me addressing him as ‘Booba’ and at the end of the lesson told me that his name was in fact Natsu. It transpires that Booba is a French rapper and he had blagged me good and proper! I have since researched Booba and will be dedicating part of their next lesson to the differences between him and Natsu to ensure I have the last laugh. Anyway in the next part of the lesson I introduced the topic of ‘lying’ – and after much modelling they got it. They would then have to introduce themselves to their partner telling either zero, one, two or three lies according to a secret piece of paper I had given them. The idea was that they would listen to each other much more carefully to work out how many lies the speaker had told, and they enjoyed playing both roles of the liar and the guesser. The biggest thing I learnt on my first day of teaching was the importance of lingering as long as necessary on the modelling stage to ensure that everyone was on board before trying it themselves. In my first class, they hadn’t all understood so I had to go back to giving examples – in the following classes that day, the lesson got better as I became more in tuned with recognising when information was falling on deaf ears. Shout outs to Michael and Grace for helping me with that lesson – it was much better than what I was originally planning!


Another lesson I did with the older year group was introducing ‘ago’. Again Michael’s help was invaluable for this lesson - it involved a timeline of events in my life, and then a lot of modelling to illustrate the construction. Eg. I was born in 1987/ I was born 24 years ago. I came to Saint Raphael on the 6^th May/ I came to Saint Raphael 5 days ago. I was surprised at how many examples I had to give of this before it made sense to them but by the end of the class they were all offering me examples of things that that happened in their own lives – my favourite was Angelo’s effort: “My fish died 2 years ago. His name is sushi!” 


I thoroughly enjoyed the first week and on Saturday we went on a trip to Nice, which was lovely. I managed to catch Huddersfield’s first play-off leg against MK Dons (glamour tie), which we won 2-0. The victory made the €8 pint of Grolsche much easier to swallow. We then had a walk down to the port and (after a particularly messy Friday night including some startling revelations in the ‘I have never’ drinking game), I was more than ready to get the train back to St Raph when 6pm came. Michael, Mark and I (in a bit of ‘boys only’ time) also went to see the local football team St Raphael Frejus Etoiles on Friday night– we got in for free and they won 4-2! 

I have a few lessons to prepare for this week . . . but on Friday I’ll be heading to Sainte Maxime avec ma petite amie (who is visiting) to stay at the hotel her sister is working at, and watching the Champions League final on my birthday this Saturday! All in all I’m having a great time with some wonderful people! I realise I haven’t mentioned our training week in Denbigh, Wales – suffice to say it was great fun and I think stood us in good stead for teaching young people here in France. The leap from teaching adults (on the CELTA course) to teaching teenagers has not been as great as I might have imagined – the most important thing is to remember what we were like at their age! They are both interesting and interested – in one of my more rowdy classes I had to abandon the lesson plan for ten minutes as students pelted me with questions. I was happy to do this as they were curious about me and had an instant reason to want to speak English – surely this is the point!



Ben