Recent Lesson Plans

      I am officially teaching for a full week for the first time, starting today. Let me just reiterate that my contract with the French government started on October 1st. France definitely works at a different pace than we do in America; if you work with them, eventually things get resolved. Eventually, just not quickly. After some communication snafus, I sorted out a schedule with the third college where I was contracted to work- College Nicolas Vauquelin.

College Nicolas Vauquelin.

     Nicolas Vauquelin (1763- 1829) was a French chemist and pharmacist who discovered Beryllium (Be, atomic number 4). The college is only a five minute walk from the University of Toulouse's Mirail campus. The university is a pretty dismal looking place compared to the beautiful old British universities and their convivial close-knight campus counterparts in America. The same goes for the college, actually. The outside looks more like a prison than a school.

The Universite de Toulouse II- le Mirail. This is an outside shot of one of the main classroom buildings. 

     The teachers at Vauquelin are welcoming, and the kids are pretty easy to work with. After telling the Spanish teacher that I'm from New Iberia, he got very excited and  talked about Cajun music. He sang some Zachary Richard for me to prove how much he loves the Cajun culture. 

     Since I haven't talked about what I've actually been teaching in a while, here are some recent lesson plans:

          -For Thanksgiving I showed most of the classes this video, per another English teacher's suggestion. After the video I reiterated the history of Thanksgiving with a map of Massachusetts and by making sure the students understood the buzz words in the video like pilgrim, Mayflower, Squanto, etc.

                *Next, I asked if anyone knew what Americans eat for Thanksgiving. Pretty much everyone knew about the turkey, but sweet potatoes covered in marshmallows was news to them. Our family doesn't do some of the more traditional Thanksgiving dishes, so I told them about turkducken and oyster dressing- in southern Louisiana we don't have stuffing we have dressing- which also blew their minds. 

                *I showed some short clips of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, and with some of the younger classes we made hand turkeys and wrote what we were thankful for in each finger/feather. 

                *I brought along a children's book called a Turkey for Thanksgiving, which I asked the students to read. Middle schoolers hate it when you ask them to do something they consider to be babyish, so they didn't like the idea at first. However, their English level is not strong enough for them to get through more than a 6 sentence page in said children's book, so they stopped complaining pretty quickly.

          -The Presidential Elections proved to be an interesting topic. When I asked my students what had happened on November 6th in America, I got Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Obama! Only a handful of students even considered that anyone but Obama was running for election. They all asked me who I had voted for, to which I replied that not only is that something we Americans like to keep private, it's a matter that should never be discussed in school.

               *To help the kids understand how voting works in America, I showed them a map of the states from the Wall Street Journal with the country's electoral college breakdown and respective red or blue coloring. "Are there only 303 people in America?" I asked. They all looked a little closer at the map, and in each class someone would realize that there was something other than just a popular vote swaying the presidential race. 

               *After explaining that Republicans are red, elephants, and Romney versus the blue, donkey, Democratic Obama, I asked for two volunteers. One person would represent the Elephants and the other the Donkeys in our classroom campaign to decide what should be changed in the school. Non-candidate students each voiced at least one concern with the school- paint color, food quality, homework- and the candidates then picked two or three talking points from the list. With some nudging the students gave a mini-speech on how they would change the school and then waited in the hallway while the voters cast their ballots. For the older kids, I assigned everyone a state to make the electoral college idea more understandable. It was a hit! 

       - I tried to talk about advertising and word association with a couple of classes yesterday, hoping the kids would be able to build their own advertisement. The lesson I planned was a little too complicated, so I changed strategies. Today we played Scattergories, and I allowed the students to work in pairs. They really liked simple word associations, so I whipped out some pictures of football players getting tackled, players rejoicing, and a Snickers ad from Sports Illustrated and asked those same pairs to write down as many words as they knew in each picture with 1 minute on the clock. I explained the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words" too. Another hit! 

     All in all, things are going well. I finally have a set schedule in all three of my schools, and I'm getting better at crowd control. The kids still have private conversations in the middle of class and are generally rowdy, but the few groups that actually pay attention and work give me respite. I will post more about lesson plans and life in France soon!