Sunday 09.10.2011, 20h54: Week 1 summary

Sunday evening. Just finished my first REAL lesson plan for tomorrow and I'm excited. Everything is still pretty disorganised (I still don't have a completed timetable) but it's getting there.

Some snippets from this week:

Classes. Thus far I've only got 9 out of my 12 hours confirmed, so it'll take a while before I know where I'm at with all of my classes, but slowly, slowly things are beginning to take shape.
I met three of my classes on Thursday and Friday :) was great to finally get to ACTUALLY meet some of my pupils. It was pretty daunting introducing myself to the first class, especially since I'm talking in French the whole day and then suddenly I have to switch over into English and introduce myself to a whole bunch of teens who wish I was speaking to them in French -I even said something totally ungrammatical in one introduction :/
I'm supposed to speak English only in as much as possible, for some classes that'll be more possible than for others. I mostly have final year pupils but there is a massive range of different ability levels. I think it's going to be quite tricky to gauge the competence level of all the different classes at first, let alone individuals.

This week the waking hours have been mostly filled with admin and feet-finding. Hopefully next week with open up more social opportunities.
Some nice things happened this weekend though:

• Saturday night feast. We were supposed to have a staff outing on Saturday (a hike and then a meal) but in the end it was cancelled. One of the spanish teachers who is working with Ronald invited us out to have the meal anyway. We were 6 of us in the end: Roland, the spanish teacher (Luce) and her husband (Réné) , a retired colleague of the husband (Gilbert), another spanish assistant (Angelica), and myself. It's quite hard to describe the banterousness of the evening; Spanish and French mingled together with jokes and stories. We ate, drank, laughed and were merry (oh such nice things we ate and drank: champaign aperitifs, cèpes (penny bun/porcino mushrooms, boletus edulis), dauphinoise, confit de canard (duck), red wine, cheese, chocolate tart, nut ice-cream, coffee.
  And to top it all off Gilbert insisted on paying for our meal. We came home stuffed to the gunwales with good food and goodwill.


• I went to church this morning. It was COLD.


• Ronald, Angelica and I went for a Sunday afternoon wander in the autumn drizzle. (It's amazing how markedly the season has changed in the last 2 days, not a subtle coming on of autumn but a sudden change in temperature, colouring of leaves.) We stumbled across a folk dancing competition in the market hall, played in a play-park, climbed a wee hill and talked to some horses. Even under the damp clouds, the countryside here is beautiful.