Orientation day part 2

This is a little late but here you go nonetheless. On Monday, we had our final orientation day. I thought it would be helpful and it was for about an hour of the 7 hours that we were there. The first half of the day was devoted to describing the infrastructure of this program and the French school system on a whole. That was both informative and unnecessary, as we all had hoped that we would be guided through how to create a lesson plan and actually teach since most of us have never done this before.

After the hour and a half lunch break, the real information and help began. We spent an hour discussing ideas, games, how to run the class and any other suggestions from our leaders in the program. That was what I really wanted and though it was short, it did help ease my fears a bit. However, most of the "lesson" was spent reminding us that it is OUR responsibility to come up with games, figure out how to teach them and above all else, DO NOT SPEAK FRENCH IN CLASS.

We got some cool little schoolbags with schoolbooks for 2 levels of teaching (novice and intermediate level). They each had a teacher's book, student activity book, a CD and flashcards. I looked through the teacher's books and what I really wanted were games ideas since you have to do most of the teaching orally and unfortunately, games were not listed. It was mostly suggestions on what to teach: colors, numbers, clothes, body parts, simple conversations and introductions, etc. Writing is not at all stressed and not recommended for the lower levels of the primary school. Basically, I will be teaching anywhere from 1st to 4th grade. I will know on Thursday what my specific ages of each class in each school will be. FINALLY! The fact that I have not known what age I am teaching has been a huge stressor for me though most likely, I am teaching all age ranges since most of the other assistants are doing the same. So I don't really know why I was/am stressing about the age ranges in the first place. Having to teach so many levels is the scariest thing about teaching. If I could repeat the same lesson plan for all of my classes, I would be in heave. If I only had to create 2 lesson plans for each week, I would still be in the heaven. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I will be creating tons of lesson plans because most of the classes will all be at different levels of knowledge. Therein lies the real challenge and my huge fear of the unknown.

One of the funniest things that we ran into during the training was when we were being advised on how the kids should refer to us. One of the leaders of our program suggested we have the kids call us "teacher". All of us looked at each other and we were like, "uh, I don't think so!" That's so ridiculous. I have decided to go by Miss K. They strongly discouraged the use of our first names to keep us a little more distant from the kids and continue to assert some authority. I know Kimpfbeck will be impossible and Miss Jennifer sounds really weird to me. I feel like a nanny or something if someone calls me Miss Jennifer. That or a Southern belle. I can't decide. I can't really go by Miss Jen either. Jen, when pronounced in the French fashion, translates into the verb for "to bother or annoy." I don't want to be confused as a bother or annoyance so Miss K it is. Though it does sounds rather short, don't you think? It should be known as well that we will never be alone in the class. The teacher will always be with us physically in the classroom but not up front teaching in tandem. They will just be there to supervise the class and deal with most of the disciplinary items if necessary.

My favorite part of training was looking through the flashcards, which were clearly developed by British people in 1990. The pictures were a bit silly though I am sure very good for the kids. This now leads me to your British word lesson of the day.

Your British Word Lesson of the Day: budgie = pet bird. In a sentence: I have 2 dogs, a cat and a budgie at home. (The reason that this particular British word is so funny to me is because when looking through our flashcards, I came upon the pet section. As I was flipping through all of them word-side-up, I can upon "budgie". I flipped it over and saw a bird. A little too loud, I said to Dawn, "what the f*#k is a budgie?" She looked at me like I was absolutely nuts and couldn't believe that I had never heard of using this word for "pet bird". I must add, in my defense, that other Americans were just as bewildered as I was when they came upon this word, so there!)