The French and "Bonne Année"

I am a little backlogged on blogging but I had to write about this because it made me giggle. Today was back to school day and I had to teach 3 classes. I actually really like my Monday classes for 2 reasons. One: I don't have to get up early since I don't start until 2pm. Two: Most of my kids are well-behaved and bright. You have no idea how tired I get just from trying to keep some kids in my other classes on other days in line. I waste/spend so much time in class trying to calm kids down that I lose energy for actually teaching.

This week's lesson is about telling time in English. They get to learn about AM, PM and the fact that we don't run on military time as they do in France. 2PM is 14:00 in France. Try getting used to that as an American! We learned how to say "morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night and midnight". It reminded me of the Truman show when I said "afternoon, evening and night" about 7 times in a row. It reminded me of how Truman says: "In case I don't see you: "Good afternoon, Good evening and Good night!" My favorite part of the lesson was having the kids figure out how to say "night" by only reading it and not hearing me say it beforehand. I get a little sadistic satisfaction from watching them struggle with silent letters in English. We also learned how to say "two thousand nine".

Anyway, what I wanted most to comment on was the fact that the French and even my kids, love saying "Bonne Anneé" which means "Happy New Year!" I had kids run up to me on the playground before class and during recess to say "Bonne Année" to me. How odd is that? I explained to the kids that though we do say "Happy New Year", it's more of a phrase we only really say on the night of New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. It's not like a phrase we go out of our way to say to each other. After explaining that to the first class of the day and seeing their really disappointed faces, I decided to bite my tongue and just teach them the English phrase and be done with it. They loved learning the phrase and then repeating it to each other.

Unfortunately, I don't have any British word lessons of the day since I haven't seen Dawn in 2 weeks but I promise new lessons to follow in the future. :)