Rentrée "Back to School"

A mixture of the work of school and summer past times.

I know it is the third week of September and I am only now posting on my blog on going "back to school." As many of you know, I have been working part time for an English language institute which caters to business people. This job is going well, but is really not enough for me to sink my teeth into. Since the end of August, I have also been working for a bilingual school two and a half days a week. It has been a big adjustment and I am still adjusting. I have a class of eleven students both Anglophone and Francophone and in addition to the language challenges I also have three different grade levels within that one class. By the end of this year I'm going to be the queen of diversified instruction. Most of the challenges I am encountering are based on my prior teaching. I had no idea how different elementary and high school teaching really are. I have students asking me what colour pen they should use to do their corrections and where they should put the label on their scribbler. I feel like I am teaching them how to develop routine, more than I am teaching them how to read or write. Eventually I will get into the groove of it all, but for the moment I am planning way too much and then getting frustrated because we are not moving fast enough. Really I just need to chill and realize that it is okay to let them colour once and a while. It is funny but I thought I would be daunted more by teaching all of the subjects, instead of being stalled on classroom organization and helping them acquire basic skills.

Working for a small private school is another interesting experience. There are only seven other teachers and three assistants plus one part time secretary. The team is great but with most of them working with the really little ones, I feel sometimes like I can't relate to giving time outs on the chair or get equally excited about colourful name tags. This whole thing is a bit of a re-education for me. Being a very small school there are few resources and even fewer in English. I am still waiting for my textbooks and on the Friday before school started all of the teachers were unloading school supplies so that the students would have scribblers for the first day! Another example the lack of resources is the fact that I bought an English dictionary this past weekend because I didn't have one in my classroom. To top all of this frustration, the internet hasn't been working so I can't even tell students to look things up on the classroom computer.

The school itself has only five classrooms and is on the second floor of a 100 year old building. There is no proper gymnasium and we take the children to the park or to the public gym for sports. By the way because the park is on a hill you have to take an elevator to get to it! Another crazy difference is that I can take the children off school grounds whenever I want, without permission forms. Anything that is within walking distance from the port to churches or the library is fair game.  Some of the perks are that for physical education we are going skating this fall and in the winter we will be skiing for a week! Interestingly snacks and lunches are provided for the students by the school.

Things will come together eventually, but for the moment the chaos continues with lesson planning and trying to understand all of the information that is fed to me in French. I know that the beginning of the year is always crazy and I am simply trying to get as much as I can done while I am at school. The philosophy is I am only employed part time and I need to leave the rest of my week for my other work, tutoring, and a bit of travelling.  Funny I remember making this same promise to myself in years gone by ...