non, on reste la,c'est trop genial!

primo: let's just have a quick reminder that this blog serves as a journal of sorts for me, so when i vent it's just that, nothing more. i am doing fine here! i mean, i might be slightly more crazy now than i was when i left the states in sept, but it's all good.

segundo: i just wrapped up the best teaching week ive had thus far. as ive mentioned, at least to the other assistants, my classes are rarely as bad as i make them out to be, and even when the lessons fall flat, it's all over in an hour, right? usually i have one or two good stories from the week, sometimes a raging headache, but nothing too terrible. but this week i feel like i might have finally hit my stride - and it's about time, non?

ive moved from relying on handouts to trying to play more games. jeopardy has been my cure-all savior, i love it, the kids love it, ive seen boys talk that usually dont so much as acknowledge my presence get into the lesson! none of the teachers have seen this type of game, but it goes without saying that as soon as 14-yr olds have something to be competitive about, they tend to get excited. it was simple - i just made 5 categories (food, clothing, countries, colors, sports/hobbies, and professions) with 5 questions each ($100 to $500), split the class into 2 teams, and away we went! it works on so many levels - i read the questions in english then gave them the card to read the question, they had to understand and make sure that they had the right vocab word, and then give the response in english. several questions had multiple responses, so there was the whole teamwork element of choosing the best answers, too. the best part was this afternoon, with some 3es at Valery - my worst school, where the 3es just dont care about annnnnnything - and we played for 30 min and they were supposed to switch with the other half of the class, but instead we got into an intense game of hangman, with the kids AcTuAlLy calling out the letters in english!!, and they were all like, nooo let's stay here, it's much better!! soo i kept them for an hour and i think they might have used more english in that hour than they have in the past month. i kid you not. (since it went to well, i might redo the game later on, using more grammar questions, too.)

so yah, ive played jeopardy with about half the classes i had this week, and the rest were fun, too. with the 5es i did clothing review - either describing pictures from magazines or doing a little color-cut-and-paste action, followed by a presentation to the class of "he is wearing a blue and green sweater," etc...and that was fun times because i gave them free reign to color however they wanted, they cold put skirts on the guys, add hats and outrageous hair-dos, whatever, just as long as they could describe it to me. we had a few aliens, some pom pom girls, a bum, you know, good times.

my last class today was some 6es - little ones, like 11 years old - and i had to review prepositions of place and house vocab. so i had my little house pic and i was going to have them draw in the members of the family and describe where they were located. pretty fun, drawing, yaay, but to warm them up (bc i realized that i dont really do enough pre-activity prep) i demonstrated the prepositions. ON the chair. and i stood on it. and they FREAKED out. and then i had them mime the prepositions. ON the chair. UNDER the table. IN the poubelle. BESIDE the assistant. it was a riot! it was hot and sunny, the door was wide open (luckily no one saw us...), we were laughing and then the settled down and wrote some realllllly good sentences!!! i was so impressed! and they didnt want to switch groups and go with the teacher (but they did, finally), and it was wonderful and funnn. and i left Valery smiling, which was a first and awesome!!

So i have a teacher that wants to steal my jeopardy game when im through with it! and my 4e at Zay said that i speak french very nicely : ) and oh! yes! with my super smart, on-point 3e at Zay i did an article on Obama/Clinton that linked back to the civil rights/women's rights movements. it was long. there were hard words. they did not think they would get through it. but we read slowly, and i translated a lot, and they had questions to answer, and it went really well! they had all kinds of interesting questions about US politics and the parties and how elections work and whatnot. we had some great discussions, half-english, half-french (it was a real workout for my french, all those fun past-tenses and the like, but i felt pretty comfortable with it, only had one correction!!) i love those kids. they are so bright. and wonderful. anyway, so my little milestone for the week/last 10 days was that many of my kids realized that they know more/can do more with english than they thought. and thats pretty freaking cool.