promenading

First real week of work. I still have two more classes to teach tomorrow, and then it will be over. It has been quite an interesting week. Turns out I don't know what I'm doing. Ha. My first day was absolutely ridiculous. I had my first class at Rascol at 8am. I was afraid because the students I had met before from Rascol were really rude etc (as I mentioned before), but this was a different group. They were all about my age and were studying accounting instead of high school...or after. I don't know, the system here is super confusing. Anyway, they were fairly pleasant to teach, so that was a nice surprise. After, I went to Bellevue and waited an hour for my next class, and when I got to the classroom there was no one there. Turns out there was a miscommunication between the teacher, the students, and me. Big surprise. My later students who were supposed to be good at English were very frustrating, lazy, and disrespectful. There were only 6 of them, but they kept just talking amongst themselves in French, and finally I got so frustrated with this one guy that I said, "I can understand you, you know." I think he was thoroughly embarrassed. Well, good. Then my last group of students was a group of girls, and we didn't have a classroom to use (they have changed my rooms about 5 times since I started) so we just had class outside. The next day I got to school and right before my class was supposed to start, I was told that my classroom was occupied, so I couldn't use it. Well, ok. Then there was a fire drill, so that took up about 20 minutes of my class time. And then, since I no longer had a classroom, I had to share with the other English assistant, Stephanie. So we just put our students in the same classroom and did a team class. It was fine, just bizarre. Every day so far has been equally weird. Some of my students are great, and some are extremely difficult. The boys that I wrote about before were actually probably my best group of students so far. They asked questions and participated and seemed genuinely interested, which was just very surprising to me.  In any case, I am going to have to be pretty creative with my students in order to get them to participate.Yesterday afternoon Brent and I went to Toulouse, just because we could. I love doing things like that. It only takes an hour to get there on a train, so we just went to explore.

It was fun, and I bought some cheap hiking shoes so I can do a bit of that on my vacations to come. The only thing about the trip that wasn't great was the fact that our train back was cancelled because of some problem in between Toulouse and Albi. So we had to wait around for two hours, then take a bus which took a lot longer. So I didn't get home til about 1 am. Good thing I didn't have classes to teach this morning.

It is so lovely here! The sun is still out, which surprises me, because this is France. But it is the south of France :)   Autumn is going to be just wonderful. It's not fall in North Carolina, but I guess it will do.