hard at work

Still unable to upload pictures. Sorry! Soon there will just be an abundance of them for ya. So today was my first day of work. Well, "work." It lasted about 45 minutes. I've been trying to email anybody and everybody to figure out what my schedule is, and received nothing until yesterday, when I got an email from one teacher telling me to be at Bellevue at 12:30 today to meet with her. So I did that, and found out some useful and interesting information. She is a very tiny, somewhat scatterbrained lady who didn't seem to really know what was going on either because apparently they change classrooms every day. EVERY SINGLE DAY. Goodness gracious, why would anyone think that is a good idea??? Anyway, the more important things I learned: First thing: everyone except me has my schedule. The directrice "forgot" to send it to me. Great. Still don't have it! Whatever. Second thing: the teacher was expecting someone from England, so I think she was kinda disappointed that she got stuck with an American. Well, tant pis, madame! Can't help it.

The other things I learned were significantly more positive. I know that at least with her students, I will be leading discussion with small groups of 5 or 6 students at a time in a separate classroom. Half of the students are in terminal, that is they are in their last year of high school, and they are pretty good at English, so discussion I think will be pretty interesting with them. The other half are post-bac, have already graduated, and are taking intensive courses for two years. They are not as good at English as they are supposed to be, but they are super motivated apparently. This is great news to me because it means I have mostly older students, at least at Bellevue.

So then I met one of the groups of students (there are about 30 of them) and they asked me questions about where I'm from, etc. They're kinda shy, and more than half of them showed up late, but they're in high school, so that's to be expected.

So I have no idea what the rest of my week will look like, aside from the fact that I'm going to Toulouse on Wednesday for an orientation day. I can't let the French way of organizing things get to me already. Gotta just take it in stride.

Last night I made dinner for the family, and one of the other assistants, Brent, came over and we all ate together and had good discussion of the differences between our two languages. It's a good thing the French are all language nerds, because I love talking about it. We keep a giant French dictionary and thesaurus on our kitchen counter at all times. And Micka references it at least twice a day. It's great.

We have Australians staying in the house right now, so I've been somewhat of a translator the past couple of days. For the first two days they were here, they thought I was Micka and Corrinne's daughter and just happened to speak excellent English. Funny.

Anyway. I'm going to start planning my first vacation because believe it or not, it's coming up. Haha. So ridiculous.

a plus !