I'm still alive.

It's felt touch and go at times. No, I jest.

I'm reconnected to the Internet, on a permanent (for seven months) connection in my own apartment. I can use the Internet whenever I want, and not with a funky French keyboard. Not that I've really minded the lack of World Wide Web too much - a lot less than I anticipated in fact - as I've been going to sleep at a sensible time and getting up feeling relatively human, which I think anyone would agree is a bonus.

The living room I will inhabit for a while.

Friday was a training session, full of useful information and terrifying tales of true worst-case scenarios, involving a nine-year-old child who was sent out of the classroom on his own and proceeded to put a scarf on whilst it was still attached to the peg on the wall, and it didn't end well. Another student attempted to escape punishment through a window. This was a lesson in how to keep control of your class. I think I will be making very sure that I do.

The weekend, unable as I was to stay in Rouen and join a night out due to a lack of accommodation, was spent in a supermarket with Laura, spending a lot of money on stocking up, my flat doing some preparation for my first lessons, and at Fanny's house borrowing the Internet, being fed and doing some more work. I'm glad I did it, it paid off.

Still representing Britain!

The first class I took was on my own with half of a sixième (Year 7) class. It wasn't terribly easy as the level of English wasn't very high, but I persevered, and taught them and practised some vocabulary through pictures of my family, friends, home, university, pets, and so on. Some were enthusiastic, some less so, but I guess that's always the way it goes. The next time I stayed in with the teacher and the whole class and we played a team game of "who knows the most about Imogen?" and listened to some music. I have the same taste as that teacher it turns out (Queen, The Beatles, David Bowie...) and that taste had manifested itself in the children as the ability to sing along to The Beatles' song "Hello, Goodbye". Not entirely in tune, but very sweet all the same. My final class of the day was much more left to myself than I expected. It became apparent that with the littlest ones I may have to speak some French in the classroom despite being told to speak only English. I don't think I'd get very far with just English, and French will help them to understand, I hope.

At my second school, my first lesson on Tuesday did not go at all to plan. My classroom there has no overhead projector and I had a PowerPoint presentation. There was a laptop and a small enough group to perhaps just use that, but it took fifteen minutes to start up, and even then it wasn't really compatible with my presentation. After waiting two minutes for the laptop, I decided enough was enough and I would have to continue without it or risk losing the class. Thankfully I had thrown into my bag my maps and postcards rather at the last minute before leaving the flat so I had something to go on. Only, they weren't very forthcoming with the English. These were older ones (troisième, Year 10), and I'd seen in class what they ought to be capable of but I really met that typical teenager silence that lesson, and it was hard work. I blamed myself afterwards but then realised I actually gave it all I'd got, and I can't do any better than that.

The others, however, were absolutely fine, and some lunchtime planning in my head adapted my sixieme class into a lesson with poster creations, map interaction and a simple whiteboard-based wordsearch. I thought older students would be easier to work with as they would have more English but so far I've been proved wrong - the enthusiasm I've encountered with the 11-year-olds has been the best. The vast majority want to try and impress me, want to write on the board, want to understand and explain to their classmates what I said to them in English. I do use some French, when I feel it's necessary, but they're not using that as a reason to misbehave and avoid English, so far. In fact, it feels like now they know I speak French, they think I understand them (I do unless it's in slang) and so they can't mess me around. Although I don't think the little ones want to mess me around regardless of the language in which I speak with them. I even think one of them is a little bit of a groupie of mine already.

So far, I'm speaking a lot of English for a person in France, but I feel a bit more confident even so. You are thrown in at the deep end by living here, even if surrounded by three fluent English speakers a lot of the time. Just this morning I was rudely pulled out of my late lie-in (I have Wednesdays off) by my flat's alarm. I didn't know what to do with it, so I shoved a hoody on over my pyjamas and ran upstairs to another flat to ask for help. It was easily solved, thankfully, but my point is I had no other way of dealing with the problem other than to just do something! That's the essence of the Year Abroad for me so far - by doing something, you achieve something, even if it is seemingly minimal.

There are other things that I have learnt too. Suzie, in her blog post (click her name for the link), made the point that the students in her town had not really been able to get out of it, and were not likely to in the future, and she felt almost as though she were the connection between them and the rest of the world. I understand completely what she means, and I find it hard to put into words without it sounding unkind, which I do not mean at all. Just showing them pictures of Wolverhampton (the city out of which we take the mickey, yes), explaining its size, and showing them the pictures of my travels amazed approximately ninety percent of the children. There were intakes of breath at an aerial shot I found of Wolverhampton. I think possibly it is this that helps to make the young ones so excited by my presence that even when I didn't feel a lesson had been so great, they didn't want to leave me and go back to their teacher, despite promises I would see them again.  It is a small town of 17,000, I think probably most kids don't leave the country very often, and I therefore appear as exotic, perhaps. I've had to drag the words "United Kingdom" out of most of my younger groups so far, or just give it to them, as "England" is the only name for my country that registers with them. I know teachers have taught it to them, I'm not criticising my colleagues in the slightest, but the kids haven't remembered it I suppose because it isn't relevant to them, and the direct French translation for what they use in common speech is, actually, just "England"... But I'm speculating. But I hope if it amazes them that it might inspire even just one of them to aspire to see some of the world when they're a bit older.

And as these thoughts have been festering away in my head, I've joined an aerobics or step class in French (it's easy enough to follow most of the time after all I can just copy), had numerous items of post to make me feel special, discovered a girl who watches Doctor Who here in France (two in fact), bought and received my train tickets home for Christmas, booked my flights to Zurich and Malaga for the two-week Toussaints school holidays, and had a third article published in the newspaper this year back in Exeter. When I feel down, which has been a bit more common lately as I miss being able to see friends' faces as frequently as at home, I ought to reflect on this. Even if my language learning has not yet accelerated to fluency (and I've bought a grammar book to make myself practise and started to listen to the radio), I have still achieved a lot in a short space of time. Three weeks, one day and counting.

Oh and the most common questions asked about me?
1) "Does she speak French?"
2) "Do you have a boyfriend?"

I, like every other female assistant abroad, have not escaped the latter.

Anyway, I'll cease this reflective rambling for now. I have to walk three kilometres to school tomorrow morning, I should probably go to sleep. But maybe I'll watch TV first. You know, again.