Les Autres Ecoles

Today I went to the other schools I'm teaching at to meet the classes and whatnot, and now I have a much better picture of what I'll be doing throughout the year.  I'm getting a lot better at keeping a conversation two-sided, rather than just answering to all their questions with a 'oui' or 'non'.  Anyway, here's the petit story:

Typically my work days (Monday and Tuesday) will look like this : wake up at 7 or so in order to get to my first school by 8:30.  I teach there until 11:30, when I go home for lunch.  Then I go to my second school to teach from 1:30 to 4:30.  That's it! In my first school there's only three classes, so I just go to each one for an hour.  The second school there's four classes, so I go to each one for 45 minutes.  Then in the last one there's seven classes, it's huge!  I think we're gonna work something out where I go to three classes one week and then the other four classes the next week. Not sure yet.

Anyway today I went to the first school and the third school just to observe classes and whatnot, and to ask the teachers what they had in mind for me in the upcoming weeks, also when I should go to which class. The first school, Bernaudin, is small but really fun.  There's pre-school age kids there, but also 3rd-5th graders.  The directrice there, Fabienne, is really into teaching her 3rd graders English, and they know quite a bit already! They sing a handful of songs like the ABC's, rain rain go away, etc.  I hope to add to their repertoire. Nadège, the teacher of the 5th graders also has a pretty good thing going with her class, although I haven't really been blown away by anyone's English yet (obviously, the kids are still in elementary school...).

So then I went to my last school, Van Gogh (pronounced Van Gog).  That place is enormous compared to the other schools...there's two floors and a huge field for playing in at recess. I stayed in the 5th grade class there the whole three hours because...well...I'm a sucker for the more intelligent kids, and they like me more I think.  We played soccer together at recess, I scored a goal and they flipped.  I feel like an all-star in all the schools!  The kids love me...I think it's just because I'm an American and I speak both English and French haha.

There's a whole lot going on as far as trying to get my schedule straight goes.  Here's a picture to help you better idea of what I'm talking about:

Really, that's basically all that will be happening for the next seven months.  I'll post an update when something interesting happens, but it might not be for a week or so when I go to St. Etienne or when I go to Grenoble for my training/welcoming thing.  I'll probably end up posting something tomorrow haha.

The good news is that I bought a power block for my xbox (because the US one wouldn't work, obvi, and using a power converter wouldn't work either because the voltage doesn't match up i.e. there's too many coming in from the wall for my US block to handle and it would short out. also, buying a transformer so that I could do that would be unreasonable and expensive. So.) for like 20€, which is HUGE savings (thanks ebay.fr) and it came in today and I plugged it in and it works! I can officially look forward to playing Skyrim. I realize I'm in France but...I've been waiting for this game for as long as I've been studying French :P