Teaching Placement

I'm taking a little break from researching the Dreyfus Affair to write a little about my teaching placement. So to explain a little I a teaching assistant in english classes at a local "college" (a middle school here) which is grades 6-9 (or in their system grades 6-3... you remember in french class when you thought that every thing in french was backwards, it's true in the school system too)
I work with 4 different english teachers and am in classes in about all the grades. It is a program that is through the local catholic school board and the first thing that struck me about it was how little I had to do to be part of it, true this program has been happening with Waterloo and Nantes for several years but there was no need for a resume, a reference, or a police check to volenteer in this school. My main job is really just to talk with the students in english, usally the teacher gives me a subject (yesterday I talked about Thanksgiving, what we eat, what we do, the difference between Canada and the States) or the kids will ask me questions about what they are learning (for example when they were learning about healthy lifestyles "How often do you play football?"). The students are usally great, they are intrested in learning english and learning about Canada too.
I'm learning alot about the french school system and how things work here. For one thing the students have to stand up when a teacher enters a room and can't sit untill the teacher says they can. Although this is a little odd, I did notice that it focuses the kids at the begining of class. Also the teachers often ask the kids for feed back on how they think they did on something or their opinion on an other student's work. Say after a presentation the teacher will ask the class what they thought and usally the kids are quite honest about it, if it was good they say so, and if it was bad they will say why they thought so or maybe give a suggestion to make it better.

My next challenge is that I'm getting 15 grade 8's to do extra english lessons with separate from their normal classes (see they really do want to learn english), whatever I want to teach them. So I have to think about that a bit...
I will keep you posted on how that goes

well I better go have lunch before the caf closes...
Janna

I'm back

Hi sorry if you have been waiting for me to post, i've been waiting to get some of the pictures from my trip to show you but i havent yet. you see something terrible happened to my camera... i forgot it on the train from Austria to Germany. Overall the trip was amazing we did the wirl-wind tour of London, then hopped to Austria (as one of my post cards says home of Mozart and THE SOUND OF MUSIC) and then to Munich where it snowed and we did this really great walking tour that showed us alot of the city. So it was a very busy week but also a lot of fun. I will try to get some pictures up about it.
Since then I've been trying to get lots of work done, minor problem about that is that the majority of France is on strike (for example today on strike there is, the train workers, the post people, natural gas, electrity workers, teachers (grade, middle, and high schools) the telephone people, the weather people and many other government workers. The university students have been on strike for the last two weeks and have blocked off the campus and the now library, the canadians (including myself) still have class because our main classroom is downtown, but it seems I am getting the full french experience.
talk to you again soon!