Today ended a long week full of travel, orientations, TAPIF,
and meeting awesome assistants.
After hitting the snooze button a few times after hearing my
5:30 alarm, Amy and I hopped on the bus to Avignon at 6:15 this morning. We had
gotten about 5 hours of sleep and after all the traveling we had been doing, we
were dreading another day full of travel and orientations. We got in at 7:45
and since both of our orientations started at 9:00, we decided to sit and have
a relaxing petit-déjeuner, complete with un
chocolat chaud and un pain au
chocolat.
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As I had never actually been in the city of Avignon, I
really enjoyed my limited amount of time in the city today. It is a nice clean
city, filled with white and off white typical provençal buildings with periwinkle blue shutters. It still has
that small town feel with the size of a nice city, plenty of shopping and cafés
to explore. I am thinking many trips to Avignon are in the future, as it is the
closest bus ride away!
The meeting that required me to be in Avignon today was the formation pédagogique, or the teacher
training. I got to spend this session with the other English speaking secondary
assistants in my department (the collection of cities surrounding Avignon). We
spent the morning defining some words and phrases that we might encounter
during our time in the secondary schools. As I had seen many of these before
from living in Lycée Charles de Gaulle, it was great to get more clarification
on this stuff.* After lunch, they presented us with many examples of different
activities we can use with our students during our lessons.
Coming from the perspective of an assistant who already has
a degree in education and a teaching certification, I didn’t learn honestly
much new in terms of the types of things I can do to facilitate learning. A lot
of the activities shown were activities I have done in my French classroom,
just now in English. I don’t want to say today was a waste of time – I can
always improve on my teaching, and this assistantship will give me even more
experience in the classroom. For that, I am grateful. I am just saying that
today I got a little bit bored. Especially with being so exhausted from the
past few days of travel.
After the training, Amy and I caught the bus back to Apt and
ran into a problem we had yet to experience: Friday rush hour traffic coming
out of Avignon. Typically, the bus we take gets us to and from Avignon in an
hour and a half. Coming back today, it took 2 hours. For a half hour of it we
were in standstill traffic. Oh the embouteillage!
Which reminds me of something I have been noticing quite a bit this week: the
serious craftsmanship that is driving a bus in the South of France. I remarked
to Amy on our windy bus ride down the narrow alleys of Marseille the other day,
I seriously don’t know how these people do it! They maneuver these machines
like they are compact sports cars, all with complete ease and (though sometimes
a bit scary) intense speed. And to top it all off, the drivers are always so
kind, never forgetting to tell you bonne
journée as you leave the bus. So gentille!
With the craziness from this week dwindling down, I can now
start to enjoy a relaxing weekend in Apt, filled with the market, a potential
Sunday hike and pique-nique and
watching Mean Girls in French. I mean, how else would you spend the weekend
after October 3rd?**
*And herein lies the origin of the title of this blog. In
starting to talk about strikes, and the inevitable possibility of teachers
going on strike during our assistantship , one of the teachers leading the
training said “La grêve (strikes)?
it’s a French tradition!” Nothing could be more close to the truth.
**If you don’t get this reference, you’re dead to me.***
***I’m only joking. But you seriously can’t sit with us.
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