I have never in my life given up something for Lent. This is mostly because I'm not even remotely religious, plus I'm pretty sure it's one of those Jewish holidays I'm not allowed to celebrate Something about Jesus being lost in a desert, tempted by a potato pancake for 40 days and 40 nights and then starring in a terrible movie about his experience with Josh Hartnett. I may be wrong about that, but I don't think so.
However, this year I was talking with my friend Paul, and he said for Lent he was giving up swearing, for the fourth year in a row. Needless to say, he is not doing a terribly good job at it. He swears constantly (I may goad him a tiny bit) and punishes himself by hitting himself REALLY hard in the leg. I suggested he give me money every time he swore, but he didn't think it was a good idea. I personally thought it was a great idea. I'm also pretty low on money.
So this year, I decided to give up something for lent. I ended up starting with coke, and making it soda in general. For those of you that know my physical dependence on the stuff, you realize what an epic decision this is, to not have soda for 40 days (more actually, given that apparently Sundays don't count? Bullshit, I say). This may not be terribly exciting to any of you, but I couldn't tell you the last time I went a week without a soda of some sort, it's easily been years, so this is quite the undertaking for me. I'm on day 13 or something ridiculous right now, and I hate every second of my life. As if the kids I teach weren't horrible to begin with, now I have to deal with them while going through withdrawal (actually happening, by the way). Man life is fun.
Anyway, this is uninteresting to anyone but me, but I have a blog. That's what people do on their blogs. I'm blogging! So, if you people care what I'm doing with myself in my spare time, now you know. Torture. Thanks Jesus! Way to ruin things YET AGAIN
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Guess who sucks at posting? This guy!
Alright, so I've already decided that this probably isn't going to be a regular thing, and you shouldn't treat it as such. Think of it like an update email, something that comes irregularly and with frequent long intervals in between. That will help.
Now, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to try something new and start doing more daily updates with shorter posts that tell you what my day to day life is like*. We'll see how it works, I'll talk about what I've done this week, and you can see how little I actually work, and hate me for bitching as much as I do about my job.
*After writing this, I then changed my mind for a third time, and decided to do weekly recaps. So lets try that. Of course, it's already Tuesday of the following week. I'm not good at blogging
Monday: To understand Monday, you have to understand my schedule. So I work at two schools, College le Parc, and College Christine de Pisan. At le Parc, I have a set schedule, 6 hours every week, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, no variation. At de Pisan, they are on a two-week schedule, so I am also on a two-week schedule. Because of this, I have some classes that alternate, so I have them every two weeks. Monday is one of those classes. Before this last vacation, I had one class on Monday, from 11-12 every other Monday. Given that it takes an hour to and hour and a half to get there, and the same to get back, it seems sort of foolish but whatever. I was originally supposed to have another class that day, but the teacher decided it would be more interesting for me to visit all her classes instead of just one. Anyway, I usually have this class at 11, but the teacher told me not to come, which is great, and a not terribly uncommon but still delightful occurrence. Unfortunately, my schedule has been altered for the last six weeks. I used to have two Friday classes that again, met every two weeks, but they got cut so I could pick up one extra Monday class every week. Confused? Yeah, that's the French system for you.
So Monday was my first time with this new French class of what I took to be not the most intelligent kids*. We worked on introducing yourself/asking questions, so we started off by reviewing question words, and then they had to figure out how to ask me things like "What is your name" "Where are you from" "How old are you" things like that. This managed to take up the entire class, and it was weird because the kids were terrible, which I am used to, but a little less used to seeing them be terrible with another teacher. They didn't bother waiting until they had covered the question as a class, they just shouted at me as I was sitting off to the side. This actually happens to me a lot at this school. The kids just yell questions at me. Also, the teacher wasn't the strongest English speaker. Every so often, the English teachers will ask me about something, or will make I mistake that I try to subtly correct, but this poor man kept asking me, because he wasn't trained as an English teacher in the slightest. Of course, neither am I, but at least I speak the language. This was one of those pointless classes where I stood off to the side watching them be bad for the entire time. I think the highlight of the class was that, as most of the students tend to do, this class assumed that I didn't understand them when they spoke, because I refused to respond to them unless they spoke in English. They don't realize I do this to try and force them to come up with the answer in English. So this one kid asked a question to the teacher I missed, and the teacher said (in French) that's why you need to learn English, and the kid said he (meaning me) should learn French. I wanted to tell the little bastard that I speak French better than he ever will speak English, not to mention I could probably stumble along better in Spanish and Russian than he could in English. But somehow arguing with a 12 year old about who's smarter is surprisingly beneath me.
*I have since learned that the reason I was switched off of the Friday class was because the kids were being bad, and so to punish them the teacher took away the pleasure of having me sit around and looking like an idiot every Friday. Can you even imagine? Having me as a teacher is seen as a privilege? What a world we live in. Of course, the hilarity is that he gave me this class because they were so terrible that he couldn't take care of the entire class by himself, so he wanted to split them up with me taking half of them. This will be a short-lived experiment, as you will see next week.
Tuesday was a magnificent display of the level of organization that I've grown to expect and admire from both the French in general, and this program in particular. My first class, from 9:05-10, was canceled. This at least I knew beforehand, the teacher was in London on a field trip with some of the students. My second class was another class that I have every other week, and is one of my least favorite classes. I take half the class for an entire period, and then wait two weeks, and then take the other class. This means I see one group of students roughly once a month, which is a completely pointless endeavor from my part, plus these students are very very stupid, so there's really no point in it, but I can't just not show up (I mean I can, and I have a couple of times, but it's sort of poor form). I hadn't seen this particular group since January I think, because I had missed a couple of Tuesdays, and the half that I was having today was the one I really don't like, and had led to my worst class so far. Fortunately the teacher said to me "Oh, are you with me this week? Can you do next week? They've been bad and I want to punish them" (Noticing a pattern?) I was like of course, I'd love to teach your class because teaching is my lifeblood and I take such joy from molding their young minds, but if you insist, I'll skip a turn. So, at this point it was about 10:15, and I didn't have my next class (English Club) until 12:45, so I hung out for about two and a half hours. Then, it turned out that the school was having meetings in the afternoon, so the afternoon classes after English Club were canceled. But the kids left anyway, so at about 1:05 I headed home, having been there for three and a half hours, and not working for a minute. Just to keep track, I was supposed to have taught 5 classes at this point, and had taught one, where I stood to the side and watched.
Wednesday is the one day I have that is always the same. I teach three classes at College le Parc (or the good school), from 9:25-12:30. My first class, which is hit or miss because some of the kids are very interesting, and some are very loud, and that means that some percentage of the time they are really into what I have to say, and another, slightly larger percentage of the time, they spend the whole time babbling. Today was more of an interested one, which was good, and amazingly, I managed not to fall on my face. I find that when I prepare very well, I have good classes, and that I suck at thinking on my feet, which has done wonders for my work ethic. Unfortunately, I started to teach them stuff they already knew, so I had to switch courses mid class and try to make it work, and amazingly it did. I taught them about preterite versus gerund, and when to use it, which is probably the most difficult thing to learn when trying to learn English. Basically, when do you say I speak vs. I am speaking? We just know what sounds right, but the kids don't know that I want knowing sounds very wrong and that I want to know is right. So I taught them a bit about that and I think it was helpful. My second class, with my favorite teacher, was canceled because she also was on a field trip (Spain for her) and my third class I taught superlatives (the greatest, the most intelligent, etc.) to a class that is uninspiring given the lack of participation, but at least rarely have behavior problems.
As a quick aside, it's amazing how few grammar rules I have learned, and how much I know just by what sounds right. For example, I never realized how superlatives are formed. If it's a one-syllable word, you add -est (for example: greatest), and if it's two or more, you had the most (the most convenient), with the exception being adjectives that end in -y (the happiest, not the most happy). I never even think about these things, I just know not to say the most great or the convenientest.
After my classes, I met this woman named Muriel at a library. Muriel, the poor girl, thinks that I can speak French well enough to teach her English. I think I do a pretty good job with the grammar, but a big part of what she wants to do is take magazine articles in English and translate them into French. Straight translation is epically difficult, especially for me, and trying to do a word for word translation is an exercise in futility, but it's what she wants to do, and I don't want to say no because I love the money she gives me, so we soldier on.
Thursday is usually my hell day. I start at 8:25 and end at 6, and on a full day teach 7 classes. Of course, I am not sure if I have ever had a day where I taught every single class (maybe one or two). One is almost always canceled, and today was no exception. My first class was canceled, again with my favorite teacher because she was in Spain. My second class was with a teacher who, while very nice, is incredibly child-like, and difficult to have a conversation. She apparently also has a major problem with discipline, but I'll have more to say about that another time. She told me that because many of her students were in Spain, maybe we could go to the computer room and the kids could work on the computer. I thought great, the less work I have to do the better. So we get to the computer room and she turns to me and says so, what do you have for them to do? I was like you whorish slut-face, YOU suggested we come to the computer room and now it's MY responsibility to come up with an activity? Fortunately I had this stupid Valentine's Day web search that I had used the week before vacation when I just didn't care anymore, and they could do that, but it was a little irritating.
My second class was actually the one where I was going to use the Valentine's Day thing again, but unfortunately, the teacher that I taught with had booked the room out from under me, and I ended up going into the class with absolutely nothing prepared. As I've said earlier, I don't necessarily think on my toes very well. I kind of babbled about vacation, told them about visiting Amsterdam, got into an impromptu discussion on World War II and the Holocaust (which they seemed ignorant of. Middle schoolers mind you! Stupid French), and then decided to make them write about their vacations. I made a spur of the moment decision to give them a grade on it, and you should have seen them jump. Apparently, they don't have things like graded homework here, so every time something is graded, they think it's a test and flip the fuck out. Which was fine for me, they took it more seriously, it somehow ate up 30 minutes of time, and I got out of the class unscathed.
So, at this point it's 11:30. Usually, I have classes at the other school from 1:30-3:30, and then after school lessons from 4-6. But both my other school classes were canceled, one teacher was in London and the other didn't need me. So I got to sit around for four and a half hours waiting for my afternoon lessons. Super exciting, let me tell you. I thought about canceled my after school lessons, but I've done that a few times and they don't like it, plus unlike canceling my other classes, this one costs me money.
The lessons I teach from 4-6 are extra, on top of the 12 hours I'm supposed to teach a week, and I get extra money for it, an absurd 25 euro an hour. The problem is, there's no structure, and no way to prepare a lesson beforehand, because I never know who will show up, so I basically have to make it up as I got (have I mentioned I suck at that?). Today, I had 4 kids in the first hour, all of different levels, all learning different things. So I taught them a cavalcade of random crap, I think we covered can and cannot, daily routines, playing sports, and body parts. My second afternoon lesson has basically been this one kid who is just learning English, so I take my French book and just do it in reverse, so Thursday we worked on beginning verbs, and important connecting words like and, but, with, etc.
So that was last week. I'm entertained that my attempt to make a shorter post has still led to 2500 words, and I left a ton of stuff out, and didn't talk about my weekend (3 hours of soccer and an NYU house party where some kid peed off a balcony and three different girls hit on me, one after hearing that I had a girlfriend). I'm working on one about the apartment I live in, and then one about this week, which has been horrible so far.
Thanks to the two of you who read this. It makes the hours I spend typing all worth it.
Now, to completely contradict myself, I'm going to try something new and start doing more daily updates with shorter posts that tell you what my day to day life is like*. We'll see how it works, I'll talk about what I've done this week, and you can see how little I actually work, and hate me for bitching as much as I do about my job.
*After writing this, I then changed my mind for a third time, and decided to do weekly recaps. So lets try that. Of course, it's already Tuesday of the following week. I'm not good at blogging
Monday: To understand Monday, you have to understand my schedule. So I work at two schools, College le Parc, and College Christine de Pisan. At le Parc, I have a set schedule, 6 hours every week, 3 on Wednesday, 3 on Thursday, no variation. At de Pisan, they are on a two-week schedule, so I am also on a two-week schedule. Because of this, I have some classes that alternate, so I have them every two weeks. Monday is one of those classes. Before this last vacation, I had one class on Monday, from 11-12 every other Monday. Given that it takes an hour to and hour and a half to get there, and the same to get back, it seems sort of foolish but whatever. I was originally supposed to have another class that day, but the teacher decided it would be more interesting for me to visit all her classes instead of just one. Anyway, I usually have this class at 11, but the teacher told me not to come, which is great, and a not terribly uncommon but still delightful occurrence. Unfortunately, my schedule has been altered for the last six weeks. I used to have two Friday classes that again, met every two weeks, but they got cut so I could pick up one extra Monday class every week. Confused? Yeah, that's the French system for you.
So Monday was my first time with this new French class of what I took to be not the most intelligent kids*. We worked on introducing yourself/asking questions, so we started off by reviewing question words, and then they had to figure out how to ask me things like "What is your name" "Where are you from" "How old are you" things like that. This managed to take up the entire class, and it was weird because the kids were terrible, which I am used to, but a little less used to seeing them be terrible with another teacher. They didn't bother waiting until they had covered the question as a class, they just shouted at me as I was sitting off to the side. This actually happens to me a lot at this school. The kids just yell questions at me. Also, the teacher wasn't the strongest English speaker. Every so often, the English teachers will ask me about something, or will make I mistake that I try to subtly correct, but this poor man kept asking me, because he wasn't trained as an English teacher in the slightest. Of course, neither am I, but at least I speak the language. This was one of those pointless classes where I stood off to the side watching them be bad for the entire time. I think the highlight of the class was that, as most of the students tend to do, this class assumed that I didn't understand them when they spoke, because I refused to respond to them unless they spoke in English. They don't realize I do this to try and force them to come up with the answer in English. So this one kid asked a question to the teacher I missed, and the teacher said (in French) that's why you need to learn English, and the kid said he (meaning me) should learn French. I wanted to tell the little bastard that I speak French better than he ever will speak English, not to mention I could probably stumble along better in Spanish and Russian than he could in English. But somehow arguing with a 12 year old about who's smarter is surprisingly beneath me.
*I have since learned that the reason I was switched off of the Friday class was because the kids were being bad, and so to punish them the teacher took away the pleasure of having me sit around and looking like an idiot every Friday. Can you even imagine? Having me as a teacher is seen as a privilege? What a world we live in. Of course, the hilarity is that he gave me this class because they were so terrible that he couldn't take care of the entire class by himself, so he wanted to split them up with me taking half of them. This will be a short-lived experiment, as you will see next week.
Tuesday was a magnificent display of the level of organization that I've grown to expect and admire from both the French in general, and this program in particular. My first class, from 9:05-10, was canceled. This at least I knew beforehand, the teacher was in London on a field trip with some of the students. My second class was another class that I have every other week, and is one of my least favorite classes. I take half the class for an entire period, and then wait two weeks, and then take the other class. This means I see one group of students roughly once a month, which is a completely pointless endeavor from my part, plus these students are very very stupid, so there's really no point in it, but I can't just not show up (I mean I can, and I have a couple of times, but it's sort of poor form). I hadn't seen this particular group since January I think, because I had missed a couple of Tuesdays, and the half that I was having today was the one I really don't like, and had led to my worst class so far. Fortunately the teacher said to me "Oh, are you with me this week? Can you do next week? They've been bad and I want to punish them" (Noticing a pattern?) I was like of course, I'd love to teach your class because teaching is my lifeblood and I take such joy from molding their young minds, but if you insist, I'll skip a turn. So, at this point it was about 10:15, and I didn't have my next class (English Club) until 12:45, so I hung out for about two and a half hours. Then, it turned out that the school was having meetings in the afternoon, so the afternoon classes after English Club were canceled. But the kids left anyway, so at about 1:05 I headed home, having been there for three and a half hours, and not working for a minute. Just to keep track, I was supposed to have taught 5 classes at this point, and had taught one, where I stood to the side and watched.
Wednesday is the one day I have that is always the same. I teach three classes at College le Parc (or the good school), from 9:25-12:30. My first class, which is hit or miss because some of the kids are very interesting, and some are very loud, and that means that some percentage of the time they are really into what I have to say, and another, slightly larger percentage of the time, they spend the whole time babbling. Today was more of an interested one, which was good, and amazingly, I managed not to fall on my face. I find that when I prepare very well, I have good classes, and that I suck at thinking on my feet, which has done wonders for my work ethic. Unfortunately, I started to teach them stuff they already knew, so I had to switch courses mid class and try to make it work, and amazingly it did. I taught them about preterite versus gerund, and when to use it, which is probably the most difficult thing to learn when trying to learn English. Basically, when do you say I speak vs. I am speaking? We just know what sounds right, but the kids don't know that I want knowing sounds very wrong and that I want to know is right. So I taught them a bit about that and I think it was helpful. My second class, with my favorite teacher, was canceled because she also was on a field trip (Spain for her) and my third class I taught superlatives (the greatest, the most intelligent, etc.) to a class that is uninspiring given the lack of participation, but at least rarely have behavior problems.
As a quick aside, it's amazing how few grammar rules I have learned, and how much I know just by what sounds right. For example, I never realized how superlatives are formed. If it's a one-syllable word, you add -est (for example: greatest), and if it's two or more, you had the most (the most convenient), with the exception being adjectives that end in -y (the happiest, not the most happy). I never even think about these things, I just know not to say the most great or the convenientest.
After my classes, I met this woman named Muriel at a library. Muriel, the poor girl, thinks that I can speak French well enough to teach her English. I think I do a pretty good job with the grammar, but a big part of what she wants to do is take magazine articles in English and translate them into French. Straight translation is epically difficult, especially for me, and trying to do a word for word translation is an exercise in futility, but it's what she wants to do, and I don't want to say no because I love the money she gives me, so we soldier on.
Thursday is usually my hell day. I start at 8:25 and end at 6, and on a full day teach 7 classes. Of course, I am not sure if I have ever had a day where I taught every single class (maybe one or two). One is almost always canceled, and today was no exception. My first class was canceled, again with my favorite teacher because she was in Spain. My second class was with a teacher who, while very nice, is incredibly child-like, and difficult to have a conversation. She apparently also has a major problem with discipline, but I'll have more to say about that another time. She told me that because many of her students were in Spain, maybe we could go to the computer room and the kids could work on the computer. I thought great, the less work I have to do the better. So we get to the computer room and she turns to me and says so, what do you have for them to do? I was like you whorish slut-face, YOU suggested we come to the computer room and now it's MY responsibility to come up with an activity? Fortunately I had this stupid Valentine's Day web search that I had used the week before vacation when I just didn't care anymore, and they could do that, but it was a little irritating.
My second class was actually the one where I was going to use the Valentine's Day thing again, but unfortunately, the teacher that I taught with had booked the room out from under me, and I ended up going into the class with absolutely nothing prepared. As I've said earlier, I don't necessarily think on my toes very well. I kind of babbled about vacation, told them about visiting Amsterdam, got into an impromptu discussion on World War II and the Holocaust (which they seemed ignorant of. Middle schoolers mind you! Stupid French), and then decided to make them write about their vacations. I made a spur of the moment decision to give them a grade on it, and you should have seen them jump. Apparently, they don't have things like graded homework here, so every time something is graded, they think it's a test and flip the fuck out. Which was fine for me, they took it more seriously, it somehow ate up 30 minutes of time, and I got out of the class unscathed.
So, at this point it's 11:30. Usually, I have classes at the other school from 1:30-3:30, and then after school lessons from 4-6. But both my other school classes were canceled, one teacher was in London and the other didn't need me. So I got to sit around for four and a half hours waiting for my afternoon lessons. Super exciting, let me tell you. I thought about canceled my after school lessons, but I've done that a few times and they don't like it, plus unlike canceling my other classes, this one costs me money.
The lessons I teach from 4-6 are extra, on top of the 12 hours I'm supposed to teach a week, and I get extra money for it, an absurd 25 euro an hour. The problem is, there's no structure, and no way to prepare a lesson beforehand, because I never know who will show up, so I basically have to make it up as I got (have I mentioned I suck at that?). Today, I had 4 kids in the first hour, all of different levels, all learning different things. So I taught them a cavalcade of random crap, I think we covered can and cannot, daily routines, playing sports, and body parts. My second afternoon lesson has basically been this one kid who is just learning English, so I take my French book and just do it in reverse, so Thursday we worked on beginning verbs, and important connecting words like and, but, with, etc.
So that was last week. I'm entertained that my attempt to make a shorter post has still led to 2500 words, and I left a ton of stuff out, and didn't talk about my weekend (3 hours of soccer and an NYU house party where some kid peed off a balcony and three different girls hit on me, one after hearing that I had a girlfriend). I'm working on one about the apartment I live in, and then one about this week, which has been horrible so far.
Thanks to the two of you who read this. It makes the hours I spend typing all worth it.
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