My first day of work is technically tomorrow, the 1st of October, but that’s a Wednesday and I don’t actually work on Wednesdays. However, tomorrow I’ll be going to Lille, the biggest city in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais region, for my orientation. Someone is driving me and two other Americans I have yet to meet. I think they are the only other two in this area besides me and Ed, a guy who was going to meet me in the Brussels airport and get a ride down here with my contact person…until he missed his plane in Chicago and had to spend the night in the airport and not fly across the Atlantic until the next morning. When he finally got to Brussels, he was going to take a southbound train to Mons, then take a bus to Maubeuge. But then he accidentally took a northbound train and only realized this when all of the signs were in Flemish. He was practically in Ghent by this time. Poor Ed. I haven’t actually met him yet either.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the orientation because I think it will give me a much better idea as to what’s going on. Not that people haven’t been extremely helpful, but I think that actually sitting in a room with people who are in the same boat as I am will be beneficial to my general peace of mind.
Yesterday I ended up going to the school in Villers anyway. After this week I’ll go there all day on Mondays, but yesterday I just took an afternoon bus to get there around one. It’s actually only about a ten-minute bus ride from here, which is nice. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons I’ll go to the school I’m assigned to that’s actually in Maubeuge, which is about a ten-minute walk from my apartment.
I should probably explain a little bit about the school in Villers. I mentioned before that Villers only has about 900 people in it. The school definitely reflects this. It reminds me a little bit of those one-room schools that you hear about from the pioneer days or whatnot, where all the kids are in the same room regardless of their age, except here there are three classes. In France you can start sending your kids to school when they’re two years old, and even though it’s not obligatory until a bit later, many parents start sending their kids that early because nurseries are expensive and school is free.
The school in Villers is both an “école maternelle” (for the 2- to 3-year-olds) and an “école primaire” (basically our elementary school, 4- to 10-year-olds). There are a couple of teachers who tend to the really little kids, of which there are maybe six or seven. Mme Carmalez teaches the 4- to 7-year-olds all in the same room, which seems difficult because she basically has one group of students who can’t read yet, one group who are learning to read, and one group who can already read. Altogether there are maybe sixteen of them.
A fairly young guy named Sylvain teaches the older kids. (I didn’t catch his last name, but I do know that he likes Nicole Kidman and eats kiwis with the skin still on them.) There are probably sixteen of them as well. They can at least all read, but again, he basically has three different grade levels in the same room. Mme Carmalez, who teaches English to Sylvain’s class while he takes her class outside for gym, had me go ahead and do introductions with the older class. The kids have all picked English names, and of the three 10-year-olds, one picked Homer and one picked Bart. (The third picked Owen, which is just as funny to me because I can only think of Danny DeVito in Throw Momma from the Train.) There was apparently also a Milhouse at one point (pronounced “Mee’-loos,” of course).
After we’d done introductions, Mme Carmalez had the kids ask me questions in French and I was to respond in English. She basically forbade me to speak any French to them in the classroom, which is reasonable. Some of the questions were pretty funny, like, “Do you have beaches with hot, white sand?” and my personal favorite, which a small boy with glasses whom Angèle calls “la crevette” (the shrimp) asked, “Do you like bones?” At first I thought I’d misunderstood, but I hadn’t. It seemed so random to both me and Mme Carmalez, but we later learned that Sylvain had done a lesson on bones earlier that day.
After the hour of English was up, everyone went outside for a little recess. Some of the girls from Sylvain’s class crowded around me and started talking about their cats; I’d told them that I have two after someone asked me if I liked animals. “I have two cats! Their names are Princesse and [something French I don’t remember]!” “I know a girl who has thirteen cats!” They’re all really cute, and I figured it was okay to speak French to them outside of the classroom.
After the recess was a music lesson. A lady taught Mme Carmalez’s and Sylvain’s classes separately about percussion instruments, and then at the very end the entire school, including the really little kids, got together and sang in preparation for their Christmas concert. This was all adorable beyond words.
Tonight I’ll meet Fabienne, the teacher I’ll be working with at my other school, when we all apparently go “boire un coup” at some place called Le Pot. This should be entertaining.
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